“My commitment to the forgotten families of Australia is to ease your cost of living pressure”
Tony Abbott
It was awfully nice for Tony Abbott to come into bat for the ‘forgotten families’ of Australia. You know, because families never get anything in budgets, from the Labor or Liberal Parties. Aside from the usual tax concessions, tax cuts, pats on the head, soothing words and a lollypop from every treasurer ever to bring down a budget; lavish praise from every Prime Minister to hold office, and slavish devotion from the press, families barely get a thing.
But, to be fair for a moment, even with the rain of bonuses and tax cuts and effusive sloganeering, there are still families out there who are doing it tough, who could be fairly called ‘forgotten’ (although I will boldly suggest at this point that families earning over 150k are not in this category).
So if we accept that there are families out there who are doing it tough, the next question is this: who are they? If we take ‘forgotten’ to mean those left behind; if we take it to mean the working class, those who have yet to see all the benefits of the mining boom. What is their profile?
Recently, I indulged in a long rant for Making the Nut that ended up being picked up by the ABC. I love do our Aunty – she runs an overly generous, broad church that apparently will give any hack a run. At the beginning of the article I took to flaying coffee snobs, which attracted a lot of comments from readers about a good cup of coffee (even though this wasn’t the point of the piece).
One of the readers made the following point: “…there is less and less to differentiate them [the middle class]from the working class. I became a coffee snob 20 years ago – was the only person in my circle who knew about the arabica/robusta divide. Now my cafe is frequented by tradies who are just as fussy as I am.”
In part, the reader in question was trying to say that class differences are less relevant due to the ‘equalising’ effect of our nation’s increasing wealth; that historical class differences were no longer cut and dried. An interesting point and a reasonable one to argue – even if made by a priggish coffee snob. Or so I thought, until I really thought. The assumption in the quote is that a ‘tradie’ (good old salt-of-the-earth) is ‘working class’ while latte drinkers are usually middle-class professionals. This sort of assumption makes perfect sense right up until the moment you bump into the facts about the average weekly earnings of a tradesperson.
The thing is a lot of experienced tradies these days are earning north of 100k. As the median income in Australia (as of 08/09) is 44,000 and the median household earning is around 67,000, many of those working in the trades are earning more than double that of the average Australian. While certainly not all are earning over 100k, the majority of fully qualified tradies are earning above the median wage. If you’ve ever sat in your lounge room looking at a 250 dollar bill the plumber just gave you for the 30 minutes it took to replace a part on your toilet, you’ll know where I’m coming from.
To put things in perspective, only 4.5% of people earn more than 100k a year, while less than 1.5% earns more than 150k. Half of the population earns 44,000k or less. So any salary approaching the 100k mark is hardly a ‘working class’ salary. Certainly, average earnings vary between trades – for example, someone working as a house painter tends to earn a lot less on average than someone employed in construction – yet overall the trades are increasingly a well-paid, middle class occupation. The fact that there is a dearth of qualified tradespeople in Australia has only helped to drive up their average earnings.
I’m not criticising that by the way – quite the contrary. I think tradies give a lot more back to Australian society than the average corporate lawyer or political lobbyist; a damn sight more. I think they earn every cent they make, unlike the soft-handed financial advisor* recommending toxic investments in junk companies.
What I’m saying here is that the stereotype of the tradie representing the ‘working class’ is becoming a fiction, and that you shouldn’t be surprised if two burly construction workers sit in your local cafe and discuss the finer points of drinking ‘Arabica’ or ‘Robusta coffee.
Let’s take the coal miner – the once iconic symbol of the working class – stories abound in national newspapers of many of them now earning as much as the Prime Minister (that is, more than 350k a year). In fact, as of 2010, the mining industry had the highest average weekly salary in the entire country at 2200 dollars or 114k a year (the food services and accommodation industry has the lowest at 475 dollars week). The salt of the earth has earned the silver spoon.
So if we can’t rely on the stereotype of the tradie or miner, who are the true ‘working class’; the ‘forgotten families?’ According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the six lowest-paid categories of workers in Australia are (from lowest up): textile and footwear workers; hairdressers (one of the few examples of a chronically underpaid trade); child carers; checkout operators; cleaners and laundry workers, and receptionists. You will note these 6 industries have a predominance of female workers. Professions requiring a tertiary education don’t necessarily fare a lot better either. A qualified nurse for example, working in a public hospital in NSW, starts at around 46k; a midwives’ assistant earns around 36k. And the range for public school teachers is not much higher.
One more example: the average yearly salary of a female child care worker is 38,900; the average for a male legal professional is 107,000. Think about that and vomit. In the far-flung future, 1000 years from now, at Starfleet headquarters in the Andromeda Galaxy, space historians will reflect on the poisoned, desiccated husk that once was planet earth and think ‘how did we fuck that up so badly?’ Well, Exhibit A will be the era in which we decided to pay corporate shills three times that of the people who care for our children (Exhibit B will be Sarah Palin; and C will be the enduring popularity of ‘farmer wants a wife’).
So who are the forgotten families? Well, they’re in the public service and the private sector, they can be tertiary-educated and those with high-school education. They’re non-managerial nurses and teachers; they are shop assistants and hair dressers. They’re not up to their elbows in coal dust or insulation, but they are up to their elbows in the shit and blood of patients, or in the suds and grime washing half-eaten plates of eggs benedict at the local cafe.
A snapshot of the typical Australian worker would be as follows: it’s a woman, and she’s teaching your kids or cleaning your clothes or serving you food. She’s doing it tough. And don’t you forget it.
This article was first published at ABC’s The Drum