You don't need to read much between the lines to suspect that Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe and his offsiders think the workers and their unions should be pushing harder for a decent pay rise.
Why else would he volunteer the opinion, in his testimony to a parliamentary committee on Friday, that average wage growth of 3.5 per cent a year would be no threat to the Reserve's inflation target?
This while employers are crying poor and Scott Morrison makes the extraordinary claim that big business needs a cut in company tax so it can afford to pay higher wages.
Why should Lowe care about how well the workers are doing? Because, as one of his assistant governors, Dr Luci Ellis, pointed out last week, our economic worries are shared by most of the other rich economies, except in one vital respect: they have reasonably strong growth in consumer spending, but we don't.
What's making our households especially parsimonious? No prize for remembering our world-beating level of household debt. Trouble is, consumer spending accounts for well over half the demand that drives economic growth.
Our economy won't be sparking on all four cylinders until consumption spending recovers, and that's not likely until our households return to annual wage growth that's a percent or more higher than inflation. That's why Lowe's encouraging workers to think bigger in their wage demands.
Even so, his proposed pay norm of 3.5 per cent, errs on the cautious side. That figure comes from 2.5 percentage points for the mid-point of the inflation target, plus 1 percentage point for the medium-term trend rate of improvement in the productivity of labour.
But 4 per cent a year would be nearer the mark because the trend rate of productivity improvement is nearer 1.5 per cent a year.
Even so, Lowe is acknowledging a point employers and conservative politicians have obfuscated for decades: national productivity improvement justifies pay rises above inflation, not just nominal increases to compensate for inflation (as is happening at present).
Lowe's concern that the present annual wage growth of about 2 per cent not be accepted as "the new norm" is an important point from behavioural economics: rather than calculate the appropriate size of pay rises based on the specific circumstances of the particular enterprise, as textbooks assume, there's a strong tendency for bargainers to settle for whatever rise most other people are getting.
That is, there's more psychology – more "animal spirits", as Lowe likes to say; more herd behaviour – and less objective assessment, in wage fixing than it suits many employers and mainstream economists to admit.
Which implies that, if the unions would prefer a wage norm closer to 4 per cent than 2 per cent, they should be doing a better job of managing their troops' fears and expectations.
In the Reserve's search for explanations of the four-year period of weak wage growth, it puts much emphasis on increased competitive pressure, present or prospective.
But in her speech last week, Ellis qualified her reference to the more challenging "competitive landscape" by adding ". . . or at least how it is perceived". Just so. It's about perceptions of reality.
It's easier for firms worried about a future of more intense competition to take the precaution of awarding minimal wage rises if they can play on their employees' own fears about losing their jobs to Asian sweatshops or robots or the internet.
There's little sign in the figures for business profitability that most firms couldn't afford much bigger pay rises than they're granting. But it's no skin off the employers' nose if their fears of future adversity prove exaggerated. Only their workers had to pay for the excessive fearfulness.
Workers - particularly those in industries with enterprise bargaining – are meekly accepting smaller pay rises than their employers' circumstances could sustain because the union movement has done too little to counter the alarmists telling their members they've lost the power to ask for more.
They've played along with the nonsense about 40 per cent of jobs being lost to robots, and that there's nothing to stop greedy businesses from making us all members of some imaginary "gig economy".
Worse, they've exaggerated the spread of "precarious employment" and encouraged the still-speculative belief that weak wage growth is explained almost exclusively by anti-union industrial relations "reform", which has stripped workers' bargaining power to the point where the right to strike has been lost.
Presumably, their game is to advantage their Labor mates by heightening disaffection with the Turnbull government, but this is coming at the expense of the economy's recovery, not to mention workers' pay packets.
