Industrial relations is not just a contest between management and workers, but between job-seekers and those already admitted to membership. There are 100,000 Australians unemployed for more than a year. For them, the minimum wage acts as a raised drawbridge, separating them from their most fundamental aspiration. Every small increase is a higher jump for them to clear.

In international terms, the Australian labour market is like the high rollers room at the casino. You have to be able to make a starting bid of $15.50 an hour before you are allowed to join the tables. If you are a new arrival to this country, a refugee, with no English, low levels of education and few marketable skills, a courteous but firm doorman will advise you ''I'm sorry sir or madam, but you can't make the minimum bid. You will have to go back downstairs to the welfare room where someone will give you enough chips to survive but not enough to get in the game''.

Getting started is always the hard part. Like a first kiss, the first pay packet is a big deal. It comes with the revelation that ''somebody wants me''. There is a formative power in the knowledge that a person unrelated to me places a high enough value on my skills and labour to cut a cheque. That is a critical moment in the formation of what the Harvard professor Robert Putnam calls ''social capital''. Imagine if you got from one end of your life to the other, and never had that experience.

For a case study of the damage done, see Gough Whitlam's well-intentioned decision to legislate for indigenous wage parity after the Wave Hill walkout. The Cape York indigenous leader Noel Pearson has cited it as one of the most destructive of any government, forcing thousands of employed Aborigines off the stations and onto sit-down money. The ego destruction that followed their forced withdrawal from the dignity of paid work saw many self-medicate with grog and dope and some to beat wives or girlfriends, as report after tragic report has shown.

Trade unions represent workers in jobs, paying union dues - job-seekers are only going to put downward pressure on wages and conditions. The ACTU looks after those inside the lifeboat, grabbing the minimum wage as a club to smash the knuckles of those trying to clamber out of the water and over the gunwales.