Helen Masterman-Smith

GREEN COLLARING A CAPITAL CRISIS

The global economic crisis has delivered a boost to ‘green collar’ employment in wealthy nations through sizeable injections of public stimulus funds. It is therefore timely to question what this means for relations between labour, capital and the ecosystem. This article offers a critical analysis of political economic and policy aspects of the green jobs growth anticipated to flow from the global financial crisis. While critics of the growth imperative of capitalist political economies are skeptical of market-based approaches to averting destructive climate change and the associated social and ecological costs, governments, industry and organised labour are confident that this is the appropriate course of action to the current economic and climate crises. However, snapshots of labour conditions at the lower end of the green economy suggest that social justice notions of green jobs and the possibilities of a just transition are likely to be elusive aims in capitalist societies.

Bradstow revisited' : a comparative study of class politics in Bowral, 1974 and 1997

This study revisits the Southern Highlands community of Bowral (NSW), the subject of Ronald Wilds political examination in the late 1960s. The paper commences with an assessment of changes in the local political economy, comparing contemporary socio-economic indicators and electoral data with Wilds findings. Little change is revealed in the patterns of social stratification or conservative political dominance between the two periods.