Households and citizenship in a restructured region: the Latrobe Valley, Australia

Abstract

While policy responses to de-industrialisation have focussed on individual access to industrial citizenship through attachment to the workplace, there has been less focus on the role of households in mediating industry shocks or in building social citizenship. The paper explores how households with peripheral attachment to industrial citizenship cope with additional challenges to their social citizenship accruing from long-term disability support, ageing and retirement funding and discrimination on the basis of age and union membership. Two processes are at work. The first is the exclusionary nature of industrial citizenship and the way in which the subject of industrial citizenship has been narrowed while in the second, the substance of industrial citizenship has been dismantled and its domain weakened as a result of industrial restructuring. These themes are explored via a study of citizenship and households in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia, a region undergoing long-term social and economic restructuring.