Social Class in Europe

New Inequalities in the Old World

Étienne Penissat, Cedric Hugree, Alexis Spire, Cédric Hugrée

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788736282
• eBook ISBN: 9781788736299
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the last ten years - especially with the 'no' votes in the French and Dutch referendums in 2010, and the victory for Brexit in 2016 - the issue of Europe has been placed at the centre of major political conflicts. Each of these crises has revealed profound splits in society, which are represented in terms of an opposition between those countries on the losing and those on the winning sides of globalisation. Inequalities beyond those between nations are critically absent from the debate.

Based on major European statistical surveys, the new research in this work presents a map of social classes inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. It reveals the common features of the working class, the intermediate class and the privileged class in Europe. National features combine with social inequalities, through an account of the social distance between specific groups in nations in the North and in the countries of the South and East of Europe. The book ends with a reflection on the conditions that would be required for the emergence of a Europe-wide social movement.

1

The Weakened Working Class

Since 2008, the eruption of the Greek debt and the crisis in public finance have exposed the marked disparities in economic development between different European countries. Despite the constantly reiterated promises that social policy would be standardised, the most disadvantaged groups in some countries have been hit much harder by the crisis than in others. During the 1990s, the received wisdom was that the social and economic structures of the countries comprising the European Union at that time would inevitably converge. Many sociologists have prophesied the inexorable disappearance of the working-class world, and its replacement by a large middle class. Thirty years later, social structure is far from uniform across European countries, and the working class has not disappeared.

However, the term ‘working class’ is singularly absent from most public debate about Europe. The European Commission prefers the terms ‘poor’ – those who earn less than 60 per cent of median wage¹ – or ‘excluded’ – all those who lack the means to meet their needs. In technocratic discourse, Europe is summed up as an opposition between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, with unemployment the main differentiating criterion used to measure inequality. By thus homogenising the ‘bottom’ of society, this approach conceals the relations of power and the social processes that are at the root of these subaltern positions. This binary perspective, dividing people into winners and losers under the new rules of the labour market, suggests that inequality can be reduced to differences between individual life paths. The concept of the working class helps to break with this representation of the world in terms of singular viewpoints and mobilities, for it reminds us that subaltern positions are inherited and reproduced.

In this chapter, we seek to highlight those factors that, beyond national citizenship, unite socio-economic groups as disparate as cleaners, manual workers, retail saleswomen, small tradespeople and farmers in order to shed light on the relations of power that operate throughout the continent. Identifying the common characteristics of the European working class is also a way of evaluating the effects the economic crisis has had on these social groups, by revealing their particular vulnerability, and emphasising the obstacles to trade union and political activism among these groups throughout Europe.

PORTRAIT OF A SOCIAL GROUP IN COMPETITION THROUGHOUT EUROPE

In recent years, every effort has been made to bring the working classes of the different European countries into conflict with one another, exacerbating the competition arising from the globalisation of trade. Indeed, it is primarily the sectors employing large numbers of manual workers that have been displaced from the centre to the periphery or even beyond the margins of the continent. Chains of outsourcing also developed considerably during the 1990s, and have been strengthened in the East since the 2000s: more than 4.5 million employees in Europe work in an industrial enterprise whose activity is subcontracted by a company in another European country.² These movements have major consequences for the social situation within a number of companies that are particularly at risk, where job blackmail has become common currency: adjustments of working hours, wage cuts, productivity pushes and everything else become negotiable, even in the German automotive sector where the trade unions are still strong. Aside from these relocations, the fall in industrial employment in Western Europe is also due to a shift in the division of labour at the European level, mainly between the former Eastern countries and those of the North and West. This increasing specialisation of work between countries alters the shape and composition of social classes in Europe.

The dream of a Europe without proletarians

According to the accepted doctrine currently operative in Brussels, the tertiarisation of the European economy is synonymous with an unstoppable march towards a Europe of the knowledge economy that will become the domain of managers and highly skilled professionals. Manual professions and unskilled jobs would be destined to disappear, through the development of robots and digital technologies that would replace workers carrying out unskilled tasks. In reality, nothing is less certain. Undoubtedly, since the 1970s, industry has been declining in importance in Europe, being replaced by new activities in retail, services, banking, etc. The tertiary sector (services and retail) is now the biggest employer, representing seven out of every ten jobs. This development has by no means led to the disappearance or even the minimisation of the working class in Europe. But the tertiarisation process has also changed low-skilled jobs. In fact, unskilled occupations and jobs have increased markedly at the same time, because these new services also require a workforce that can take on tasks where skill is less recognised. Moreover, the increase in women’s levels of employment, and the ageing of the population in the North and West, create new needs in relation to childcare, care for the elderly and domestic tasks. Thus the number of domestic cleaners, childcare workers, home-care assistants, shopworkers, cashiers, sales assistants and nursing assistants (all jobs occupied predominantly by women) is increasing sharply all over Europe.³ This has led some to conclude that a polarisation of European social structures is under way: on the one hand, highly skilled, well-paid employees and, on the other poorly skilled, low-paid precarious workers.⁴

