Geoff Bannister, at his Potts Point cafe, was pleased with the reduction in Sunday penalty rates. Credit:Brook Mitchell First, because globalisation and "skill-biased" technological change have produced a small number of winners and a large number of losers. Second, because far from using the tax-and-transfers system to require the winners to compensate the losers we've gone the other way, making the income-tax scale less progressive and tightening up on payment of benefits to people of working age. Third, because although the economy has changed in ways that weaken organised labour, we've doubled down, weakening legislative arrangements designed to reduce the imbalance in bargaining power between bosses and workers. Unions weakened

The unions have been weakened by the greater ease with which employers can move their operations overseas and by the technology-driven shift from goods to services. Selina Young, a long-time hospitality worker, is concerned about changes to penalty rates. Credit:Lisa Maree Williams The legislative attack has focused on removing union privileges, weakening workers' rights and weakening workers' bargaining power by discouraging collective bargaining and favouring individual contracts. In the US there's been a failure to raise minimum wage rates. Here, there's been a decades-long campaign to eliminate penalty rates for people working "unsociable" hours which, supposedly, are anachronistic. The mentality that produced these developments is "bizonomics" – something that sounds like economics because it repeats buzzwords such as "growth" and "jobs", but isn't.

In Australia, micro-economic reform has degenerated into a form of rent-seeking that's saying the way to a prosperous economy is to keep business – the people who create the jobs – as happy as possible. This bizonomics isn't new, of course, as attested by its slogan: What's good for General Motors is good for America. Less is more? As it relates to the labour market, the proposition is that the way to make things better for everyone is to make life tougher for the workers. Pay them less, give them less job security in the name of greater "flexibility", acquiesce to business's ambition of making working life a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week affair, and we'll all be better off.

The flaws in that argument – and the price to be paid for playing this game for decades – are now more apparent. For a start, the number of workers and their dependents far outnumbers the bosses and owners and their dependants. So if all you end up doing is transferring income from the workers to the bosses, far more people lose than gain. Of course, that's never what we're promised. The promise is always that the loss to existing workers is justified by the gain to all the would-be workers who'll now get a job. Trouble is, too often you end up with a lot of workers making a sacrifice with only a handful of would-be workers finding jobs. Experiment without evidence

The Fair Work Commission's decision to cut Sunday and public holiday penalty rates for workers in hospitality and retail is an experiment in trickle-down economics, based on faith rather than evidence. That makes it like everything else on big business's "reform" agenda: the immediate benefits come directly to business – in the form of cheaper labour – but, not to worry, those benefits will trickle down to the rest of us, so in the end it will all be much better for everyone. Do you wonder why the punters don't believe it and conclude simply that "the government" has cut wage rates to benefit its big business mates, thus adding to their disillusionment and willingness to vote for populist fringe parties? As I've explained before, the claim that lower penalty rates in retailing will lead to growth and jobs is – like the argument for protection – based on a fallacy of composition and the absence of "economy-wide" thinking. The most likely effect is that total consumer spending remains little changed, but more of it's done on Sundays and goes on recreation and retail.