Books by Elizabeth Humphrys
Why do we always assume it was the New Right that was at the centre of constructing neoliberalism... more Why do we always assume it was the New Right that was at the centre of constructing neoliberalism? How might corporatism have advanced neoliberalism? And, more controversially, were the trade unions only victims of neoliberal change, or did they play a more contradictory role? In How Labour Built Neoliberalism, Elizabeth Humphrys examines the role of the Labor Party and trade unions in constructing neoliberalism in Australia, and the implications of this for understanding neoliberalism’s global advance. These questions are central to understanding the present condition of the labour movement and its prospects for the future.
Book chapters by Elizabeth Humphrys
The Far Left in Australia Since 1945, 2019
in Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze (eds), On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe, Elguta Press: London , 2011
Challenging the Orthodoxy, pp 173-180. Eds Susan Schroeder and Lynne Chester, 2014
Marxism and Social Movements. Edited by Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Jun 2013
Left Turn: Political Essays for the New Left, pp 10-26. Eds Anthony Loewenstein & Jeff Sparrow., 2012
Co-authored with Tad Tietze.
Refereed Journal articles by Elizabeth Humphrys
Safety Science, 2023
Exposure to high heat and humidity in the workplace is a critical health and safety issue. In Aus... more Exposure to high heat and humidity in the workplace is a critical health and safety issue. In Australia, where heat waves are occurring with more frequency and intensity the risks posed by occupational heat exposure have been acknowledged by employer groups, trade unions, and statutory government agencies. In this study we investigate the employment context in which heat stress is experienced, and whether the mode of employment affects the capacity to manage it. We examine the experience of workplace heat exposure for two groups of affected outdoor workers: contracted pieceworkers in bicycle delivery and permanently employed municipal workers in parks and road maintenance. Data was collected in Sydney during the summer of 2019 via surveys and in-person interviews with the two sets of workers. Research findings reflect the well-established nexus between outside temperature, humidity and work effort in producing heat stress. The comparative findings reveal that more secure forms of employment enable social organisation and workflow to manage heat stress and that, conversely, more contingent forms of employment such as contractual piece work can exacerbate exposure. The research demonstrates that the mode of employment has a direct bearing on the capacity to address workplace heat stress: growth in contract or ‘gig’ work may exacerbate impacts; this issue is likely to become more important with advancing climate change.
Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2022
Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2022
Labour History, 2020
The West Gate Bridge collapse in 1970 is one of the worst industrial disasters in Australian hist... more The West Gate Bridge collapse in 1970 is one of the worst industrial disasters in Australian history. Closely examined for the engineering lessons it provides, scholarly interest in its historical, social, and industrial import is far less extensive. This article examines the role of union leaders, employers, and a private welfare organisation called the Citizens Welfare Service (CWS) in the management of funds raised to support the victims and families of the disaster. More broadly, it reveals philanthropic attitudes and practices adopted to manage working families’ needs in the 1970s that were not altogether dissimilar from those of nineteenth-century philanthropists. Despite the families’ raw grief in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, “home visitors” from the CWS felt entitled to offer heavily gendered and class-based advice to widows about frugal budgeting, domestic order, and composed behaviour. The case management style employed by this welfare agency demonstrated a derivative commitment to capitalist mores that promoted hard work and thrift, while stigmatising welfare dependence.
Journal of Australian Political Economy, 2020
Critical Sociology, 2019
This paper examines climatic heat stress as a question of workplace health and safety in relation... more This paper examines climatic heat stress as a question of workplace health and safety in relation to at-risk and precarious labour. First, we argue that precarity is usefully understood as a phenomenon that is both generalised (all work is precarious given the function of labour under capitalism) and differentiated (experienced differently across geography, labour process and employment status). We frame climate change and labour relations as internally related and argue that climate change needs to be incorporated into the notion of precarity. Second, we explore the experience of construction workers in New South Wales, Australia, and consider the industry as a potential site of organising over both labour conditions and global warming. We conclude that climate change exacerbates precariousness, disrupting all work and intensifying and extending individual risk in various ways. Further, these experiences present a potential site to simultaneously act on both global warming and labour conditions.
Globalizations, 2019
Numerous scholars have identified the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ as the key driver of the ne... more Numerous scholars have identified the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ as the key driver of the neoliberal transformation. These accounts emphasize the building of neoliberal hegemony through the mobilization of this collective, and the New Right parties who aligned to these ideas. We argue that Australia's corporatist road to neoliberalism pushes against this thesis, as the movement found little sympathy among policy makers. Rather, the thought collective acted more like a ‘ginger group’, attempting to radicalize public debate and create space for new neoliberal arrangements. In Australia, successive centre-left Labor governments rolled out neoliberalism in a series of formal corporatist arrangements with the trade union movement. This paper sets out a reconsideration of the role of the thought collective, on the basis of the Australian experience, and argues this can move us beyond the ideational determinism that has come to characterize key accounts of how neoliberalism developed.
