Category Archives: Class and Capitalism

Theory of class, capitalism, social relations of production, technology and the general Marxist or post-modern (Re-thinking Marxism) discussions.

“Hard Labour”: A Review of Wage Theft in the Age of Inequality

For a book on industrial relations, Ben Schneiders’ Hard Labour is a good read – interesting, passionate, depressing and hopeful in equal measure. Based on investigative journalism done for the Age newspaper, it traces the rise and exposure of wage theft in Australia over the last 10 years.

Cover Photo: Hard Labour - Wage Theft in the Age of Inequality by Ben Schneiders

I am not sure Schneiders ever gives a formal definition of wage theft, but the book is concerned with workers being paid at rates below the legal minimum or award wages. Many of the examples are familiar (including from Schneiders own reporting): Spotless laundry, McDonald’s, Coles, 7-Eleven, Woolworths, a series of high-end restaurants, and piece-work on farms and in the gig economy. That is the depressing part, but what is interesting is the different models of underpayment and wage theft.

Three Types of Wage Theft

The most straight-forward was unpaid work hours forced on workers by bosses threatening visas, or by industry norms or by the star-power of the workplace. Celebrity chefs and fancy restaurants were Schneiders’ case studies for the later – made even more egregious in some cases by corporate structures which evaded tax as well as industrial relations responsibility. But such unpaid work is also a norm in industries not considered in the book: for instance, for young academics and young lawyers needing to work their way into a decreasing number of secure jobs.

Beyond this enforced free labour, the book also details cases where the standard piece-rates of fruit-pickers, farm workers, delivery drivers and task workers in the gig economy are set so low that it is impossible to make the minimum wage. This is a long-stranding problem, but the stories of successful new union organising among migrant workers in farms on Melbourne’s periphery was one of the most hopeful parts of the book.

Perhaps the most outrageous form of wage theft was hidden in plain sight: workplace agreements which traded away penalty rates and left workers earning less than the award wage. These were negotiated with the union and were rubber-stamped by the Fair Work Commission. The book covers cases with supermarket and fast-food giants effectively sidestepping the “better-off-overall test” (although eventually many of these agreements were voided after legal challenges). Ever-present here was the union, the SDA, which not only failed to protect low paid members, but actively colluded in the negotiation of these (ultimately) illegal workplace agreements – sometimes in the context of cosy closed-shop recruitment schemes.

That matters not just for the workers affected, but for the future of unionism. In one of his most chilling observations, Schneiders notes that in 2020 only about 5% of young workers were members of unions. The rest were rarely exposed to unions, indeed barely knew they existed – or perhaps their first or only experience was with a union that had sold them out. And their remedies appeared to lie outside of union structures (in local organising, in media, or in government watchdogs). It is not a pretty picture for unionism, notwithstanding that some of the heroes in the book are organisers in other unions.

The Bigger Picture

Many of the stories of wage theft in Hard Labour are well known and have been documented by media, Senate Inquiries, and finally in Fair Work Commission findings. But the book is much more than a series of stories lifted from old reporting. It also gives us the background to the media stories (i.e. the campaign organising), the reaction to publication and the industry push-back, and the development of the issue as it unfolded over the last decade.

That story is interesting, but for me the power of the book lies in the broader context. While he says it is not a book of economic or political theory, Schneiders nonetheless puts the story of wage theft in the context of neoliberalism: the choices made to deregulate the economy and to curtail union and worker rights. In this context, wage theft is not a coincidence, nor the work of a few rogue companies. It is a manifestation of a fundamental shift in power in favour of (global) capital. For Schneiders, wage theft is ultimately not an industrial relations story, but a story of power and inequality – and I am not going to argue with a framing that starts with Thomas Piketty and the statistics on rising inequality and the accumulation of wealth and income at the top end.

The point of Hard Labour is that wage theft is both a manifestation of and a contributor to that disproportionate rise of capital incomes and inequality.

