What's he singing?

He's singing Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall, an anthem about alienation. Not exactly. He is a bit too reserved (ahem) for that. But the themes are more or less the same. We need higher wage growth for a happier Australia (yeah, I'm paraphrasing but only a little).

Lowe is a bloke with a renowned moral compass – someone who always tries to do the right thing. But his campaign on stronger wage growth is not, at face value, about what is right morally. It is about how we can keep the economy growing. The more we earn, the more we have to spend. Same as it always was.

Yet bigger wage growth also may have another benefit - it might be, indirectly, about how we can have a more harmonious society. We have seen what happens in both the UK and the US when inequality skyrockets. Perhaps Lowe is warning of what is to come. He is telling businesses we want a society where everyone can have a fair share otherwise we will have the chaos of elsewhere.

On Wednesday, he spoke at an Australian Industry Group event and said that the lack of wage growth is chipping away at Australia's "sense of shared prosperity". What that really means is that the pressures we all have, to deal with bigger bills and a stagnant pool out of which to pay those bills, makes us resentful. As Lowe pointed out – and has highlighted on a number of occasions - there are lots of reasons for slow or non-existent wage growth: a decline in the bargaining power of workers (read, shrinking union membership), an increase in the global supply of workers (which may mean they undercut costs because they work offshore) and businesses which haven't capitalised on technological change, focusing on controlling labour costs.

As he said: "This cost-control mentality does not make for an environment where firms are willing to pay larger wage increases."

These are all the reasons. But come Sunday fortnight, there will be another one: a further cut to penalty rates. Why are penalty rates being cut again?

The decision last year by the Fair Work Commission meant that cuts to penalty rates would be rolled out slowly. Those cuts were really the result of heavy-duty campaigning by business, big and small; based on the concept that cuts to penalty rates would mean increased jobs. That turned out not to be true. There was zero increase in jobs, according to research conducted by the University of Wollongong and Macquarie University. In some cases, after the 2017 cuts, some workers actually experienced a drop in the number of penalty-rate hours they worked in the first two months after the cuts were introduced. That research is about to be published in Economic Papers, the journal of the Australian Society of Economists (this turns out to be a gentle reproach for University of Canberra professor Phil Lewis, who in January this year was critical of the research. Professor Lewis represented the retail industry in hearings that led to the cuts to penalty rates).

Now bigger cuts to Sunday penalty rates are coming. And Martin O'Brien, the chief investigator in that research, says he is keeping an eye on the hospitality industry and the number of jobs is actually decreasing. He too points out that it's hard to spend money on eating out when wage growth is so sluggish.

I always think about those first cuts as being a taste of what is to come - penalty rates cut for the industries we don't think are important, hospitality, retail. It's a way of desensitising the electorate so when it comes to the industries which are really important, we won't be able to argue. Nurses. Aged care workers.

In the meantime, wages reduce. Whatever argument employers might make about an increase in jobs – or at least in hours – has been disproved by the research. But research doesn't usually make a big impact on the electorate. We have five by-elections coming up and now we have the knowledge that the ACTU is campaigning hard on the cuts to penalty rates in those electorates.

I have no idea who will win those by-elections – but it's a ground war and the unions have shown how good they are at rolling out the troops in the run up to any election. They will summon up everyone who has ever been in a union, whether they are members of the Labor Party or not, to get out and doorknock. And they will have one rather terrifying piece of evidence. Here's what a permanent retail worker on Level 1 wages who worked eight hours each day from last Saturday to Monday would have received $1,018 in her pay packet, according to ACTU calculations.

The next pay after July 1 for the same hours on the same days? A reduction of $132. From the same date, Malcolm Turnbull will get a pay rise of more than $200 a week.

Philip Lowe wants shared prosperity. Instead, business is backing its workers into shared poverty.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.