Are aspirational voters rethinking their aspirations?

Perhaps it’s not just Xi Jinping who believes there’s been a little too much lionising of wealth creators and an insufficient focus on common prosperity

Photo by hosein zanbori on Unsplash

I once heard an American immigrant to Australia – or perhaps it was an Australian immigrant to America – sum up the differences between the two cultures with reference to the slicing of cakes at children’s birthday parties.

I’ve never attended one, but apparently children are asked if they want a big or small slice of cake at American birthday parties. At Australian birthday parties – and this conforms with my lived experience – there is an egalitarian distribution of the cake. If there are 20 kids at the birthday party, the cake is divided into 20 equally sized pieces.

While they may still divvy up birthday cakes along Communist lines, Australians – along with their counterparts elsewhere in the Anglosphere – long ago decided that they were happy for the national income pie to be divvied up much less equitably than had been the case circa 1930-1980.

This inevitably brings me to the latest industrial relations brouhaha.

Do you really want the poorly paid to be better paid?
I have no penetrating insights to offer about the pros and cons of multi-employer bargaining. For all I know, there may be superior ways to ‘get wages moving again’ without endangering the profitability/continued existence of Australian businesses.

But Australians – particularly working-class and middle-class Australians – must now decide whether they want real wages – which are currently heading south due to high inflation – to increase.

It’s a rookie mistake, one frequently made by Leftists, to assume those who aren’t either business owners or highly paid employees invariably believe Labour should get more than just the leftovers of the national income pie.

This probably was the case for the 50 years or so following the Great Depression. But sometime between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, significant sections of the working and lower-middle class decided that (a) It was possible for them to better their station in life and (b) once they had bettered their station in life they didn’t want any of their newfound wealth redistributed downwards through either the imposition of high taxes on high-income earners and/or business owners and shareholders being expected to hand over a goodly chunk of their profits to the workers who played a role in the generation of said profits.

The well-heeled, who have always been keen on low taxes and low wages, continued to back political parties – both right-of-centre ones and reinvented ‘third way’  left-of-centre ones headed up the likes of Hawke, Keating, Clinton and Blair – that would promote the redistribution of national wealth from Labour to Capital. But much to the dismay of the type of well-educated, politically engaged, middle class and upper-middle class progressives who sent books such as Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, lots of people who weren’t well-heeled started voting against what appeared to be their economic interests circa 1979 and continued doing so for decades. As Frank observed in 2004:

The gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there's a good chance they'll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.

This isn’t the place to debate whether aspirational voters were, to borrow a phrase, behaving like roaches voting for Raid in backing neoliberal politicians so enthusiastically throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The relevant point is simply that many voters in Anglosphere countries were happy to have a handful of kids monopolise most of the birthday cake while the rest of the children were reduced to fighting for crumbs. That’s presumably because they figured they might get to gorge on the cake themselves one day and weren’t overly concerned about the prospect of others going hungry.

Are we all in this together?
I’m not sure when a majority, or at least a plurality, of Anglosphere voters began to twig that they were unlikely to end up being one of the gorgers and should therefore start supporting a fairer slicing up of the cake.  

I’ve always suspected Obama won more votes than he lost telling a disbelieving ‘Joe the Plumber’ that “spreading the wealth around… [was] good for everybody” during his 2008 election campaign. Many Americans and Brits, especially younger ones, had their aspirations very much curtailed during the post-GFC period of austerity. More recently, the coronavirus led growing numbers of people to declare ‘we are all in this together’ and to consider whether those toiling away in unglamorous but socially necessary jobs deserved a bit more pay and status.

Earlier this year, the Australian voters elected a one-time Socialist firebrand raised by a single mother in public housing as Prime Minister. Albanese might have been a small target, don’t-frighten-the-horses Opposition Leader, but he is morphing into a conviction politician now he's ensconced in the Lodge. It seems that, along with his ambitious Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, he really does want to get wages moving.

As would be expected, this has prompted the usual hysterical conniptions among the wage-paying class. The pertinent political question now is whether or not a critical mass of Australians want to divide the national income pie more equitably.

