News fresh from the Department of the Obvious this week: the Australian Financial Review reports that “class can have a bigger effect on your chance of being promoted than gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation”.
What has long been suspected is now quantifiable. It demands to be measured and addressed, far beyond corporate employment. In how we think about infrastructure. How we make culture.
Data collected by KPMG “showed people from working class families took an average of 19% longer to shift up a grade” on the employment ladder, “compared to those from higher socio-economic backgrounds”.
The data confirmed that those disadvantages compound if you’re also a woman and/or a person from an ethnic minority background.
We already know that classism is a pervasive and effective modern bigotry, because no one who perpetuates it admits that it exists. It helps that the definition of class in the contemporary context can be slippery. Class is not just socio-economic but cultural, manifesting not merely in productive relations but in shared rituals and behaviours which are different across nations and communities.
In Australia, public school versus private school education can delineate class, but after the introduction of mass vocational education in the 1980s, tertiary qualification today is far less revealing. KPMG joins PwC, the Slaughter and May law firm and others who are establishing class parameters by surveying for the occupation of a person’s highest-earning parent. It’s a crude metric but does broadly capture the class relationship of family history and legacy to forms of capital and opportunity.
The historian EP Thompson summarised class complexity with a memorable caveat in his gargantuan study, The Making of the English Working Class. “The finest meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class,” he explains, “any more than it can give us one of deference or of love.”
And yet every day we engage in habits of deference or love informed by the class commonality or difference we perceive in others – sometimes explicitly, sometimes unconsciously, but always unspoken.
The evolving dataset to which KPMG contributes is one that raises interesting questions far beyond the corporate and other leadership roles in which it invests. One of these asks why great literature challenging class assumptions might be so hard to find.
Decades of wild west property profiteering combined with government housing undersupply have left Australia with a housing crisis but the limited class lens applied to the effects of restricted supply, low vacancy rates, rising rents and the pressure of consumer price-gouging in Australian cities rarely stretches to consider the cultural.
Unlike the corporates, local cultural employers are not yet assessing for class. They should. Testimonies suggest the same oppressive “class ceiling” sits firmly across arts and cultural practice. Years of economic drivers from increased university fees to cost-of-living pressures to shrinking arts incomes compound its exclusions.
The average income for an Australian author of literary fiction sits around $14,500 a year. For an Australian musician, the median income is $6,000 a year. For a visual artist, it maxes out at $12,000. It is not enough to make rent anywhere in Australia without another form of income, or help.
Meanwhile, the disappearance of cheap city housing is not only driving renters out of the cities, or anyone beyond the capitalised classes away from becoming artists. It doesn’t merely compromise the quality of creative work that can be made in the hours around a day job, or impose geographical barriers to employment around infrastructure that is overwhelmingly centralised. It also means the old flexible-if-low-paid jobs in hospitality, retail and care aren’t enough to support anyone’s independent urban living either.
This doesn’t just mean an uncomfortable shortage of local baristas. Were cultural industries assessed for class diversity, we may get some insight into what we lose from driving poor and working-class kids away from making our pictures and telling our stories. We might consider the social disconnect that gets perpetuated when an entire generation of the kids who face no class barriers to culture-making make that culture from laptops in their parents’ lounge rooms – without ever having being educated beside, or lived among, or worked with people from classes that are not like theirs. Already, about 50% of Australians aged 18-29 are still living at home.
When Pulp sang 1995’s immaculate Common People about the slumming-it art student “watching roaches climb the wall” knowing “if (she) called (her) dad (she) could stop it all”, it was sharp criticism of rich-kinds indulging proletarian cosplay. Thirty years later, it evinces nostalgia for a fading intra-class curiosity.
One stares at the KPMG report, then at the housing crunch, and wonders; what songs will those unfairly privileged storytellers of a generation write – if they’ve never once had to imagine that other walls exist.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