Yet despite everything, there is some hope in the book with cases where wage theft was addressed and wages paid out. Perhaps the “golden age” of wage theft is over – or perhaps (as I hinted above) we simply await another series of reports from different firms and different industries?

Time, and further activism, will tell.

Sidenote

Underlying my reading of the book was of our research at SACOSS on waged poverty. One in four Australian households below the poverty line have wages as their main source of income – and that that employment adds costs to already impossible household budgets. Not every worker below the poverty line will suffer wage theft, but many live in the same milieu of precarious work, and wage theft is inevitably part of the story of waged poverty.

Hard Labour is another reminder that (as I argued in my previous post) poverty and inequality need to be tackled in the primary distribution between wages and capital, not just in after-the-fact welfare redistributions.

Industrial Relations, Income Flows and Inequality

With Australia’s new industrial relations law now through the federal parliament, there is talk of increased wages, or at least a hope that real wage increases will be possible with workers having better bargaining tools to try to secure them. After years of wage stagnation, obviously any increase in wage levels is welcome, but much of the public debate has focused on the need for wage increases to help households, especially low-income households, with increased cost of living. But increasing wages is also fundamentally important to macroeconomic income flows and equality.

In his landmark Captial in the Twentieth Century, Thomas Piketty noted that in many western countries inequality was increasing to levels unprecedented since the turn of the last century because the growth of capital incomes was outstripping wage incomes. Capital incomes are concentrated at the high end of income distribution, so the relative share of society’s income going to capital and to labour was a crucial determinant of inequality.

However, in a really interesting exchange after the release of Piketty’s book, political economist Anwar Shaikh argues that Piketty’s work focuses largely on the final distribution of income, but a far more nuanced understanding of inequality could be gained by tracing the primary, secondary and tertiary income flows which lead into that final distribution.

Shaikh argues that in a capitalist economy, production is based on the harnessing of labour power to produce new value from which capital can make a profit. Accordingly, the primary income distribution is that between labour and capital in the production process. At the macro level this primary distribution is captured in the structure of the national accounts where the income side of Gross Domestic Product is divided into compensation of employees (labour income) and gross operating surplus (capital income). In June 2022, labour received 44% of GDP, and the historically low labour share was one of the driving forces of the government’s Future Work Summit and the push industrial relation changes (see for instance the ACTU Job Summit Paper: An Economy that Works for People).

However, this primary distribution does not tell us the full story because from this primary distribution there are secondary distributions. Wages (compensation of employees) is split between taxes and disposable “take-home” income – an important distribution as progressive taxation is a significant factor in equalising take home wages from what is a much more unequal original distribution between wage earners. But gross operating surplus is also split into rents, royalties, profits, interest and taxes. These distributions are the property claims of different types of capital on the surplus income. The relative amounts of the secondary flows between these types of capital reflect the structure of production and the balance of class power within capitalism – so that, for instance, it has been suggested that finance capital has claimed most of the gains of neoliberal economic growth over the last 20 years.

Finally, there is the tertiary distribution which is redistribution of the taxes (taken in the secondary distribution) to households through transfer payments and to capital via subsidies and industry support. This is important because these social security transfers are the most visible face of “redistribution” and efforts to over-come inequality (e.g. campaigns to increase income support payments, or to provide public services). However, as we will see below, it is also the smallest of the distributions. While interventions in this space are necessary – especially for those outside of the circuits of capital and production income – they are also necessarily limited as the size of the tertiary flow is inevitably determined by the primary and secondary income flows.

The focus on primary, secondary and tertiary income flows arises out of classical and Marxian political economy, but they are difficult to quantify because our national accounts are based on Keynesian and neoclassical principles. Accordingly, the accounts do not necessarily record these flows. However, some data is available and is captured in the table below.