Journal of Sociology, 2018
Given recent calls for a new social contract between the unions and government, it is timely to c... more Given recent calls for a new social contract between the unions and government, it is timely to consider the relationship of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) prices and incomes Accord (1983–97) to the construction of neoliberalism in Australia. Contrary to most scholarly accounts, which posit the ALP and ACTU prices and incomes Accord and neoliberalism as exogenously related or competing processes, this article argues they were internally related aspects of economic transformation. The implementation of the Accord agreement deepened Australia’s existing corporatist arrangements while simultaneously advancing neoliberalism within a highly structured political-economic framework.
Thesis Eleven, 2018
This article traces a line of theorisation regarding the state-civil society relationship, from M... more This article traces a line of theorisation regarding the state-civil society relationship, from Marx’s early writings to Gramsci’s conception of the integral state. The article argues that Marx developed, through his critique of Hegel, a valuable understanding of the state-civil society connection that emphasised the antagonism between them in capitalist societies. Alternatively, Gramsci’s conception of the ‘integral state’ posits an interconnection and dialectical unity of the state and civil society, where the latter is integrated under the leadership of the former. The article argues that while Marx and Gramsci’s positions are, at first, seemingly incongruous ideas – as to the ‘separation’ in Marx and ‘integration’ in Gramsci – this tension can be bridged when the integral state is understood as being always necessarily unstable. The article argues that this framework can help us understand the contemporary breakdown of political rule in the phenomenon known as ‘anti-politics’.
Critical Sociology, Aug 4, 2016
Critical explanations of neoliberalism regularly adhere to a dominant narrative as to the form an... more Critical explanations of neoliberalism regularly adhere to a dominant narrative as to the form and implementation of the neoliberal policy revolution, positing neoliberalism in its vanguard period as a project implemented by governments of the New Right, imposed coercively on civil society by state elites and only subsequently adopted by social democratic parties. In such accounts, labour is typically posited as the object and victim of neoliberalising processes. In contrast, this article focuses upon the active role of labour within the development of neoliberalism. The period of social democratic government in Australia (1983-1996) is used as a case study to illuminate labour's active role in constructing neoliberalism. Indicative evidence from the USA and UK is then presented to argue that the agency of labour can usefully be 'written in' to the presently dominant narrative regarding the rise of neoliberalism to provide a more satisfactory account of its nature and resilience over time.
Globalizations, Jul 4, 2013
The ‘s11’ protest in Melbourne in 2000 saw 20,000 demonstrators successfully blockade the Asia-Pa... more The ‘s11’ protest in Melbourne in 2000 saw 20,000 demonstrators successfully blockade the Asia-Pacific Summit of the World Economic Forum and led to the cohering of the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in Australia. The 9/11 attacks, a year later to the day, halted that momentum and seemingly caused movement crisis and retreat. While some accounts, such as the Wall Street Journal's editorial ‘Adieu Seattle?’, argued the ‘global security crisis’ trumped movement claims and strategy, the experience of activists in Australia is better conceptualised as rearticulation and realignment in response to elite hegemonic practices. This article argues that 9/11 was not the cause of movement collapse in Australia, but that its consequences exacerbated internal movement weaknesses. Further, it argues that despite the return of anti-systemic movements — in the form of the Indignados and Occupy movements in particular — the global justice frame has remained weak in Australia.
Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE), Dec 2012
"In the final chapter of Capital: Volume 1, Karl Marx discusses E.G. Wakefield’s insights into th... more "In the final chapter of Capital: Volume 1, Karl Marx discusses E.G. Wakefield’s insights into the colony in the Swan River district in Western Australia and pokes fun at the ‘unhappy Mr Peel’ (1976: 933). Despite Thomas Peel’s foresight to bring ‘means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000’, along with 300 working class persons, he failed to arrange for ‘the export of English relations of production’ to the isolated district (ibid.)1. In the years that followed the colony’s establishment in 1829, it approached collapse. Unable to generate capital and extract surplus labour, by the early 1840s colonists were petitioning for the first ‘free’ colony of Australia to introduce convict transportation2. It was ultimately through the introduction of unfree labour to Swan River in 1850 that capitalist social relations were able to advance, and almost 10,000 convicts were relocated to the location by 1868, when transportation ceased. A question that emerges from the story of Swan River, and from the early years of the other Australian colonies further east, is whether a land lacking virtually any ‘doubly free’ labour should be considered part of the capitalist mode of production.
