The tycoon who called for unemployment to soar to teach ‘arrogant’ workers a lesson – Apologizes after uproar

One of her richest men Australia he apologized after saying that unemployment had to jump to make the arrogant wise employees. “We have to see pain in the economy,” Tim Gurner had said. But Mr Garner later said he “regretted” the comments, which sparked a global backlash.

He has previously made headlines for saying that young people can’t afford to open a home because they spend too much on avocado toast. The video of his comments has gone viral, attracting over 23 million views and heavy criticism online.

Speaking during a property summit this week, the 41-year-old said the Covid-19 pandemic changed worker attitudes and work ethics for the worse – singling out manufacturers as an example. The gym owner-turned-property tycoon claimed the change is hurting productivity in the sector, which – combined with tighter regulations – is fueling Australia’s housing shortage.

He suggested that the country’s current unemployment rate of 3.7% should be increased by 40-50% to reduce “arrogance in the labor market”. This would practically mean that more than 200,000 people would lose their jobs. “There’s been a systemic shift where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them,” Mr Gurner said. “We need to remind workers that they work for the employer and not the other way around”.

But later, Mr. Gurner said in a LinkedIn post that he had “made some observations about her unemployment and productivity in Australia that I deeply regret and was wrong about.’ He said there had been “important discussions in this environment of high inflation, pressures on house prices and rents due to a lack of supply and other cost of living issues”. He said his comments were “without emotion” for workers, traders and families “across Australia” affected by cost-of-living pressures and losses jobs. Mr Gurner added that he believed the loss of a job “has a profound impact” on workers and added “I sincerely regret that my words did not show empathy for those in this situation”.

Mr Gurner’s posting comes at a time when many companies are tussling with staff over issues such as telecommuting and pay.

Changing attitudes to employment are also a topic of widespread discussion on social media, spawning hashtags such as “quiet resignation”, a term intended to capture the decision to stop overstepping bosses, and “lazy jobs”, which refers to well salaried, flexible positions that offer greater work-life balance. Mr Gurner’s earlier comments, which were shared by the Australian Financial Review (AFR) which hosted the summit, drew criticism on social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), TikTok and LinkedIn. They were also condemned by Australian MPs from across the political divide. Labor MP Jerome Laxall said they were “comments you’d associate with a cartoon Superman”, while Liberal MP Keith Volahan said they “couldn’t be more irrelevant”.

“Losing a job is not a number. He sees people on the streets and they are dependent on food banks,” Mr Wolahan told the AFR. US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also criticized the property tycoon. “We’re reminded that big CEOs have inflated their own pay so much that the CEO-to-employee pay ratio is now at some of the highest levels ever recorded,” he wrote in X.

But others – such as Minerals Council of Australia president Andrew Michelmore – had defended him. “Workers are used to earning the same amount of money but not working the same hours,” Mr Michelmore told the AFR. Mr Gurner is the chief executive and founder of the Gurner Group and has an estimated worth of A$929 million ($598 million).

He has spoken in the past about how loans from his grandfather and former boss helped him get started as a business owner.

Mr Gurner has also previously made controversial comments criticizing new homebuyers for their spending habits, saying in 2017 that when he was saving for his first home, he “wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each ». This caused a flurry of discussion and prompted it BBC to ask: how many pieces of avocado toast would it really take to pay a deposit on a house? It turns out that in London at the time, shoppers would have to refrain from eating 24,499 avocado toasts.