Income Distributions, Australia, June Quarter 2022

Table showing primary, secondary and tertiary income flows: GDP $609,133m Wages $268,573m Surplus $182,263m Total Taxes $174,807m Social Security Transfers $36,991m

Source ABS, Australian National Accounts, June Quarter 2022, Tables 7, 22, 23.

These numbers are important because they show the magnitude of the different income flows and the potential impact of changes in them. For instance, a 2 percentage point increase in the labour share of the economy (compensation of employees), which would return labour to the levels of twenty years ago, equates to a $12bn or 4.5% increase in total wages for the quarter. By contrast, even a 10% increase in social security payments (personal benefit transfers), would only see a $3.6bn redistribution of income.

Again, this is not to say that arguments for social security increases are unimportant, but it does emphasise the importance of industrial contestation over the primary income distribution. Or put another way, it emphasises the importance of class (income flows based on relationship to the means of production) to understanding inequality.

A similar argument could be made around gender. Applying the proportion of the total wage pool noted in a previous post to the above national accounts data, a 2 percentage point increase in the female wage share would equate to a $5.3bn (5.1%) increase in women’s wages in the quarter. Again, that is more than the total of social security transfers (which also disproportionately go to women). Arguably then, closing the gender pay gap or increasing women’s labour force participation is a more direct route to gender equality than social security payments – albeit with application to different women.

Obviously these class and gender arguments reprise my previous arguments about the importance of a structural approach to addressing inequality, but they may be particularly important as the labour movement goes forward with the campaigns under the new industrial relation system.

Snapshot of Inequality – South Australia and National

This snapshot of inequality summarises my series of recent posts on this subject. The series has been a journey. I didn’t completely know where the data would take me and I am now asking different questions than when I started. However, frustrated by the mono-dimensional analyses that often dominate discussion of inequality (including in my own work) I was keen to explore the multi-layered nature of the beast.

Inequalities in income and wealth distribution between households, across states and regions, and between structurally differentiated social groups all matter, so I was keen to analyse the data on all of these – even if in an iterative fashion. I also wanted to look particularly at South Australia, partly for local relevance and partly because state-level data is often not factored in to the analysis of inequality.

Snapshot of Current Inequality

Overall the data examined in this series (almost all it sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics) showed significant levels of inequality across the country, as summarised in the table below.

 AustraliaSouth Australia
Household Income (between states) (2019-20)Australian average (mean gross) income $2329 per week, but state averages range from $1,736 (Tas) to $2,422 (NSW)Average household income $1,989 p.w. = 85.4% of national average, although difference mainly at top end. SA receiving 6.3% of all household income (which is below its population share).
Household Income (within states) (2019-20)  Bottom 40% of households received 13.4% of the total income. High-income households (90th percentile) received 9 times the income of low-income households (10th percentile).Inequality broadly reflects national patterns, but relatively lower incomes at the top end of the income spectrum
Household Income (Regional Areas) (2019-20)Regional Australia accounted for 31% of the population, but received only 27% of income.Regional SA share even smaller with 19.9% of population, but just 17.7% of income.
Household Wealth (2019-20)Distribution more unequal than distribution of income: highest wealth quintile held 62.2% of all household wealth, while the bottom 40% of households held only 6.1% of wealth.Distribution data not available, but wealth holdings in SA have a different structure (relatively less wealth in home ownership, more in financial assets).
Labour Share of the Economy (2021)“Compensation of employees” at historically low levels (47.7% of GDP).Labour share slightly higher (49.3% of GSP)
Gendered Wage Patterns (2022)Gender pay gap of 14.1% in full-time ordinary-time earnings. Bigger gaps when all earnings and all employees included.At 7.4%, f/t ordinary-time earnings gap is around half the national average, but on lower earnings and relatively lower male earnings. Difference between national and SA figures narrows when all earnings and employees included.

Changes Over Time

The above snapshot of inequality is precisely that – just a snapshot at the current point in time. Arguably, a more important story is evident when changes over recent decades are considered.

