A new collection of essays released last week sees leading figures from Labor’s Right faction soul-searching about their party’s electoral demise, with many arguing they must regain the trust of their “working class base” to remain competitive at the federal level.
The book’s co-editor Nick Dyrenfurth noted that “if there’s a recurring theme in the book it’s refocusing our efforts on winning back working class Australians in their full diversity”.
These chapters were published amid the backdrop of an identity crisis within the federal Labor caucus and serious leadership rumblings. MPs and commentators are frequently invoking the working class in this ongoing skirmish, but who are they actually referring to? And do they represent the true “working class” in modern Australia?
The working class and blue-collar workers are not synonymous
Dyrenfurth’s previous writing has been criticised for assuming the working class is predominantly composed of white men. He has strenuously denied these claims and now stresses the diversity of working people.
But his recent advocacy for making the ALP’s membership less “inner city, progressive” and more “working class” has seen him use tertiary education as a proxy for defining class categories. He has suggested introducing quotas for Young Labor to recruit more non-university students and “actual working people” such as “tradies, assembly-line workers, train drivers…”
Outspoken former ALP frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon has similarly conflated the working class with blue-collar employees in his criticisms of Labor’s “progressive” constituencies and their preferred policies.
Whilst many blue-collar workers remain working class, they are increasingly better off than white-collar workers. In 2012, the Suncorp Bank Wages Report found, for the first time in Australian history, blue-collar workers earned more on average than white-collar workers. It found six of the top 10 highest paid industries are blue-collar professions.
Various indicators suggest little has changed in the eight years since. Last year, News Corp and the Grattan Institute analyses both found tradies’ lifelong earnings surpassed many university graduates’. Graduates still earn more on average than non-graduates (including low-skilled workers and the unemployed), but their advantage is now far slimmer, especially when compared to tradespeople.
Dyrenfurth’s co-editor Misha Zelinsky, assistant national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, addressed this conceptual shift, stating working-class voters are “often on high salaries”. Yet as centre-left parties traditionally championed the industrial proletariat because they were disadvantaged, how should they relate to wealthier labourers?
Highly paid tradespeople also increasingly operate as small businesses or contractors, fostering less class solidarity with fellow employees. The divergence of incomes and asset prices also means that prosperity is increasingly unrelated to one’s profession.
This complicates once traditional categories of capital and labour, blue and white collar, and has left many Labor figures pining for its more easily discernible “base” of yesteryear.
Towards a collar-blind vision
The key challenge for modern centre-left parties has been to appeal to multiple constituencies, from minimum-wage migrant cleaners to PhD-qualified baristas, cashed-up sparkies and asset-rich, cash-poor retirees, all of whom have competing economic preferences. But the label “working class” still holds moral sway among social-democrats, and claims of inattentiveness invoke a sense of betrayal, of their supporters and their core values, which requires atonement.
In this context, conflation of the working class with increasingly affluent and aspirant blue-collar workers must either be confused or cynical. Either way, it could lead Labor to redefine economic justice as its opposite. When a shopfitter on $180,000 a year is not wealthy, “left-wing populism” may seem anti-worker.
If the complexity of economic hardship is drowned out by a romantic restoration of the chippie as working class hero, Labor’s policies are likely to be misdirected or regressive.
Such unmooring of class from material conditions is sustained by an excessive focus on the appearance of traditional working class-ness over its structural roots — see Zelinsky on Bali holidays and the footy.
Writing on previous ALP literary provocations, historian Geoff Robinson described this tendency toward rustbelt cosplay as, “a cultural workerism in which ‘class’ was defined by a performance of imagined working-class norms”.
Blue-collar nostalgia is not limited to Labor’s Right, with Left figures also reminiscing on rosier days when their aligned manufacturing unions had more members. But both should remind themselves the average union member is now a tertiary-educated woman in a service industry.
There is independent merit in diversifying student politics, a major pipeline for future politicians and their advisers. But you don’t need a degree nor an apprenticeship to see a true battler cannot be defined by post-war cultural signifiers in the 21st century.
More to the point, Labor has to decide what it actually stands for.
Certainly broad scale social and communal benefit seems to be of little more importance to it than it is to the Liberal and National Parties.
After the anguish inducing loss of the Whitlam government in 1975, Labor has lost all of its socialogical courage and turned itself into an alternative Conservative Party.
As the apparatchiks in the bowels of Sussex St never tire of pointing out, it wuz them wot won it for Hawke after expunging, or Baldwining, the very notion of left out of the party during the Frazer years.
Hmmmm…. Apparently “Not Liberal” is no longer enough.
I find so much about the Coalition’s behaviour very objectionable. But the Labor party seems so afraid of being wedged that they are almost paralysed. They really need to identify their core values, and be prepared to back those values, regardless of the cost.
I know that didn’t go well for Shorten, but you still have to stand for something. Trying to get in on the basis of ‘we’re not quite as bad as the LNP’ counts for nothing at all.
There may be an economic working class in Australia, but culturally there is hardly any. What may once have been working class is now culturally lower middle class (at least), with aspirations for a better life.
Responding to this does not necessarily mean major policy changes, but it does require changing the words used to express them. The middle class (including self-employed and small business owners) can recognise that the big end of town/the corporates are out to screw them. A party that looked after their interests would potentially have the numbers over the LNP.
Some of the issues that could be picked up (and I think some of these are already hiding in ALP policy) include:
fake contracting
failure to pay sub-contractors on time, in full, and sometimes even at all (see Palmer,C)
unfair contract provisions
providing an environment of fair competition in the economy and eliminating anti-competitive behaviour that favours large corporates
tax fairness between small operators and big business – eg big business should pay a similar proportion to small business
consistent enforcement of a wide range of regulatory standards so there is one rule only for small and big business.
An Integrity Commission that could look at corrupt practice in business might have support from a lot of people.
I also suspect that the ALP has to avoid going down the US style rabbit hole of identity politics (for the many reasons see about every third article of Guy Rundle’s). Policy can attach itself to multiple identities. While identity is important, most people have multiple identities not just one or two that define them. The classic example is a gay conservative – and there are a few examples of those in the LNP.
I concur, and would add that it maybe not about traditional work or construction sites but emerging/growing sectors in health care, hospitality, technology etc.
The Howard onwards identity politics and nativism imported from the US has had Labor well wedged, nor helped by the Greens (Brown cooperating with Abbott to roll Rudd’s carbon emissions scheme) on environment issues.
I’m really sick of this ‘pink batty’ type meme about “…Brown cooperating with Abbott to roll Rudd’s carbon emissions scheme“.
Krudd neither sought nor listened to Green objections to his EMS which was a job creation scheme for merchant bankers and corrupt foreign autocrats.
He had Talcum’s support (quel bloody surprise!) and thought that sufficient.
At the suburban building sites I see on my daily walk, I suspect that the tradies are more likely to have an ABN than a union ticket.
If labour explained to the electorate why neo liberal economics is bad for the country and how they are going to reverse its effects – eg first step to make the tax system truly progressive – they might have a chance at the next election.
Of course they have embraced neoliberalism as has the LNP, but they now need to admit they were wrong – thus avoiding the Govt’s predictable and justifiable claim of ideological hypocrisy – to be credible.
If the Greens take the initiative suggested above and labour doesn’t, expect the Greens to hold the balance of power after the next election.