6 - Classy Work

Summary

Labour movements deployed well-known strategies for collective action, but how did the professional class collectivise their interests? The mechanisms by which the professionals achieved and maintained their status in the mid-twentieth century are laid bare by records of an institution unique to Australasia: formal conciliation and arbitration courts. This chapter focuses on a particular event, the Professional Engineers Case, which was brought before the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission between 1957 and 1961. This case shows professionals articulating their class status to argue, in arbitration, for the value of their work to the nation’s collective economic and moral good. This good was linked, for the judges who elevated their salaries, to the individual professional’s investment in education but also to the prospective worth of their virtuous work to the nation. The risk to the nation if unvirtuous people performed professional work was too high to let them fall behind in material terms. To belong to the professional class, it was not enough to be qualified – they also had to perform class in their standard of living. Assuring consumption standards, then, was also a way to assure quality work – and the rationale that enabled the professional class to monetize their virtue.