That story is not straight-forward and has been explored more fully in the earlier posts. However, the short version is that, at the national level:

  • income inequality between households has increased slightly,
  • inequality between cities and the regions, between capital and labour, and inequalities in household wealth have all increased more markedly,
  • gender wage inequality was the only measure where inequality decreased.

These trends are evident in the graphs below which trace changes in the share of the various pools of total income (or wealth, or production), alongside the same data for South Australia (i.e. share of SA total income/product). The time periods vary depending on data availability.

Household Income and Wealth

As can be seen, nationally, the share of total household income of the lowest two (equivalised) income quintiles has been relatively stable, peaking in 1996-97 at 21.4% and falling to 20% in 2019-20. However, while this fall in income share appears small, every 0.1% change represents over $22.6m (in 2019-20) going from the lower to higher income quintiles. Even more significantly, the share of national wealth held by the poorest two wealth quintiles fell more markedly, although the data is more limited, and is not available for South Australia.

Time series snapshot of inequality: share of household income and wealth captured by the bottom two (equivalised) income quintiles, 1994-2020.

Households in Regional Areas

The share of total income received by households outside Australian capital cities fell from 30.7% of the national total in 2000-01 to 27% in 2019-20. (Note: not all years are included in this data). The South Australian data is more volatile, and shows a lower share overall (with proportionately fewer households outside the capital), but the trend is similar.

Time series snapshot of Inequality: Share of national and SA income captured by households in respective regional areas, 2000-2020.

Class

Nationally, labour’s share of the economy fell from 48.8% in June 1994 to 47.7% in June 2021, with each 0.1% change in this data set representing $2bn (in 2021) lost from labour payments. However, the South Australian data here is different, falling more swiftly from a higher share of the economy to a low point in June 2004, then recovering to 49.3% of Gross State Product in 2021 – a larger share of the economy than the labour share nationally.

Time series snapshot of inequality: labour compensation's share of the economy, SA and Australia, 1990-2020.

Gender

As noted above, the gender wage share is the only indicator to see a reduction of inequality with women increasing their share of the national wage pool from 33.1% in November 1994 to 39% in May this year.

Time series snapshot of inequality: female share of total wage pool, SA and national, 10094-2022.

Caveats and Conclusions: Why the Numbers Matter

This snapshot of inequality focuses on shares of total pools of income/wealth, rather than the more traditional but disparate average income figures. My approach enables some consistency of analysis across the different data sets, but I make no claim of a causal relationship or that the inequalities are comparable in nature. Clearly, inequalities can contribute to each other and the data sets overlap, but they are analytically separate and the different trajectories show why it is flawed to simply focus on one dimension (usually household income) when considering questions like whether inequality is increasing or not.

In a future post examining the South Australian data in more detail I will explore more specific interactions between different axes of inequality, but the point of this snapshot of inequality is simply to summarise the data and note the importance of considering multiple forms of inequality alongside each other, rather than the usual mono-dimensional focuses.

In arguing for a broader focus on the multiple forms or layers of inequality, I am not calling for endless sets of data or the infinite division of society until we are left only with individuals (as in the neoliberal dream). Rather, my point is that statistics (and all research data) is a reflection of the questions we ask and the theoretical understandings underpinning the research. Our national economic statistics are a product of the neoclassical and Keynesian theories that gave rise to them (that was Chapter 1 of my PhD). So too, the data we use to describe inequality reflects particular theoretical standpoints.

More than that, the data can limit the way we see society and the policies we might pursue to address both inequality and political economy more generally. For instance, data on the distribution of income between households tends towards a tax-and-transfer redistribution (after the fact) to support households in the lowest income brackets. By contrast, labour share data begets industrial policies, while regional data inevitably leads to development debates.

