If you thought next month’s Jobs and Skills Summit was going to be about consensus-building, think again. With the release of its first Jobs Summit Series paper, the Australian Council of Trade Unions has fired the opening shot in what is shaping up more as a battle than a summit.

The ACTU paper does a reasonable job of documenting some of the challenges we are facing. Australia – like most advanced economies – has had sluggish real wage growth since 2013.