THE big winners from six years of Labor government were white-collar, inner-city Greens, while the big losers were blue-collar traditional ALP voters and young mums in the outer suburbs, an analysis of job trends shows.
Report author John Black - head of demographic profiling company Australian Development Strategies and a former Labor senator and national executive member - said yesterday it showed Labor had failed its much trumpeted promise to advance "working families".
Mr Black's report finds that between 2007 and 2013 Labor presided over a slump in the industries of its traditional voter support base - manufacturing, construction and transport - while increasing jobs in industries and electorates that have become Greens strongholds.
Employment in "McMansion" outer suburbs and among young mums declined at the same time as Greens voters in the inner-city "goat's cheese line" flourished in new health, education and public administration jobs.
"The people who thought they were going to be looked after in 2007 were working families in outer-suburban areas and where those suburbs transition into rural areas," Mr Black said.
"They were the people who supported Labor in the first instance in 2007 and to a lesser extent in 2010. But basically they lost jobs, in relative terms. When you look at what's happened to working families since then, they've gone backwards."
Mr Black said that, of the almost one million jobs created during the six years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, none were in the traditional Labor-supporting industries of manufacturing, construction and transport.
Instead, these industries' share of the labour market fell during Labor's administration from 24.1 per cent in November 2007 to 22.1 per cent in November 2013. During these same six years, 60 per cent of the additional 957,000 new jobs created were instead in health, education and public administration, sectors that grew from 23.7 per cent of the workforce to 26.7 per cent.
"These predominantly white-collar jobs tend to be publicly funded or regulated and show in our election profiles as equally strong Green voters," Mr Black said.
Middle-income families with four-bedroom "McMansions", and young mums aged 30-34 with two children, had fared badly.
"In 2007, the chances of (those young mums) being in the workforce was average but by the time it got to 2013 it had fallen right away, well below 50-50," he said.
An analysis of federal electorates showed the 12 seats that experienced the greatest work-participation gains - such as Grayndler in NSW and Wills in Victoria - were generally wealthy inner-city seats where the Greens vote averaged almost 16 per cent.
The 12 electorates with the worst declines in participation rates - such as Rankin in Queensland and Bruce in Victoria - were, by contrast, lower-income, outer-urban seats where the Greens vote averaged only 6.4 per cent.
"The biggest political losers from six years of Labor governments were young swinging-voter families and traditional blue-collar Labor voters," Mr Black said. "The biggest winners were well-paid, public-sector Green voters living inside the goat-cheese circle of our major cities."
A former Australian Workers Union official, Mr Black believed the Rudd and Gillard governments abandoned "self-discipline" by giving unions want they wanted, rather than what they and the labour market needed.
"Giving unions what they want doesn't necessarily help them find new members or keep existing members, even if it plays out nicely on the 24-hour news cycle," he said. "Bill Kelty and Simon Crean used to know that, as did Bob Hawke and Paul Keating."
He believed all sides of politics needed to address over-regulation of the labour market, including penalty rates, to promote job creation.
Labor employment spokesman Brendan O'Connor said that while Mr Black's data might be accurate he was "drawing a long bow" in much of his analysis.
Mr O'Connor said many of the trends identified, such as the shift from traditional blue-collar jobs to services, applied across OECD economies and were the result of factors beyond the control of national governments.
"Across the First World, manufacturing jobs, because of changes to technology, and because of the growing economies of the developed world, are falling at a much faster rate," Mr O'Connor said.
"Most OECD countries are seeing an increase in services jobs. But to suggest that ancillary workers in education or health are (all) white-collar jobs is a nonsense. You tell a cleaner or a careworker who may not be of a professional status that they are white-collar."
He said the analysis also ignored Labor's internationally acknowledged success in protecting traditional blue-collar jobs during the global financial crisis. In particular, stimulus measures protected the construction industry and anti-dumping measures assisted manufacturing.
He also took issue with Mr Black's commentary that Labor's tenure had seen the greatest participation-rate growth in Greens inner-city strongholds.
"Employment will always grow faster in urban centres - that is the reality," Mr O'Connor said. "That's why people go to big cities."
The suggestion Labor would struggle electorally because its support base in traditional industries was dying wrongly assumed Labor was incapable of winning votes among workers in new sectors, he said.
"That would be true only if you made the assumption that Labor's constituency is static and doesn't evolve," he said. "It does evolve. It's been evolving since the 1890s.
