You and your day

A regular client cuts back from every six weeks to every eight. An apprentice you spent two years training leaves the trade. A stylist tells you a client said something inappropriate and asks if she has to keep cutting their hair. A queer barber mentions that a regular customer has stopped booking with him since the last federal election and started seeing the older guy two doors down. An older customer mentions she has stopped getting her hair done because it is not in the budget anymore.

The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt drew a distinction between work, labour, and action that still helps with hairdressing. The cleaning, the sweeping, and the running of the till are labour, the kind of work that has to be done again tomorrow. The cuts, the colours, the building of a clientele, the slow craft of becoming good at the work are work in a different sense, the making of something that lasts. Action is something else again: the way a salon hosts the politics of its time, the politics of women’s bodies, queer bodies, migrant skill, and intimate service, whether anyone in the salon names it that way or not.

Reading the politics is not separate from running the salon. It is part of the work itself. It is also part of how stylists and barbers, employed or self-employed, decide whose chair they sit in and whose chair they leave.

Your community and clients

Hairdressing happens at close range with people you see often enough to know about their illness, their divorce, their financial pressure, and their grief. Salons and barbershops are among the few remaining places in modern life where intimate, in-person, repeated contact still happens with strangers who become familiar. That makes them barometers of community wellbeing. It also makes them politically significant in ways most clients and most workers do not consciously register.

What gets discussed in a women’s salon is rarely what gets discussed in a traditional barbershop, even on the same street. What gets discussed in a queer-run salon, a migrant-owned salon, or an Afro hair specialist’s chair is different again. The politics of a community travels through these places along different routes. A trans woman finding a stylist who knows what to do with her hair is a political fact. A young Sudanese-Australian client finding someone who has trained on her hair is a political fact. A male client in an upmarket women’s salon being treated like an oddity, while the same man in a barbershop is treated like the customer, is also a political fact, and a slightly funny one.

When a client cuts back from every six weeks to every eight, that is not a private decision. It is a small political signal. Multiplied across a community, it tells you about household budgets, about cost of living politics, and about which people are absorbing economic pressure first. Single mothers, casualised workers, recently arrived migrants, and pensioners cut back first. The salon notices.

Your Council and neighbourhood

Footpath trading, signage, parking, hours of operation, waste disposal, lighting on the way to the train station, the political composition of the local trader association. Each is a Council decision, shaped by who sits on the local board, what the strip’s traders are pushing for, and what the surrounding residents want. The political composition of inner-Melbourne Councils has been shifting steadily, and the shifts change what is possible outside your front door.

Whose strip is it? Whose hairdressing is welcomed there and whose is left to find a quieter side street? Local politics rarely makes the news, but it shapes the day more than most national debates do. A queer-friendly strip is a political achievement. A multicultural strip is a political achievement. A strip that pushes out small operators in favour of chain stores is also a political achievement, of a different kind.

Your state

State politics has been one of the more active layers shaping hairdressing in recent years. Workers’ rights, gender equality, child safety, anti-discrimination protection, vocational education funding, and apprenticeship arrangements all sit at the state level in Australia. Victoria in particular has been politically active on workers’ protection and gender equality, and the appetite for stronger protections for service workers has been growing. The state-level politics is the largest layer most small business owners and self-employed stylists notice directly.

This is also where the long debate about whether hairdressing is recognised as a skilled trade plays out. Apprenticeship funding, qualifications, and the prestige of the trade are all decided at state level, and they are all political. The salon owner who finds it harder to get apprentices each year is feeling the consequences of decisions made in places they have probably never visited. The trans woman applying for an apprenticeship, the migrant hairdresser whose overseas qualification does not transfer, and the Afro hair specialist whose training is not formally recognised at all are all caught in different parts of the same political settlement.

State-level discrimination protection also shapes who can work where without being legally exposed. The political position of the state government on LGBTQI+ rights, on race discrimination, and on religious freedom changes who is protected and how. Stylists and barbers who hold multiple identities are usually first to feel the change.

The nation

National politics on cost of living, wages, migration, and women’s economic security all reach the salon directly. The federal political conversation about workplace harassment that opened up with the Respect@Work inquiry has not closed, and it has shifted what is expected of every workplace, including the smallest. The same is true of the conversation about pregnant workers, chemical exposure, parental leave, and the recognition of family violence as a workplace issue.

National conversations about migration politics, racial politics, and queer rights all reach the salon. Sometimes through workforce shifts. Sometimes through clientele shifts. Sometimes through the way a regular client, after watching a particular news cycle, starts treating their stylist differently. The political mood of the country is felt at the chair faster than at the ballot box.

The region

Hairdressing across the Asia-Pacific is shaped by very different political settlements on women’s work, queer rights, migration, and informal labour. Aotearoa New Zealand’s framework for personal services workers offers a useful comparison; in some respects it has been more politically integrated with feminist labour movements than the Australian frame. New Zealand has also been more politically active on trans inclusion in service industries.

Pacific Island migration into Australian beauty and personal services raises political questions about who is recognised as skilled and who is not, and about whose hair is centred in the training programs and product ranges sold to Australian salons. The same is true of South-East Asian and South Asian migration. Many of the people doing essential hair work in Australian cities arrived through migration pathways that did not formally recognise their skills, and now work below their qualifications.

Regional politics also shapes supply chains. Most of what stocks an Australian salon comes through Asia at some point, often via political conditions that few salon owners are paying attention to. Tariff politics, manufacturing politics, and the politics of women’s labour in product manufacturing in countries Australia trades with all reach the salon, slowly and indirectly, through pricing.

The world

The global politics shaping hairdressing connects to a long history of feminist political thought, of debates about the politics of personal services, and of the rise of beauty as a globalised industry. The shift from earlier waves of feminism, which often spoke as if “woman” was a single category, to current feminist thought that recognises that being a woman intersects with being Black, being queer, being trans, being disabled, being migrant, being poor, has changed what beauty politics means. It has also changed what hairdressing politics means.

Hair is one of the most politically loaded materials a person carries on their body. The Black hair movements in the United States and elsewhere, the politics of hijab and other religious head coverings, the long history of Indigenous hair as a site of cultural identity and colonial control, and the contemporary politics of trans hair are all global conversations that reach Australian salons. So is the cultural debate about who is qualified to cut whose hair, what constitutes appropriation, and what constitutes specialisation. These are political questions, and they are getting louder.

There is also the question of what happens to feminised personal services in an age of automation. AI cannot cut hair, and probably will not learn to. That makes hairdressing one of the surprising winners of the automation politics of the coming decade. Work that requires human skill, judgement, and relationship is harder to automate than the labour of pure repetition.

The political backlash against feminism, queer rights, and racial equality, present globally now, is also reaching hairdressing. Industries built around bodies the backlash targets are politically exposed. Salons run by trans women, queer-affirming barbershops, multicultural hair specialists, and Afro hair operators feel that exposure first. The next decade of global identity politics will shape what hairdressing in Australia can be.