In saying that, I am mindful that my analysis is not comprehensive. I am sure that people with better statistical programs and skills could provide more nuanced numbers, and not all structures of inequality have been examined. Most notably, there is no consideration of structures of racial inequality, although with relevant census data to be released later this year I may be able to add to the analysis later. Perhaps more importantly, I am also acutely aware that race, gender and class inequality is ultimately not reducible to numbers – or even to the economic.

All that said, the economic aspects of inequality are important, and the numbers do provide useful points of reference. At its most basic, it seems to me to be important to have some sense of the scale of inequality, whether things are getting better or worse, and in what areas.

The Labour Share: No Paradise for Workers

This is the fifth post in the series on inequality in South Australia. While previous posts used ABS data to identify and track inequality between households, this post shifts the focus to structural inequality, and questions of class in particular – as evidenced by the changing labour share of the economy. Future posts will look at other structural inequalities based on gender and race.

Structural Inequality

The shift in focus is important because while the household data reveals much about patterns of inequality, it also has many limitations. Household income and wealth data is based on an assumption that households share resources. This assumption is probably unwarranted for many households, including the 13,000 “group households” in South Australia (272,000 nationally) where some expenses may be shared, but income is likely not shared. Further, viewing the household as the basic economic unit hides dynamics of potential inequality within households – most obviously gender and age dynamics, which then have ramifications in society more widely.

Further, the household data produced by the ABS, and used in many studies of inequality (for instance, the Productivity Commission report and the ACOSS/UNSW research) presents a mono-dimensional stratification of income distribution: a continuous spectrum from lowest to highest income/wealth on which all household/individuals are located. The measures of inequality are then based on the relationship of arbitrary points along this continuum such as income quintiles, top-bottom deciles. They do not tell us much about what is driving this stratification.

While it is possible to look at different demographic characteristics of households at various points on this spectrum, it is still largely only a scoring of an end point of distribution – not the mechanism of unequal distribution itself. By contrast, structural inequality is not simply a different location on a spectrum, it is a systemic and often conflictual relation, buttressed by a range of institutional arrangements where the economic inequality drives or at least contributes to the reproduction of that inequality.

Class – the Labour Share of GDP

This description of structural inequality and some of terms above are loose and contested, and there are mountains of academic writings on the subject. I have previously discussed Erik Olin Wright’s attempt to draw together classical Marxist, Weberian and Durkheimian approaches to class. All these approaches offer different insights, and all are added to and cross-cut by analysis of other structural inequalities. However, with no claim to being comprehensive or determinative, in this post I want to keep it fairly simple with just one measure of one structural inequality: class, as measured by the relative financial returns going to capital and labour.

The usual measure of these class-based economic flows is the share of national income going to labour (“compensation of employees” in ABS-speak), or alternatively, the labour share of the whole economic pie (that is, the share of Gross Domestic Product going to labour). I am sure there is a PhD somewhere critiquing the notion that “GDP = the economy”, but nonetheless, the labour share of GDP is a convenient measure as there is a robust ABS data set and changes in the labour share reflect changes in class power within the economy.

The Labour Share Data – National and South Australian

As is well-known, labour’s share of GDP in Australia has been falling in recent times. In 2018, the Journal of Australian Political Economy dedicated an excellent issue to highlighting the issue and examining the causes, and the labour share remains a cause of concern for the labour movement and many on the left.

Rather than add to the debate about causes or solutions, in this post, I simply want to look at the figures and compare the situation in South Australia with the rest of the country. As can be seen in the table below, despite lower average wages and lower workforce participation rates, the most recent ABS data (June 2021) shows that labour share of the South Australian economy was slightly higher than the labour share nationally.

AustraliaSouth Australia
Average Total Weekly Earnings$1,797.10$1,626.00
Participation Rate66.2%62.7%
Labour Share47.7%49.3%

While this suggests a slightly better distribution of income to workers in South Australia (i.e. a more equitable outcome in class terms), as the graph below shows, this is not historically consistent. The labour share in South Australia is more volatile and slumped below the national average in the decade from 1996 to 2006.

