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Keywords: Working Class

  • AUSTRALIA

    How the working class became white

    • Evan Smith
    • 27 October 2016
    19 Comments

    While the White Australia Policy attempted to prevent non-white workers from living and working in Australia, people from across the globe continued to do both, although often at the margins of white Australian society. The Australian Labor Party and the trade unions were complicit in maintaining this racial divide. In Australia today, a new wave of migrants is working in convenience stores, driving taxis or cleaning buildings. They are part of the Australian working class, but are often not considered such.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'War on business' rhetoric echoes '07 union bashing

    • Brendan Byrne
    • 27 June 2016
    15 Comments

    Whether or not the person in the now notorious 'fake tradie' ad is or isn't a 'real' tradie is irrelevant. What is relevant is that it is a primary example of the co-option of the language of class struggle and economic justice that has so thoroughly poisoned economic debate in the industrialised West. Implicit within it is a patronising view of the working class that dismisses them as gullible dupes who can be made to entrench the privilege of the few in return for the paltry crumbs of consumer hedonism.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Orlando shooting brings hate to its natural conclusion

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 June 2016
    45 Comments

    At the epicentre of all this is a place where young, queer men and women had felt safe and free to be themselves. The dead are almost all black, brown, gay and working class. If, as Dr Cornel West has often said, justice is what love looks like in public, then injustice must be what hate looks like, and there is perhaps no greater injustice than murder. Mass murder is hatred realised in full grotesque proportion. This means is that the little things we do to validate hatred are not inconsequential.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Homeless Persons Union holds state to account

    • Ellena Savage
    • 15 April 2016
    2 Comments

    When we talk about the 'housing crisis' we are often referring to the plight of young working people and migrants struggling to tap into a property market that has been made a prestige market. This has been incentivised by tax breaks for investors, and is symptomatic of the culture of hoarding family wealth for the purpose of passing down class privilege. The Bendigo Street occupation reminds us that the 'housing crisis' is one and the same as the homelessness crisis; not a crisis of scarcity, but of policy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hipster heroes of gentrification

    • Charlotte Howell
    • 02 December 2015
    1 Comment

    I was born into a working class family in Leyton, East London. But in the late 1980s, gentrification in the area forced us to relocate to the poor working class town of Harlow, Essex. In a twist of fate, these days I can't even afford to live there. This time it is not due to gentrification brought about by 'hipster' entrepreneurs, but because powerful construction companies have replaced the historical architecture with new developments and housing estates. I know who I'd rather pick a fight against.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Who killed Amy Winehouse?

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 02 July 2015
    2 Comments

    There are early signs of the substance abuse that would later see her become a target of gleeful media scorn, and ultimately cause her death at the age of 27. But during one interview from the dawn of her career she reflects that if she was famous, she would go mad. She was painfully aware of the gap between the persona painted by a spiteful media and fickle public, and the preternaturally talented working-class girl from London who just wanted to sing.

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  • RELIGION

    Not a good time to be Catholic

    • Kevin Donnelly
    • 28 August 2014
    34 Comments

    Growing up in working class Broadmeadows in a Housing Commission estate with a communist father and a Catholic mother – mass on Sunday and the Eureka Youth Movement on Tuesday – taught me first hand about two of the most influential and powerful forces of the 20th century.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Film compounds real life drugs tragedy

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 17 July 2014
    1 Comment

    Ben and Tas Pappas, from Melbourne’s working-class north, take the skating world by storm in the 1990s. This film doesn’t skimp on the drugs-and-sex-addled reality in which they found themselves, fuelled by massive sponsorship dollars and the anarchic skating culture. But this is not the film's greatest tragedy. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Neoliberalism in the swinging outer suburbs

    • Luke Williams
    • 03 September 2013
    20 Comments

    The outer suburban marginal seats will almost certainly swing to the Coalition on Saturday. I'm sure many of the Left intelligentsia think they have the reasons for this all worked out: voters in the outer suburbs are uneducated, 'aspirational', cashed-up bogans who only care about their mortgages, negating their working-class origins and keeping out asylum seekers. As a swinging voter from one such electorate, I can tell you the reality is not that simple.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Census and Labor's Catholic vote

    • Brian Lawrence
    • 09 August 2011
    14 Comments

    The Census will play a central role in the planning of the next Federal election. Past results show that while much of Labor's working class base has abandoned it, a solid base of Catholics remains. But many of these supporters are now standing near the door bemused or angry. These figures show that while low income earners have abandoned Labor, a solid base of Catholics have stuck with it.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Arresting Mexico's borderland femicide

    • Ellena Savage
    • 26 May 2010
    6 Comments

    Some 5000 women have been killed in Juarez since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994. These women are not 'essential victims'; we do them a favour if we realise their victimhood lies in their abuse, not as a quality they possess for being female and working-class.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sport as class warfare

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 May 2010

    Tony is the working class underdog battling to excel in a sport dominated by private school boys. The temptation for the poor westie Tony to engage in petty crime is a cliché too far, but does help to highlight the social structures that define Tony's world.

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