But this polarisation is also related to patterns of specialisation and division of labour linked to globalisation. In the countries of the South of Europe and in Germany, the growth in unskilled occupations sits alongside a high number of skilled administrative workers. In most of the former countries of the East, the proportion of unskilled workers remains limited, while skilled manual workers still predominate. In Scandinavia, social-democratic governments have limited the decline in skilled work:⁵ Finland and Denmark, for example, have seen a sharp rise in the number of skilled female manual workers. In addition to these national peculiarities, disparities persist in the different states’ strategies of intervention. Over the last twenty years of the twentieth century, some social indicators (social-welfare expenditure, levels of employment) in the member states of the European Community have tended to converge, but this process has been interrupted by the successive expansions to incorporate new countries, and by the varying reactions to the crisis of 2008. Plans for reducing national debt, imposed under the Stability and Growth Pact, have been much more drastic in Ireland, in the countries of the South and in the former socialist countries. The proportion of young people under thirty who are inactive – not in education, employment or training – reveals a growing contrast between two groups of countries, with a European average of 16 per cent in 2013, and major disparities between nations. On one side, the level was around 8 per cent in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden; on the other, it was around 25 per cent in Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.⁶ Underlying this disparity there are differences in economic growth but also in social policy: the pressure from the European Union to reduce public spending is superficially comparable in each country, but not all states have the same capacity or the same desire to resist, as is manifested by the increasing national differences in expenditure on health, education, family support and unemployment benefit.

Thus the experience of unemployment and precarity may vary from one country to another, depending on the level of benefits and social protection established by the different states.⁷

The two faces of European deindustrialisation

While deindustrialisation has led to the decline of manual labour in the six founding members of the European Union, this is not the case at the level of the twenty-seven countries that now make it up. In most Central and Eastern European countries and in the Baltic states, industrial production accounts for between 20 and 30 per cent of workers, compared with the European average of 18 per cent. This significant share held by industry is partly due to successive waves of relocation, especially in the automotive sector.

In the countries of the South, some regions which previously specialised in the textile industry, such as Tuscany or northern Portugal, have been hit hard by the departure of entire factories, speeding the decline of the manual sphere in these countries. Overall, the tertiary sector represents a comparable proportion of economic activity to that in the countries of the North and West, but this apparent equivalence is deceptive: these are activities mainly involving unskilled tertiary work, in sectors such as retail, transport and personal services.

Thus the years 1990–2000 were marked by a combination of a new division of production with the deterioration of conditions of employment in Europe. Differentiations within social structures were exacerbated by increased competition between workers. The working class was caught in a vice on both sides of the continent: on one side, those in the countries of the East and the South are forced to accept low wages or even to emigrate to find work; on the other, those in the North and West face company relocations and have to accept wage restraint and job flexibility in order to keep hold of the jobs that remain. This gives an idea of the social shock that has hit the whole of the continent, in the context of expansion of the European Union without any requirement for social convergence.

Graph 1. The Employed Labour Force in European Countries by Sector of Activity.

Data: LFS 2014. Population: Employed persons aged twenty-five to sixty-five, EU 27 (excluding Malta).

The countries of Europe can thus be divided into three large groups, on the basis of economic structure: in the West and North, skilled service jobs predominate; in the East, industrial jobs remain central; the South is characterised by the persistence of a traditional and unskilled tertiary sector. Finally, while little remains of the agricultural sector in the North and West (making up 1 per cent of jobs compared to an average of 5 per cent in Europe as a whole), it is holding firm in the countries on the margins of Europe, which are also the least developed: Greece, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia and Bulgaria. The former countries of the East and those of the South effectively constitute the workshop, the market garden and the breadbasket of countries in the North and West of Europe.

Small-scale self-employed workers still present in substantial numbers

If we now consider the social characteristics and working conditions of those at the bottom of the European social scale, we find a number of common features that allow us to draw a group portrait.

One of these common features is that, on the European scale, working-class people who are in work are predominantly men: they make up 60 per cent of this group, compared to only 45 per cent among the middle class. This over-representation is due, first, to the fact that women who work tend, in all European countries, to have higher educational qualifications than men. Furthermore, where qualifications are equal, they tend to work more in administrative jobs, while men are predominant in manual or technical professions.⁸ Working-class women are also more likely not to be in work, particularly in Southern Europe, thus automatically increasing the proportion of men among people in work. And although there may be considerable differences between countries, the employment rate for men remains higher than that for women in all European countries, without exception.

The working class in Europe con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of maps
• List of graphs
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Weakened Working Class
• 2. Delusions of Grandeur and Social Realities: The Middle Class
• 3. Beyond the 1 Per Cent: The Plural Domination of the European Dominant Class
• 4. Dominance and Exclusion: The Interplay between Social Class and Nation
• 5. Are Classes Mobilised at the European Level?
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Secondary Use of Four European Surveys
• Appendix 2: Construction of Social Classes at European Level Using the ESEG Classification
• Appendix 3: ESEG Classification (Detailed Level) and Social Class
• Appendix 4: Constructing a European Social Class Space
• Notes
• Index