'The skilful unskilled labourer': The Decline of Artisanal Discourses of Skill in the NSW Arbitration Court, 1905-15

Grease monkeys: A history of Australia's motor mechanic trade, 1900–1970

“…This thesis begins by exploring skill as a historical concept, drawing on the work of Ben Maddison, who himself adopts the theories of Antonio Gramsci. Maddison (1995, 2007) suggests the old understanding of ‘artisanal skill’ was characteristically mysterious, unknowable to outsiders but instinctual to – and thus controlled by – craftsmen. Industrialisation undermined this ‘mystery’, removing the control of knowledge from workers, and replacing them with structured institutions.…”

“De‐skilling” the 1891 Censuses in New South Wales and Tasmania

“…Thus, when influential arbitration court judges such as Heydon and Higgins began in the early twentieth century to assess what employers and employees said about the skill components of occupations, they did so in a context where an earlier artisanal discourse about skill as an instinctive biological disposition was rapidly giving way to the rational categories of scientific occupational analysis deployed in the 1891 Censuses. 59 In effecting that break the statisticians were expressing a profound skepticism about the appeal to the non-rational that lay at the heart of the artisanal view of skill, and it was precisely this skepticism that was given room to grow and to have real effects on occupational classification and wage rates in the first several decades of arbitration. Generations of white male workers between 1920 and 1970 in Australia claimed and frequently won wage rates that reflected their varying "degrees of skill".…”