I’m in the USA this week for the second time this year, so I wasn’t surprised when the Guardian reported that, according to a new study, increasing numbers of American teens from low-income communities are trading sex to stay fed.

Not just trading sex, of course, they’re also selling drugs and turning to crime because their parents can’t afford to feed them. “We heard the same story everywhere,” said one of the report authors, having surveyed low-income kids across 10 different American cities.

Last week another American piece entitled “20 ways to help your employees struggling with food insecurity” went viral.

How much Australians may wish to emulate America has become a prescient question. Because while it’s estimated that up to one in seven American households are currently experiencing “food insecurity”, pursuing American-style economic policy is very much the flavour of Turnbull’s returned Coalition government.

Their hunger is to cut corporate tax, increase workforce casualisation and punish the unemployed.

When Turnbull talks of “flexibility” and “innovation” in industrial discussion, these are euphemisms for stripping awards, busting unions and keeping wage growth low.

This is the “trickle down” ideology of the American neocons, which absolves the state of the responsibility for job creation, denies income support like pensions and welfare, and refuses to add to the collective wealth through provision of universal access to healthcare and education. The idea is to rely on a barely-regulated labour market as the mechanism to generate incomes for working families.

It’s all founded in fanciful notions of free markets and self-reliance but the result of decades of this thinking in the US is entrenched material inequality and social mobility near to frozen; with inherited wealth emerging as a major determinant of future wealth.

Last week, Americans celebrated a rise in median household income from 2014 levels, but accounting for inflation, income is still about 2.4% lower than in 1999.

Living is hard in the richest country on Earth. A 2014 report from the Economic Policy Institute reported that of 26 nations, the US had the lowest-paid work in the OECD as well as the highest incidence of it, although it isn’t because Americans are working any less hard. The lowest 10% of American workers achieved a 64.9% productivity increase from 1979-2013. Alas, their wages declined by 5% over the same generation.

Minimum wage here is a tiny $7.25 an hour. And there are 35 million Americans – 26% of the workforce – presently working for less than US$10.55 an hour.

With today’s exchange rate, that’s under AUD $13.98. And while it’s calculated that buying consumer goods in America costs around 8% less than doing so in Australia, our minimum wage is not only AUD $17.70 an hour, but our casuals receive an additional 25% loading on their pay – Americans don’t – and our minimum wage workers are only 10% of our adult workforce.

Inequality is growing in Australia but we’ve so far avoided the worst of American exploitation due to fundamental differences in values expressed by more economically egalitarian social policy.

In the 1980s, US governments decided to accept high levels of unemployment as a favour to business drive down wages and encourage competition among unemployed workers for lower pay. In Australia the Hawke-Keating Accord was a bargain struck between unions and government; unions agreed to wage restraints in return for the state’s provision of a “social wage”, Medicare, accessible higher education, family tax benefits and the superannuation scheme.

Strong Australian unions fought for the right to collectively bargain industry-wide awards and establish minimum labour standards and workplace conditions. American unions don’t have this power; they exist worksite by worksite, and are limited in representing even those members in collective bargaining if they have less than 50%+1 of a site signed up.

But recent events have revealed the Coalition’s intention is for an erosion of these Australian standards. There’s their punitive work-for-the-dole schemes, omnibus bills to cut pensions and strip public services, and ongoing attacks on unions. Since their re-election, there’s been Christian Porter’s “revolutionary” abandonment of job creation as a means to address unemployment, favouring instead to target resources to humiliating the unemployed.

There’s also their intervention in the United Firefighters Union dispute in Victoria is a means of creating opportunities to accommodate free and volunteer labour in the workforce, and therefore weaken enterprise bargaining.

Similarly, they’re unmotivated to regulate the proliferation of labour subcontractors like Uber or Airtasker. This week, Unions NSW released a report that exposed AirTasker as undermining award rates and conditions, with Unions NSW secretary Mark Morey explaining to me that Airtasker’s very platform encourages workers to undercut one another’s rates to “bid” in competition for jobs.

“The minimum award for data entry is $23.53,” is the example Morey gives, “but the the recommended rate from Airtasker is $17 an hour.” Taking out the 15% that Airtasker deducts, that reduces payment to $14.45, almost $10 beneath the award. This is also without industrial protections like workers compensation, equipment or anything else – and it’s a means of establishing a labour market that exists outside of collective standards.

It is the heavier regulatory touch that has so far spared us the unfair fate of our American cousins. Why the Coalition or anyone else would seek to tear at the fabric of Australian egalitarianism given the impoverished example of American alternative can only be a matter of ideology – one that insists that wealth is for the wealthy, and scraps are for everyone else.