Time series showing labour share of economy in SA and nationally from 1990 to 2021. Long term decline in national series, while SA slumped but regained ground from 2010.

It should also be noted that the national data here does not show the current “historically low” labour share discussed in the media. That discussion is rightly based on seasonally-adjusted figures, but these are not published at the state level so I have used the ABS “original” data series to ensure a like-for-like comparison. That said, the seasonally adjusted figures show an even lower labour share nationally (46.1%), so either way, it would appear that SA labour’s share of the state economy is higher than labour’s share at the national level.

While this may appear to be good news for South Australian workers, this is a higher share of a decreasing part of the national economy. In 1990 the SA economy (Gross State Product) accounted for 7.7% of the national economy (GDP). In 2021, SA’s share was 5.7%. As the graph below shows, South Australian labour’s share of the national economy (in orange plotted on the right axis) has declined over the last 30 years, even while largely retaining its share of the state economy (black line plotted on the left axis).

Time series graph repeating SA labour share of GDP, but also showing long even decline in SA labour's share of national economy (GDP)

For South Australian labour there is then a double-challenge – the class challenge of retaining and increasing its share of income, and the development challenge of growing the economic pie overall. Of course this struggle is not unique, but it is a particular challenge given the arguments in previous posts about being at the economic periphery.

Caveats and Conclusion

It is worth emphasising again that the labour share is a class distribution, an economic process rather than a positioning of people or households. Many people and households (particularly higher-income households) have multiple sources of income including government transfers, bank interest, investment income, imputed rents and capital gains. These are different economic flows (class processes) and those households’ labour income does not necessarily determine their total income, lifestyle options or position in society.

That said, labour income is the major income source for the majority of Australian households. Accordingly, changes in the labour share of income are a key contributor to the household income spectrum, while also being important in their own right as a reflection of structural inequality.

In this context, my interim conclusion (to be added to in future posts) is simple: with a declining share of the national economy, it is no paradise for workers[1] – either in South Australia or nationally.

[1]  With apologies to Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright for stealing their classic title.

Class In Australia: Everything and Nothing?

A book, a red book (of course), simply titled Class in Australia. A front cover emblazoned with Sally McManus proclaiming that it is “a powerful and vibrant study of the complex realities of class in modern Australia”, and a back cover announcing an examination of class rooted in the specifics of Australian settler-colonialism which also takes account of race and gender relations. A big promise from Monash University Publishing about Steven Threadgold and Jessica Gerard’s book which was published in February this year.

Book Cover: Class in Australia, by Steven Threadgold and Jessica Gerard

With this advance advertising, I pre-ordered a copy, but I am afraid I was ultimately disappointed in the purchase. As an edited collection of essays, it is a hard ask to generate a coherent picture of the complexities of class (and that was probably not the aim), but from the opening chapters I was not sure who the audience was for the book.

Much of the work plotted issues or the various authors’ research in relation to existing academic literature, but without a knowledge of that literature it was hard to evaluate the arguments and contributions. But for an academic audience, the short generalist pieces lacked the data and detail to be convincing. My reading was somewhere in between, and I was left wanting more.

Theory

Threadgold and Gerard’s introduction argued for the importance of class as a concept, and against arguments of the “death of class”. They argue that

“class is necessary for understanding how Australian society functions, how the powerful maintain their interests, and how social and cultural institutions work to reproduce inequality”.

No argument from me on that, but they neither define class or a particular approach to class analysis, beyond emphasising the need for an open analysis of the complexity of class which takes account of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and the particular context. From that atheoretical (or at least non-structural) starting point I was not sure what “class” meant or was grounded in.

