Yeah Yeah It's a huge it is actually a huge shift.

J: Yes. Like Jenna gets to buy a car. It sounds small, but it's a really big deal.

The power analysis being made by the union officials is about purchasing power and the effects of poverty in limiting choices, experiences and overall quality of life. As Emma said, the workers in question would go from being “a sort of underclass” to “proper working class” because they would no longer be struggling to pay bills or having to work multiple jobs to meet their living expenses. So we see here that wages growth is viewed as positive in the context of relative poverty, and that wage growth for the sector is regarded as redressing economic inequality through redistribution.

Participants from the union also discussed the effects of what James called political power (as distinct from economic power which was mostly defined as

purchasing power), built democratically from the workplace, on economics and redistribution. They mentioned a number of results of this including distribution via government of more public funds to the community sector, and the capacity to make demands of government. Emma stated:

So, the reality is for us that we will never achieve significant improvements in our members income unless we can force political pressure to be applied in a way that causes government to deliver additional funds to the employers.

James also said:

it is that political power that does profoundly shape the economy and the political power our members have just exercised means that $8 billion that wouldn’t have gone into this part of the economy is going into it.

In arguing that distribution of more government funds to the community sector was due to political power, they also claimed greater capacity to make demands on the way government valued certain issues and vulnerable populations. Mia, arguing that community services are essential services said:

It's a responsibility of our community and our government is the mechanism by which we exercise our responsibilities, technically… funded by our governments, yeah, no question… I'm happy to blue about what is and isn't an essential service... However, you win some, you lose some and an essential service is an essential service and homelessness and domestic violence services and disability support services... Broadly speaking, the services provided by our sector and our membership are essential services.

This notion of political power exercised in economic decisions also fed into what the leader of the NSW ASU called a ‘proper mix’, that is, a mix of public and community or not-for-profit delivery of community services. Both Emma and James posited government funding of community services, whilst maintaining community control, as the preferred mode of delivery. Emma stated:

I do think that there is a value in community-managed organisations that are reflective of their community and responsive to their community and run by their

community. I think that that's not a model that I'd say is private sector, because it's not it's community run; so, yes, the solution would be a proper mix of public sector. I do think a lot of jobs should still be done in the public sector, a proper mix of public sector and community sector organisations which are community based and community run.

This was in contrast to the way that Emma discussed wealth distribution and the funding of those services, where she was quite clear that government funding needed to be through taxation of the private sector. When asked for her views on what measures could make for fairer economies, she responded:

Tax the rich more-- basically. I mean, the - you know, better wealth distribution, especially given that in Australia… some people are doing very, very, very well, and that some people aren't, so there could be a much, much better distribution of wealth, and that would be the best thing that could happen.

Further to that, her view of how the trade union movement contributed to making fairer economies was explained thus:

the way that we redistribute wealth is either via the amount of profits that happen, so we are always after, you know, workers' share of those profits --if we're in the private sector. So in our private sector membership we are redistributing, but redistributing money that would have gone off to shareholders, into workers' hands.

In the community sector, although the relationship is less direct, Emma proposes that it is still a question of workers gaining a more reasonable share of taxation or government funds in the form of wages.

And in the case of the community sector or the public sector it's, you know, it's not quite the same, but it is the same really. It's about ensuring that, you know, still having the people that are actually, you know, doing the work that makes society work, getting you know, money for it.

While there is a notion of surplus from the private sector, this notion does not apply in the same way to the community sector because of the low funding and social, rather than monetary, outputs. As Janita puts it, when discussing why the ASU resisted the push from Government to pursue the productivity dividend of one per cent savings per year:

We would say "Well, where are we going to find one per cent in savings", you know, "We're not exactly stocked up on paper clips" like, we know that 80 per cent of funding received is spent on wages, and our wages are rubbish, like… You know, it's not overheads - there are hardly any overheads associated with SACS work.

While there may well be surpluses in the community sector of the non-monetary kind, and while the community sector is a distributor of surplus, there is little discussion of this when I ask about economy and the case in my interviews, because in the financial sense, the focus in campaigning has been on what is lacking, that is, cash. Mia discusses the intangibles of the work briefly, however the focus is on the lack of surplus, the politics is a politics of political demands and struggles over resources.

While the economic activities of the ASU’s equal pay campaign and the sector it represents are diverse, their economic language is narrow. For example, Emma, then NSW leader of the Australian Services Union (ASU), stated on the one hand that “I'm feminist and socialist and believe in economic equality and class struggle”

yet on the other hand, said of the equal pay case and campaign: “In terms of what that means… I guess, is a fairly - a dispersed thing. You know, a whole lot of women earning more, and I suppose, in the end, 150,000 people isn't going to make a massive impact on an economy.” This annexation of economy away from politics and society into the realm of the ‘real’ leads me to the view that a politics of diversity that recaptures economy as political (and therefore subject to change) is essential for successful left movements (Gibson-Graham 1999, 2006: 54). The diverse economies theorisation and community economies framing aims to challenge the naturalisation and hegemony of capitalism (Gibson-Graham 2006: 54).

It is also frequently capitalocentric. Indeed, while the campaign and members were very focused on what would allow them and their communities to survive well, from Jenna’s new car to more services from people experiencing homelessness, this was not typically conceptualised as economic. This highlights the need for a diverse language and understanding of economy and economic wellbeing.