Class and moral obligations

Given that the perception of deservingness has been appropriated by the blue-collar classes in order to gain sympathy from the white collar classes, and that the notion of disadvantage has been extended from the physically disabled to the informational and/or technologically illiterate, the distribution of advantage in the form of work-related opportunity in a knowledge-driven economy is becoming increasingly difficult to equalise in practice. Ageism, however, is still, perhaps, the most entrenched category of discrimination and concomitant exclusion from the distribution of work-related financial advantage. 

The old-age pension was premised on the notion of full employment something demonstrably beyond the reach of even working nations, and this inconsistency is not encompassed in the rhetoric about rights, equity and/or participation. This suggests that ideas about deservingness were closely related to the younger person’s labour market performance. The expectation was that younger people in work would be paid enough to provide for their own old age and that they would not be excluded from paid work for long periods.

The unwillingness to spread the benefits of paid work across a broader age range raises the notion of class, which, in nineteenth-century Australia, was closely aligned to income or the lack of it. In nineteenth-century Britain, the main determinants of greater eligibility (or class) were pedigree, property ownership and associated income, while in nineteenth-century Australia, where pedigree was uncertain, and property ownership beyond the reach of many. The appearance of respectability became the commonly used determinant of eligibility, and eligibility translated to class. Even so, the ones who set the criteria were the pedigreed owners of property, or their representatives, and the men they accorded most respect to, were the men who did not need looking after, that is, the financially independent and/or the entrepreneurial. 

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a revolution in computing and communications technology, which, by the 1990s had swept the world and challenged Australian definitions of poverty, productivity, growth, deservingness, respectability and class. The illusion of respectability gave way to the promotion by governments of voluntary participation, mutual obligation, multicultural diversity, reconciliation of differences between black and white Australians and efforts to combat social fragmentation between haves and have-nots through programs of community-values education. Almost all of these objectives had also been elements of nineteenth-century campaigns in Ballarat for self-improvement among the workless and the younger members of the community. 

During the nineteenth century in Ballarat, the most widely recognised human improvements were assessed in terms of skill, industriousness, trustworthiness, good manners, education, and the ability to support oneself as well as a wife and family. Individual initiative and Christian traditions thus formed the basis of Ballarat’s collective norms and the results have come to comprise the contemporary concept of social capital; a concept that gained currency during the 1990s, and which is often implied to be a pre-requisite to the development of social cohesion. 

The concept of social cohesion, however, not only relies on large deposits of social capital, but the conservation of social capital by way of voluntarism. This suggests that both are fundamentally reliant on the unpaid efforts of otherwise workless women. The impoverished individual cannot view ready access to public services, utilities, gardens, galleries and libraries, as assets he or she can structure or restructure at will to improve his/her own financial position. Such assets are effectively owned and managed by the state and while they improve the quality of life for all citizens, they are no substitute for paid work and independence, or even interdependence, among the educated and/or improved.

Deservingness now rates before class when it comes to the monopolisation of advantage, and this suggests a need to re-appraise perceptions of deservingness as they act to re-shape social priorities and accordingly, to re-shuffle professional opportunities.