Class has always mattered, and now social democratic parties that sprung from a working class — including the Australian Labor Party – are finding out why.
Over many years, and in many countries, a growing view among political actors and within political science was that class was losing its punch. The line was something like this. The working class once voted for labour parties. The middle class voted conservative. But over many years) that difference between how the classes voted got smaller and smaller. In some places it disappeared.
The “decline of class” narrative suited the leaders of labour and social democratic parties.
They could safely adopt market-based neoliberal policies, with a human touch added, in the knowledge their base wouldn’t desert them. But their base was changing. It was becoming more middle class, more individualistic, more awake to the benefits of market solutions to complex problems.
Now, those politicians are shocked by the rise of far-right political parties that now claim to represent the working class. In Australia, One Nation is close to matching Labor — in some polls, it is already ahead.
In the United Kingdom, Reform is leading in all the polls, while the governing Labour party is below 20%. In Germany, the neo-nazi AfD is presently leading in all opinion polls, while the Social Democrats are below 14%.
In the United States, the Republican Party has gone full Trump, on an agenda with aspects that look eerily reminiscent of prewar Germany. In France, the National Rally candidate is ahead in all opinion polls for the next presidential election.
‘Blue collar’ is not the same as ‘working class’
In many countries, the labour and social democratic parties are mere shadows of their former selves.
Perhaps the labour parties mistook the decline in “blue-collar” (manual) jobs for the decline of the working class. In Australia, the blue-collar share of jobs fell from 44% in 1979 to 28% in 2025. It’s fallen in the UK, the US and elsewhere.
Union membership, once a mostly “blue-collar” phenomenon, declined in most industrialised countries. It fell from an average of 30% of employees across the OECD in 1985 to 19% in 2005 and 15% in 2023. The fall was even greater in Australia.
But these changes did not reflect how likely people were to identify as working class.
In Australia, national attitude and election surveys give us a good idea of trends in people’s views. Between 1979 and 2007, the proportion of respondents in a standard national survey defining themselves as working class or lower class temporarily grew from 40%, to the low 50s in the 1980s and ‘90s, then back to 44% by 2007. In 2025, after a bit more movement, it was still 44% working class.
Australian Election Study and Australian Bureau of Statistics, CC BY
A British survey in 1983 found 58% of people claimed to be working class. By 2005, those identifying as working class had barely fallen to 57%. In 2023, still 53% of people identified as working class.
In the US, where the phrase “working class” appeared absent from public discourse for decades until Trump, a differently worded question showed that in 1976, 51% of Americans thought of themselves as either working class or lower class. In 2006, the same survey showed 52% identifying as either working class or lower class. Within this period, numbers had fluctuated from year to year — but always between 48% and 55% expressed working or lower class identity.
A Gallup poll added “upper-middle class” to the options, and the proportion claiming working or lower class status was only 39% in 2006. In 2024, that number was 43%.
In Canada, the proportion identifying as working or lower class was 36% in 1980 and still 36% in 1995. In 2017, a different poll found 37% identified as working class.
In short, while “blue-collar” jobs have sharply declined almost everywhere, the experience of “working class” has been relatively stable, within some fluctuating bounds. Differences in class identity between countries seem more notable than differences over time, perhaps due to how questions are asked or how different cultures interpret them.
This is not to say that giving a “working class” response to a forced-choice survey question is the same as a deeply thought position on class. But if people no longer thought of themselves as working class, you would expect to see some pretty big changes over time in answers to these questions.
How the working class was left behind
Sure, jobs changed, a lot. But there has never been much middle-class glamour in the “white collar” jobs at the checkout counter, behind the hamburger hotplate or in the call-centre factory.
Class relations didn’t weaken. In fact, inequality worsened in many countries. Neoliberal policies, including those adopted by social democratic parties, made the rich much richer, but they slowed the growth in the wellbeing of the majority of people, and left the working class behind.
The proportion that thought big business had too much power, and income and wealth should be redistributed, became larger.
Unions lost ground not because their ideas became unpopular with workers. It simply became much harder for unions to recruit and retain members in the face of increasingly hostile employers, governments and laws.
Working class voters didn’t have solutions to hand. But nor were they offered any by social democratic parties that barely spoke their language. Now the door has been opened to far-right parties, presenting alternatives that appeal to some facing those class problems.
There’s life in class voting yet, just not in the way we thought of it.
