What is Working Class?

[Samson]

We quite frequently here refer to "Working Class", as a demographic, as a voting block, and as an indavidual label. However is is not well defined, and "only 1 in 3 people say they know precisely what ‘working class’ means". I think that in the olden days it was defined by your job, in that if you worked with your muscle you are working class, if you worked with your brain you are middle class and if you inherited enough money to not work you were upper class.

A study has just been released by the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS), a union-funded thinktank. They talked to a bunch of people, and came up with a definition of working class:

Working-class life today is defined by precarity, prejudice, and a lack of place and power.

• Precarity is at the core of working-class life: The lack of a solid sense of security and safety, both economically and physically.
• Prejudice: navigating social stigma. Although many forms of prejudice are experienced by people of all classes, racism, xenophobia and sexism are most keenly felt by working-class people, who have less social power and fewer means to avoid or respond to it.
• Lack of Place: neglected and fractured communities. Being working class is related to a loss of place; it is seeing a breakdown of communities from gentrification to the closing down of youth and community centres.
• Lack of Power and voice: Most crucially and often forgotten; to be working class is about where one stands in relation to power.

This is the scoring they actually used, I am not sure how it really relates to the above:



This is interesting, I have always thought of myself as solidly middle class, but from their definition I may well be working class.

Another point that I think is interesting in the report is that the definition of working class seems more to be in opposition to "lower class", which seems to mean not on benefits and/or work for a living:

We frequently heard spontaneous references to the “lower class,” a fourth class category that we, the researchers, had not considered. “I am not lower class,” was said by multiple interviewees in an attempt to distinguish between those perceived to be ‘lower down’ on the ladder, characterised by unemployment and benefits. “I think lower class to me would be someone who is unemployed, someone that may be ridiculously struggling...But when I think lower class, I’d assume they were on benefits”[26, woman, mixed race [Black Caribbean), part-time cook]. Another participant said, “I definitely think socially they [people on benefits] would be ranked a little bit lower. Because you hear about those that deliberately take advantage of the system as well. It depends on you and your personality. Would you be doing what you can to try to find employment, or would you just become reliant on the benefits and try to just live a lazy life? Working hard, doing everything one can to improves one’s circumstances is what distinguishes a working class person from lower class” [39, woman, Bangladeshi, part-time support worker].​

Also the attitudes are more that racism is a contributory problem rather than the image presented of a white racist working class, but the dominant perception is that the system is rigged against the working class, almost to a definitional level

Our survey also found that approximately 7 in 10 working class people believe that working-class struggles are due to the system being rigged against them rather than a lack of effort or initiative. The same proportion believe that wealthy people are wealthy because they are given more opportunities and not because they worked harder or are more talented. This supports previous findings that most British people think the economy is stacked in favour of the wealthy.​

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Spoiler Tables of respondants, and why they are working class :

 

[Arwon]

This seems like a very British question

 

[Gorbles]

It's interesting (in a good way, kinda of) that they stratify wage so highly on the bottom-end. Though this is complicated because most benefit programmes don't extend beyond £22k or so last I checked, so there's a big pit between that and the average wage - which is I think around £30k now? Where you don't really have enough to get by (even before the massive increases to cost of living in the past year in the UK) but you don't qualify for anything either. I was in that band for a good 6 to 8 years after university (which in terms of class places me squarely middle-class, and by occupation too, but on the other two? 3 points each).

We've discussed this before here, and I think the consensus was that "working class" is a difficult definition to make sense of in an age where even administrative jobs can give no real pay and advancement in society. The "working poor" is a phrase I do remember, but I don't know the etymology (if it has any).

So while "working class" works in terms of political optics in defining voter share, it's probably lagging behind the real-world impact of modern capitalism on the workforce (something the Tories are very fond of, uh, expanding shall we say). And this is where it stops being a uniquely British question, because we see this pattern replicating across the broad. The value of labour increases, but the reward for that labour isn't seen by the labourer (whether blue collar, or increasingly, even white collar work).

It also ties in - as you quoted - with societal assumptions of benefits (and the basically fabricated optics of abuse of them - real abuse is an insignificant minority of the entire social care program and spending).

EDIT

Something else that's kinda missing on paying emergency bills - debt. For example, I wouldn't personally actually be able to pay that kind of bill normally (I have a small amount saved up at this second that I would, but normally / for the past decade / maybe next year I wouldn't have that. It's meant to go towards something else, basically, and I only came into it recently). We'd just shove it on the credit card, and deal with it in increments over the next few months (we always pay off the credit so we don't get saddled with interest, but it means tightening our belts elsewhere if we have to eat an unexpected expense).

