Reworking Citizenship: Renewing Workplace Rights and Social Citizenship in Australia

ABSTRACT

As a focus of creative self-expression through work, the workplace is a key site of identity formation as well as economic reward. A new narrative of social citizenship must be sourced in workplace experience and must be capable of adaptation to discrete needs. This article considers the potential for constructing this narrative and reflects on the significant obstacles. Reconstituting meaningful social citizenship in an ‘enterprise culture’—a radically restructured and individualised economic and social system—requires adaptation to the fractious diversity of this culture. It requires a creative reassertion that workers have legitimate rights to equitable conditions of work and opportunities to participate in civic life—to influence the conditions that affect them both in the workplace and the wider community. Unions can continue to play an active and creative role in advancing these rights.