Australia’s working class has not disappeared – it has changed, becoming more female, migrant and white collar, and social democratic parties must speak to its pressures before the populist right exploits them further.
We still have a large working class, but it is very different and larger than the working class of 60 years ago. The working class is now more white collar than blue collar.
The working class of about five million people in the 1960s was once employed in manufacturing, car plants and steel works.
The working class today includes care workers, nurses, teachers, retail and hospitality workers, gig workers, those working in warehouses and logistics, cleaners, security guards, healthcare support workers, agricultural and food processing workers and more. This is a very large group of workers, probably over seven million even allowing for double counting and workers with two or more jobs. It is more than working class workers of 60 years ago.
This new working class is also largely female, young and migrants.
The nature of the working class has clearly changed but the gap between capital and labour is as clear as it has ever been. There is still a sharp difference between those who own the means of production, capital, and those who only have their labour to sell. The new working class is concerned about corporate power and inequality.
As Professor David Schultz of Hamline University in the US argued in CounterPunch on 8 June, 2026 on the abandonment of class that whilst the composition of the workforce has clearly changed the grievance of labour is still alive. He says: “the worker timed on the warehouse floor does not need a seminar to be told that class is real. He feels it in his body at the end of a shift. The professor who pronounces class obsolete is generalising from a vantage point almost no worker shares……. abandoning class is among the chief reasons the gap between the rich and poor in the US has reached levels without precedent in modern American history….. When no major force in politics fights on class terms the owners of capital face no organised resistance and the result is exactly what one would predict, they take more, and the gap widens. …. Having abandoned the class frame the left had no alternative to offer, only a gentler administration of the same system and the predictable result was the slow deflection of the working class itself.”
In an article in The Conversation, Emeritus Professor David Peetz from Griffith University wrote there are still many Australians who continue to identify themselves as working class. He said: “in Australia national attitude and election surveys give us a good idea of trends in people’s views. Between 1979 and 2007 the proportion of respondents in a standard national survey defining themselves as working class or lower class temporally grew from 40 per cent to the low 50s in the 1980s …. In 2025 it was still 44 per cent working class”.
“While blue collar jobs have sharply declined almost everywhere the experience of class has been relatively stable.”
He added that “class relations didn’t weaken…Neoliberal policies including those adopted by social democratic parties made the rich much richer, but they slowed the growth in the well-being of most people and left the working class behind. The proportion that thought that big business had too much power, income and wealth should be redistributed became larger. Unions lost ground not because their ideas became unpopular with workers. It simply became much harder for unions to recruit and retain members in the face of increasingly hostile employers, governments and laws. Working class voters didn’t have solutions to hand. But nor were they offered any by social democratic parties that barely spoke their language. Now the door has been opened to far right parties presenting alternatives that appealed to some facing these class problems.”
The social democratic parties around the world – including the ALP – have not seriously addressed this major change in the working class. They seem more content with a gentle form of capitalism, despite the increasing polarisation between the have and the have nots. This polarisation is spurred on by legacy media exercising its power on the side of capital and greed. We have seen that in the recent unscrupulous media campaign against the government’s reforms on negative gearing and capital gains. Yet the Albanese government seeks to curry favour with this legacy media instead of breaking up the power it abuses.
And this is where One Nation is making gains although it has not shown any serious interest in the problems of gig workers, care workers and similar others across the country. As Kos Samaras pointed out in P&I: “One Nation has a long record of siding with employers and the big end of town, voting against wage floors, bargaining rights and the penalty right protections”.
The rise of the populist right is a problem in many western countries.
In P&I on May 30 I pointed out that “One Nation is funded and supported by wealthy and powerful business interests. It serves the rich and powerful. One Nation used to hide its links to the rich and powerful. Now One Nation is quite brazen about it”. Pauline Hanson said the $1.5 million plane gifted by Gina Reinhart was “quick, sexy and amazing”. She quotes approvingly of her hero, Donald Trump.
One Nation pretends that is for battlers when it is really in the pocket of billionaires. In The Guardian on 12 June 2026, Pauline Hanson told us that she consults her friend Gina Rinehart on policy and where Gina Rinehart “has been very beneficial “. She said “my policy on pensioners being able to work unlimited hours and without losing their pension or health card came from Mrs Reinhart and I think that’s great.”
And what does Pauline Hanson’s mentor have to say on some key issues. Gina Rinehart opposes carbon emission reduction targets and all resource specific taxes. That would include the gas tax. She is a vocal climate change sceptic. She told students in WA that it was “natural influences” like the earth distance from the sun and underwater volcanoes instead of human carbon emissions that were responsible for climate change. She fiercely criticised the proposed capital gains tax changes.
What a smorgasbord of policies that Pauline Hanson can now draw on from Australia’s richest person.
Social democrat parties must reflect on how the working class has changed. That is important in the interests of working people who have only their labour to sell. It will also be the way to defeat the populists who have nothing seriously to offer.
The new working class is symbolised by the care worker, not the sheet metal worker, by the white collar not the blue collar worker.
A gentler form of capitalism will not suffice.
John Menadue is the Founder of Pearls and Irritations and a board member. He was formerly the Editor-in-Chief. John was the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.