An Australian multi-millionaire property developer has been lashed for accusing workers of becoming “unproductive” and saying a radical rise in unemployment was necessary to “remind people that they work for the employer”.
Founder and CEO of Gurner Group Tim Gurner made the comments at the Australian Financial Review’s Property Summit on Tuesday.
“I think the problem that we’ve had is that people decided they didn’t really want to work so much anymore though COVID and that has had a massive issue on productivity,” Gurner said.
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The 41-year-old identified productivity as a major issue in the housing sector, and a contributor to the current housing crisis.
“Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity,” he said.
“They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years and we need to see that change.”
Multiple builders have collapsed over the past few months and 1709 have gone under nationwide between July 2022 and April this year, with a shortage in supplies and rise in labour costs often flagged as the major causes.
The length of time between when a contract is signed and when a project is completed can leave projects unprofitable if there is a sudden increase in costs.
Gurner went on to say that he believed unemployment needed to rise.
“Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 per cent in my view,” he said.
“We need to see pain in the economy.
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.
“There’s been a systemic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around.
“So it’s a dynamic that has to change.”
Gurner said it was clear to him that action was being taken “to kill that attitude”, evidenced in various layoffs seen in recent times and governments around the world were acting to increase unemployment “to get that to some sort of normality”.
“We’re starting to see less arrogance in the employment market and that has to continue because that will cascade across the costs balance,” he said.
Gurner’s comments have been met with outrage.
Australian Council of Trade Unions president Michele O’Neil slammed his comments as “incredibly offensive” and “just not factually true” while appearing on the ABC’s RN Breakfast on Thursday morning.
“I thought it was a spoof,” she said. “When I first saw it, I thought: ‘This is a sketch’.
“This is an uber-rich guy who is saying the quiet part out loud … he was basically advocating that you should make working people suffer to bring them under control.
“And he was talking about it being a good thing to increase unemployment by 50 per cent … saying that workers had got lazy, that people hadn’t been working hard enough.”
Workers “got us through” the pandemic by working “day and night to keep us safe”, O’Neil told the ABC.
It was “incredibly offensive” for someone who had “made his fortune off the back of skilled tradespersons building the properties that he’s developed” to say tradespeople are pulling back on productivity, she said.
“It was the most extreme arrogance I have heard … said out loud in a long time … it’s actually shocking.
“If people think in Australia there is no class difference, just have a listen to this guy and then think about the working people who made his fortune for him.”
‘People are really suffering’
The economy is currently in favour of corporations, O’Neil said.
“The growth we have seen and productivity in Australia in the last decade, the lowest share of it ever, has been shared with working people,” she said.
“When productivity has been increasing, more and more of it was going to corporate profits and not going back to the workers who are actually building that productivity.
“We’ve also seen one of the lowest investment periods for corporate Australia, ever. And we’ve seen some of the highest growth in CEO salaries and in profits.”
O’Neil said a healthy economy was not one in which company profits and executive salaries soared while workers missed out.
“People are really suffering now with the cost of living,” she said.
There are more people working multiple jobs than we’ve ever had, O’Neil said, and seeing more people out of work and facing job insecurity will not solve anything.
“One in four workers are casual and get no paid leave,” O’Neil said.
“And this multimillionaire thinks that we have to cause more pain to working people so that they’re not as arrogant.
“Well I just find that shocking and offensive.”
Gurner’s comments even attracted the ire of US democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“Reminder that major CEOs have skyrocketed their own pay so much that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is now at some of the highest levels *ever* recorded,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Gurner previously came under fire for comments he made about millennials and avocado toast on Channel 9’s 60 Minutes in 2017.
“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” he said.
He went on to accuse millennials of thinking lifestyles portrayed by celebrities, such as the Kardashians, were normal and didn’t require hard work.
“(Young people) want to eat out every day, they want to travel to Europe every year,” he said.
“You have to start to get realistic about your expectations.
“There is no question we are at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high.”
Gurner’s early leg up
Gurner’s first investment was an apartment in St Kilda worth $180,000.
“I was fortunate enough to have my boss at the time approach me to renovate it while he fronted up the money,” Gurner told news.com in 2017.
After selling it for a profit of $12,000 a year later, Gurner combined this with a loan of more than $30,000 loan he received from his grandfather — which he used to obtain a $150,000 loan.
He then purchased a gym, which he renovated and sold.
Gurner was a teenager at the time.
“It was incredibly difficult,” he said.
Gurner Group now reports a development and management portfolio worth of $9.5 billion on its website.
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