Retooling the Class Factory : Response 2
From Monochrome to Technicolour:
Adding the Lens of Unpaid Labour

Melanie Oppenheimer

Elizabeth Faue has presented United States labour history with a dilemma. After many years of researching, writing and teaching labour history, Faue believes that the stories and life experiences of her working class parents, which she describes in her article, and those of many others such as labour journalist Eva McDonald Valesh, do not really 'fit in' with traditional labour history. Faue believes that the various theories and models used in labour history, such as Marxism, neo-industrialism and postmodernism, never really touch on, or adequately explain the 'subjective experiences' of ordinary working class people like Valesh and her parents. Nor do these theories explain the ways in which people 'straddled class boundaries and identities' throughout their lives. One way around this problem, Faue explains, is to 're-tool the class factory' and retool how labour historians 'think about class'. She continues that 'to get at the subjective dimension', we, as labour historians have to view the past through an expanded set of indices or a different pair of lenses.	1
The schism as outlined by Faue which has developed in United States labour history between the traditionalists and those who wish to 'modernize' labour history through gender, race, and cultural analysis, appears to be greater there than in Australia. Australian labour history survived a period of reflection in the 1990s when a series of articles and a book edited by Terry Irving considered and confronted the challenges of labour history. 1 From those debates emerged a reinvigorated labour history genre which has embraced change and encouraged diversity. In many ways it appears that labour history in Australia today is more flexible and more inclusive than its United States' cousin. Australian labour history has been willing to experiment with different ideas and practices concerning the nature of work and how it has shifted and changed through the twentieth century. If, as Faue suggests, we need to focus on 'what is real to ordinary people' through an exploration of 'kinship, education, work, community, leisure', then the inclusion of unpaid work/ volunteer work should be acknowledged and included as well. Whilst Faue does allude to the changing nature of work in the concluding section of her article, and how this has impacted on traditional labour history, she only discusses 'paid work'. However, as I have written elsewhere, I believe that we need to expand and challenge the way we define 'work' and 'worker' to include not only paid work, but unpaid work - voluntary and domestic. Another way of getting through to the 'subjective dimensions' of the working class experience as outlined by Faue, is by placing voluntary labour at the centre of analysis. 2	2
We have to ask ourselves what exactly constitutes a working life. It is a combination of paid and unpaid labour, domestic and voluntary, and it shifts and changes over time. Faue talks about the malleability of class - that people move into and out of classes depending on their circumstances and life stories, and the peripatetic nature of employment. But so too do people's experiences shift and change outside of the workplace according to the particular stage of their life cycle. For example, the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data concludes that the largest cohort of volunteer workers (40 per cent) are people aged between 35 and 44 years. This, perhaps not surprisingly, corresponds with family commitments. 3 There are debates about definitional issues surrounding volunteering. It is generally agreed that there are two types of volunteering - 'formal' and 'informal'. 4 Both incorporate choice and involve individuals donating or giving their time freely, that is, receiving no remuneration for work done. 'Formal' volunteering is carried out in the public sphere, within properly constituted organizations. The latest ABS statistics reveal that 32 per cent of the Australian population aged over 18 volunteered for an organisation. This was up from 24 per cent in 1995. 'Informal' volunteering (that is, volunteer work which occurs outside a structured organisational framework) is unpaid work such as caring work for neighbours, friends and family.	3
Traditionally in labour history 'work' has meant paid work. No longer, however, can this presumption be made. When discussing aspects of work, one should quantify and explain what kind of work - is it paid, unpaid, domestic or voluntary? Spacial elements are important too, that is where does it occur - in the public sphere or the private sphere or a combination of both? Generally, volunteering is localised and is community focused. Volunteer work often shares identical characteristics with paid work: it is productive, valuable, value-adding, and contributes to the economy both directly and indirectly. Yet, as advocates have argued for years now, volunteer work is still not included in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of OECD countries and is not part of the United Nations System of National Accounts, thereby falling outside the accounting procedures of our global society. 5	4
The recent thematic section on voluntary work and labour history published in Labour History in 2001 reveals how far Australian labour history has come. The six articles spanned a diversity of topics: the informal volunteering of midwives in a small regional town in New South Wales during the second half of the nineteenth century to World War I volunteering; firefighters and surf lifesavers; and women's political activism within the labour movement. The articles revealed that, not only is there a blurring between paid and unpaid work, but there is also an interconnectedness between the paid worker and the unpaid volunteer, in terms of skill, continuity and regularity. As Alice Kessler-Harris wrote in the postscript to the thematic section, if the constraints of Marxism are loosened through a focus on volunteer work and subjective experiences, a whole new panorama of working class experience can be found. She continued that 'voluntarism breaks down gender and class barriers, and could have an important impact on labour history'. 6	5
It appears that much of what we have been examining in the past through the prism of traditional labour history has always been in monochrome or one dimensional. It has been in black and white and we have only seen half the person/ half the story. By only looking at work and the worker through the 'paid' paradigm, we have omitted much of what constitutes the 'whole'. We have omitted the 'subjective dimensions' that Faue talks about. If, however, you include in your historical analysis unpaid/volunteer work as well as paid work; if you include what goes on before the worker arrives at the workplace, and once the worker leaves; if you focus equally on the domestic front and relationships between and within families, friends, colleagues; if you follow that 'worker' to the community hall or the pub or the club or the church hall or the community based organisation, to the sports field, the local school, the town hall, the library, and analyse the unpaid labour that is carried out by that 'worker' within and between his/her community - then the picture turns to technicolour. The worker, be it male or female, adult or child, indigenous or migrant, black or white, becomes multi-dimensional; the worker becomes 'whole'.	6
So, by using such models as expanding the concept and understanding of 'work' to include volunteer and unpaid work, and Faue's ideas of 'retooling class analysis', we will be able to tap into the 'subjective dimensions' of labour history. This will help to make labour history relevant to those in the present, as well as in the future. It will make our labour history more relevant, vital, exciting and it will be in technicolour.	7
Endnotes 1. Verity Burgmann, 'The Strange Death of Labour History', in Bob Carr et al, Bede Nairn and Labor History , Pluto Press, Leichhardt, 1991, pp. 69-82; Rae Frances and Bruce Scates, 'Is Labour History Dead?', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, no. 100, April 1993, pp. 470-481; Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History , UNSW Press, Sydney, 1994. 2. 'Voluntary Work and Labour History, Labour History , no. 74, May 1998, pp. 1-9; '"We all did voluntary work of some kind": Voluntary Work and Labour History', Labour History , no. 81, November 2001, pp. 1-11; 'Commentary: Changes in the Nature of Work and Employment Relations: an Historical Perspective' in Ron Callus and Russell D. Lansbury (eds.), Working Futures: the Changing Nature of Work and Employment Relations in Australia , The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2002, pp. 39-45. 3. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Voluntary Work , June 2001, AGPS, Canberra, p. 3. 4. See Jeni Warbuton and Melanie Oppenheimer (eds.), Volunteers and Volunteering , The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2000. 5. Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing? What Men Value and What Women are Worth , Allen and Unwin, Wellington 1990 (1988). See also Duncan Ironmonger, 'Measuring Volunteering in Economic Terms', in Warburton and Oppenheimer, Volunteers and Volunteering , pp. 56-72. 6. Alice Kessler-Harris, 'Postscript', Labour History , no. 81, November 2001, p. 132.

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