Will you put your hand in your pocket for higher wages?
Let’s take the childcare industry as a case study. You can make a lot of money if you own a childcare centre and a shit tonne of money if you own a string of them. (A decade or so ago, much of Australia was transfixed by the spectacular flameout of the Ferrari/yacht/helicopter/sports team-owning Eddy Groves, who went from owning one Brisbane childcare centre to heading up ABC Learning, a company worth $2.5 billion at its peak.)

But you can’t make much money working at a childcare centre. The starting salary for an early childhood educator is around $900 a week. That salary can and typically does increase over time, but not by much, with most full-time childcare workers pulling in $1000-$1425 a week, pre-tax. That makes them among the lowest-paid workers in the nation.

Most childcare workers do vocational training. But, back when my children were in childcare, I was surprised by how many of them, especially the younger ones, were university qualified. Around 10 per cent of early childhood educators are now university graduates. After getting a degree and racking up a substantial HECS debt, these graduates, like their TAFE-trained brethren, can look forward to earning a maximum award rate of $37.50 an hour.

It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t agree that childcare workers do an important job and deserve to be paid more for it. But that will inevitably involve higher labour costs in what is an extremely labour-intensive industry. Childcare isn’t cheap – when my two children were in childcare half a decade ago, the weekly bill was $1000 – but if childcare workers are going to be paid more, those who use childcare will have to pay more. Childcare has long been heavily subsidised and the newish Labor Government wants to subsidise it even more heavily. That means all Australian taxpayers – including the growing number of childless ones – will also have to fork out if the wages of early childhood educators are to rise significantly.

Much the same dynamics apply to other lowly paid workers.

Want to give aged care workers a pay bump? Be prepared to pay eye-wateringly high fees to get into an aged care facility if you’re elderly and to pay higher taxes if you’re still in the workforce.

Want to improve the working conditions of those ‘healthcare hero’ nurses everyone was banging saucepans for not so long ago? Then you better forget about those Stage Three income tax cuts you were looking forward to.

Want the kid who is risking life and limb to deliver Thai food to your door to pocket more than $15 an hour? Expect to pay significantly more next time you log on to Menulog or Uber Eats.

And so on.

It’s decision time
A few days ago, the Guardian was trumpeting a poll that, according to the headline, showed “almost two-thirds of voters back Labor’s plan for multi-employer deals”.

In fact, the poll results were a little less clear cut. Exactly half of those surveyed said Labor’s industrial relations bill was “key to getting wages moving and [giving] power back to employees”. That presumably means half of those surveyed either didn’t believe the IR bill would achieve its objectives or, more likely, were frightened that it would.

(The Guardian begrudgingly conceded that 27 per cent of those surveyed agreed that the IR bill “gives too much influence to unions and will be bad for the economy and businesses”.) The ”two-thirds” support touted in the headline appears to relate to strong support among those surveyed for remote working arrangements, measures to close the gender pay gap and “strengthening the power of low paid workers to negotiate wage rises”.)

The first point to be made is that people talk a lot of shit to pollsters. Ask voters in pretty much any country if they want more money spent on health and education and they will say they do then go and vote for the political party that promises to lower their taxes.

Ask Brits if they want to stay in the EU and they will tell you they do then vote for Brexit.

Ask Americans if they are excited to cast their vote for the first woman president and they will assure they are before backing Donald Trump in the privacy of the ballot box.

Quiz women about what they are looking for in a partner and they’ll insist they want a supportive, emotionally intelligent gentleman despite the fact they’ve only ever been attracted to taciturn bad boys with pronounced Dark Triad personality traits.

Quiz middle-aged men about their mate preferences and they’ll say they want someone around their own age without any major psychological issues before proceeding to swipe right on every hot mess 22-year-old that appears on their Tinder feed.

The second point to be made is that people are frequently deceiving themselves more than the pollster when expressing their opinions. Voters would like more money spent on government services, but they don’t want to pay higher taxes. Women do want a good-hearted partner, but they also want one who is exciting. Men do want a partner who isn’t going to be a lot of work, but they also want a partner who is hot enough to get away with being a lot of work.       

As I’ve canvassed in previous musings, there appears to be a seachange in political attitudes occurring during the dying days of the neoliberal era. The question that remains to be answered is how sincere people are when they say they are willing to cop higher prices and taxes to ensure those doing poorly paid but important work can earn a liveable wage.

We will soon find out.