I wouldn't / couldn't borrow from friends or family. Very few, if any, close friends have that kind of money on-hand, and family is a Whole Other Topic that I really wouldn't expand on in an online context (and in terms of actual cash they probably don't have it spare either).

So when people wouldn't be able to pay this, there are two resulting scenarios. One is that they don't, and whatever (usually exorbitant) punishment is dealt out is suffered by them. The other is they whack it on some form of credit (predatory or not). And both are bad in different ways.

 

[Kyriakos]

I'd put precarity at the top too. If you are 1-2 paydays away from having no money, you are working class.
Although there is still a distinction (and not just due to social stigma, also physical and mental health) between blue and white collar working class. Even if I was able to make more working (say) at construction or some store-room (8 hour job), my health would rapidly deteriorate so it wouldn't be worth it even in the short term.
At least seminar creating isn't physically painful...

 

[Samson]

the average wage - which is I think around £30k now

I think the median wage is £25,296, and the median household income is £31,400.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Hm. Class, mixing of them... I had some thrown in my face during my theatre years. The very first show I worked on was a musical called "Kiss Me, Kate." I was one-half of the props crew, and my job during the show was to climb up into the rafters of the theatre, drop down into the lighting booth above the stage, and wait until the final scene of the first act to do the actions that were supposed to cap off Act I with a cheesy joke that never failed to make the audience laugh.

It's dusty up there and you have to climb a long ladder and walk along a narrow walkway to get to the lighting booth. So it isn't a place to wear your best outfits, and certainly not a dress or skirt. I lived in a workshirt and jeans during that show, since I was always crawling around up there and elsewhere in the theatre, moving stuff around.

On opening night, following the show, there was a wine and cheese party for the patrons. My crew head looked disapprovingly at me and said I should have worn a dress... um, hello, I'd just spent 3 hours in the rafters of the building. No, I was not wearing a dress, nor was taking one along an option because there was literally nowhere to change (the dressing rooms being occupied by the cast). In fact, I didn't even own a suitable dress for that occasion.

My crew head was the wife of a highly-paid local doctor, so she was unable to wrap her mind around the fact that I could actually dare to show up at this party in the same clothes I'd worn all evening. How dare I appear in front of the patrons - the people who made donations to the theatre company every year - in a shirt and jeans?

Well, the joke was on her. It turned out that one of the patrons was another doctor... one I knew quite well, as he was one of my dad's customers (my dad had his own auto repair business out on the acreage). So I went up to him, we both said hi, and started chatting away. He didn't care what I was wearing. He just wanted to gossip a bit about my dad and grandfather.

My crew head looked over with a surprised expression, as it had never crossed her mind that I could possibly know anyone in an income bracket several times higher than my grandparents'.

All those years in the theatre cured me of any notion that I wouldn't be "good enough" to mix with the "upper class". Considering that most people in town had no idea that the former mayor got tipsy while wearing a bed sheet at a production party (the idea was that it was a toga party) but I did... and carefully stored it away for a time that I might find it useful to remind him or his equally snooty wife, things worked out (I was the only person at that party not in a bed sheet, or drinking). Without that memory, I wouldn't have had the nerve to tell him off at an election forum several years later, after he said some monumentally condescending things about people who used public transit (apparently it was news to him that public transit users vote).

 

[bobbobbybobbob]

The working class parties of the West have been taken over by gender politics. It's kinda like the nutjobs taking over the nuthouse and you see the results. Who in the right mind works in the docks or some other horsehockey job and thinks about some middle/upper class "struggle" with their gender? Not happening. This gender noise is for people who have no real problem. Soon enough they will see sense when real problem shows up the door. Screech all you want. Time will prove me correct.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The working class parties of the West have been taken over by gender politics. It's kinda like the nutjobs taking over the nuthouse and you see the results. Who in the right mind works in the docks or some other ****** job and thinks about some middle/upper class "struggle" with their gender? Not happening. This gender noise is for people who have no real problem. Soon enough they will see sense when real problem shows up the door. Screech all you want. Time will prove me correct.

Which parties?

People who struggle with gender don't just come from one "class." Biology and psychology don't actually care how much money you make or where you work, if there's a problem. There are a couple of enlightening threads in OT that would make an educational read.

 

[schlaufuchs]

lmao, trans people are largely very very poor my dude.

Anyway, to me the working class is precisely as Marx defined it. It is someone who is free in the double sense: free to sell their labor to whomever they choose, but also free from any means to draw an income save the selling of their body to another in the form of commodified labor-time.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Working class. I guess it's those who live, work, pay bills, but just. They cannot escape this loop. They have to work? Not necessarily a emergency from destitution.. But unable to save and build a platform.