The Powers of Australian Retail Workers as a Section of the Global Working Class
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The wide application of the power resources approach has shown its strong capabilities in enabling strategic labour research that can also benefit activists. Nevertheless, the approach has been criticised for ignoring how power is used. This article argues that Steven Lukes’s radical view on power can address this issue. His three-dimensional view considers power in direct conflicts, agenda setting, and the situations in which an actor’s preferences are shaped by another. A key strength of this view is that it can be used to unravel systemic effects and underlying sources of conflicts. In this article, the Lukesian framework is applied to the condition of Australian retail workers as an example of the precariat. It is argued that retail workers have underestimated powers in direct confrontations with employers, and that the legal and institutional frameworks provide them with some support. The analysis indicates that capital’s efforts to form preferences, theoretical foundations and ways of thinking have contributed to substantially pre-empting retail workers’ agency. However, it also shows that there is nothing inevitable about this situation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".