This article argues that, despite the early Australian colonies encompassing the extensive use of unfree convict labour and a virtual absence of wage-labour, the ‘English relations of production’ (definitively capitalist relations) were present from the start. That is, the colonies were, during the first few decades after 1788, part of the British capitalist mode of production. The colonies were not pre-capitalist because they were largely a gaol and penal state, as some have argued, but were capitalist because that goal served an important social purposefor British capitalism. Further, this article argues that the failure of the colonies to trade within the world market is not itself sufficient to argue that another mode of production, non-capitalist or pre-capitalist, was in place.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Jan 1, 2009
This article overviews the following three papers, which arise from the 2008 conference Other Wor... more This article overviews the following three papers, which arise from the 2008 conference Other Worlds 2: After the Neo-Con Men. The article responds to an issue raised across the papers regarding social movement knowledge and theory: what is the tension between analysis produced inside the academy and that which arises from within movements. And how can theory can be developed in a way that both takes into account the viewpoint and needs of the historical players whose activity is shaping the future (social movement actors) and the wider social forces that give rise to and shape the struggles those players are involved in. It is argued that the new movements around globalisation and global justice have reasserted 'activism' as a key component of social movement analysis, challenging academics to engage with social movements in a more direct way and to ensure their output is relevant to that audience. It is argued that the concept of the ‘organic intellectuals’, outlined by Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, has particular utility.
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Books by Elizabeth Humphrys
Book chapters by Elizabeth Humphrys
Refereed Journal articles by Elizabeth Humphrys
This article argues that, despite the early Australian colonies encompassing the extensive use of unfree convict labour and a virtual absence of wage-labour, the ‘English relations of production’ (definitively capitalist relations) were present from the start. That is, the colonies were, during the first few decades after 1788, part of the British capitalist mode of production. The colonies were not pre-capitalist because they were largely a gaol and penal state, as some have argued, but were capitalist because that goal served an important social purposefor British capitalism. Further, this article argues that the failure of the colonies to trade within the world market is not itself sufficient to argue that another mode of production, non-capitalist or pre-capitalist, was in place.
This article argues that, despite the early Australian colonies encompassing the extensive use of unfree convict labour and a virtual absence of wage-labour, the ‘English relations of production’ (definitively capitalist relations) were present from the start. That is, the colonies were, during the first few decades after 1788, part of the British capitalist mode of production. The colonies were not pre-capitalist because they were largely a gaol and penal state, as some have argued, but were capitalist because that goal served an important social purposefor British capitalism. Further, this article argues that the failure of the colonies to trade within the world market is not itself sufficient to argue that another mode of production, non-capitalist or pre-capitalist, was in place.
campaigning.
2011 was a year of unexpected protests, revolts and revolutions. Demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt toppled dictators, while thousands camped in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya as part of the Indignados movement. The Occupy Everywhere movement, which began with Adbusters’ modest call for an occupation of New York’s financial district, cascaded into places as diverse as Oslo, Islamabad, Berlin and Sydney. But suggesting that social movements are unexpected is not the same as saying they came from nowhere. To understand Occupy, we have to appreciate both what is new and what follows from previous struggles – in particular, the Global Justice Movement (GJM) of the early 2000s."
Gramsci’s conception of the ‘organic intellectual’ has relevance for these observations, as there was a correlation between three factors: (1) The more actively an activist was working to develop the widest possible movement of campaigns and groupings and the better they could illustrate how they were seeking to deal with the issues and barriers confronting the movement, (2) the more they were able to describe a far-reaching conception and map of the movement, and (3) the more clearly they were able to provide a nuanced description of the trajectory of the movement and how that fit in wider social developments. The presentation will assess these observations, and conclude with a discussion of how, in the decline of the movement after the 9/11 attacks, even the presence of these ‘organic intellectuals’ could not overcome movement weaknesses."
The thesis finds that the Accord and vanguard neoliberalism were internally-related elements of class rule, challenging the predominant view that they were distinct or competing policy frameworks. The coterminal relationship is described as simultaneously deepening corporatism and advancing neoliberalism. This provides a more compelling account of the origins of vanguard neoliberalism in Australia than presently exists in the scholarly literature. The thesis finds that the origins of vanguard neoliberalism in Australia, sit uncomfortably alongside the dominant understanding in the scholarly literature of neoliberalism’s global development. The prevailing account posits that neoliberalism’s global origins are based in a project of the New Right (exemplified in the Reagan and Thatcher governments) and chiefly coercively imposed on trade unions.
While vanguard neoliberalism in Australia did share many of the key elements attributed to it by the dominant narrative—most particularly the multi-layered disorganisation of labour and state-led restructuring of the economy to restore conditions for stable capital accumulation—the thesis establishes, by way of contrast, that a social democratic government in a consensual agreement with the labour movement was primarily responsible for its implementation. The thesis finds that destabilising the dominant narrative, through highlighting commonality and divergence across geographic locations, can further specify and enrich the conceptualisation of neoliberalism.
Demographer and social researcher Dr Liz Allen from ANU, Emma Dawson, executive director of Per Capita and Dr Elizabeth Humphrys, a political economist at UTS discuss different aspects of class and inequality in Australia today.