Over the past two decades, labor historians in America and Australia have deployed a range of new analytic tools to challenge older, essentialist interpretations of working-class politics in each country (rendering them anomalous compared to their European forebears) and better evaluate workers’ thoughts and actions on their “own terms.” This chapter continues this process of revision. It compares workers’ responses to major pieces of welfare reform in each country during the Depression era, not to assess them as agents of social change but for insight into their self-understanding as political subjects. Specifically, reactions to the contributory principle that underpinned both the Social Security Act in the United States and the National Insurance Act in Australia highlights the ways in which workers’ negotiation of institutional change might affirm or alter political self-understandings. American workers’ acceptance of the contributory principle accompanied the construction of a newfound “self-governance” and “consumer citizenship” among white, working men, whereas Australian workers’ hostility to the principle was couched in a pre-existing sense of “independence” and “self-reliance” undergirded by existing social and wage policies. A comparative approach thus stresses the historicity and contingency of working-class subjectivities even in two countries much alike for their “liberal hegemony” and helps open up the possibility of rethinking institutional forms and their relations with constituting new subjectivities in late-capitalist societies.