The first chapters designed to “situate class analysis” within the specifics of Australian experience were vague and disconnected – one leaping from Poulantzas to the class contradiction of one working class man’s love of classical music, while another described property relations in settler colonial society, but appearing fairly dated in its sources. The most theoretical of the chapters in this section set out its key definitions and assumptions, and adopted a categorisation of class based on income from paid work for owners (employers and petty bourgeoisie) and labour distinguished by control of operational skills and managerial rights (expert managers, managers, experts, workers). There was data on the numbers of people in each of these classes, and some discussion of the interplay of income, assets and culture. IMHO, it was a too dismissive of housing as a class asset (for reasons discussed here), but in any case, the chapter was too short to develop its key themes and, in an edited collection, this framework did not necessarily apply to other chapters.

Race/Aboriginality

Beyond the early chapter on settler colonial society, there were various references to race and the experience of Aboriginal people, but few were developed. For instance, in the concluding interview, Raewyn Connell contrasts Australian colonialism with South African settler society in that:

“Except in the pastoral industry and especially in Northern Australia, colonialism in Australia did not subject the Indigenous population as a labour force … That produced a different pattern of racism in Australia which we still have elements of today – exclusionary rather than hierarchical.”

This struck me as in important entry point to understanding an intersection of class and race, but I wanted a more detailed analysis of how these geographic differences played out, and how the situation changed over time. In 2016, 51% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults were employed. This was still well below the 76% of the non-Indigenous people, but it shows that the exclusion from employment/class is not total. So how are we to understand the class processes and differences for both Aboriginal employees and non-employees?

Similarly, the interview with Larissa Behrendt was a story of exclusion in highlighting the discrimination she has experienced in her career. While her story is inspirational, I was not sure what it says about class that is not simply captured by the notion of discrimination (with “class” being redundant).

Industrial Relations

For me, one of the most interesting chapters was an analysis by Tom Barnes and Jasmine Ali of an industrial dispute over retrenchments in a Woolworth’s warehouse in suburban Melbourne. The analysis adopted Erik Olin Wright’s multilevel synthesis of Marxian, Weberian and Durkheimian theory (which I considered in an earlier post) to show the divisions within the warehouse staff. Wright’s work in fact appeared several times in the book, but Barnes and Ali’s chapter was a great example outlining the (Weberian) distinctions between entitlements of full-time, casual and labour-hire workers and the (Durkheimian) situational differences within the formal and informal workplace culture and hierarchy. This was framed within a Marxian logic of the power of capital in deciding production location and warehouse closure.

In the end, the union got a good outcome (much improved redundancy and rights) based on identifying the unity of class interests against capital. While that may be good news, I would have liked to have known more about how those institutional and work-floor divisions were navigated – i.e. how class was mobilised. The article also said little about race or gender intersections, so while it was a good exposition of Wright’s methodology, it did not fully situate class in the current context.

Conclusion

There is not space here to comment on each chapter of Class in Australia, which was something of a smorgasbord (or at least a tasting tray) of class discussion. Suffice to say that the cultural studies chapters analysing an SBS documentary (Struggle Street) and rural romance novels failed to convince me of the generalisability or importance of the topic. And I did not read the chapters on class and education because …

Throughout the book (and somewhat in contradiction to Threadgold and Gerard’s statement cited above), I got no sense of one (or more) classes accumulating wealth and power from their class position or at the expense of other classes. There was a sense of inequality based on class and hierarchy between and within classes, but not really a sense of exploitation or of class processes as drivers of macro-economic structures or of social change or stability. Rather, (and perhaps because they generally reject a priori theory in favour of class forming in context) class appears as the wash-up of other economic and social processes. This is unsatisfactory both analytically and politically as it robs classes of agency.

There is much to say about class in Australia, and Threadgold and Gerard set out to raise rather than answer questions. But I would argue that the class processes and conflicts which determine (or at least influence) the distribution of income and wealth at the macro-level are more important than the musical tastes, and even the education levels or voting patterns, of the players in those processes. Ultimately, that is why I am drawn to political economy rather than sociology, even while acknowledging the importance of other analysis.