To say that class doesn’t matter in Britain is like saying wine doesn’t matter in France; or whether you’re a man or a woman doesn’t matter in Saudi Arabia.
—Nick Cohen
Is the working class no more? Tony Blair certainly thinks so. His onetime senior advisor Matthew Taylor recalls the former prime minister proudly announcing that ‘we’re all middle class’ at a think-tank event when he was still Labour leader. Some of our newspapers are inclined to agree. ‘We’re all middle class now, darling,’ echoed the Daily Telegraph. Or, as The Times put it, ‘We’re all middle class now as social barriers fall away.’ The Daily Mail goes into greater detail: ‘You might say that there are now three main classes in Britain: a scarily alienated underclass; the new and confident middle class, set free by the Thatcher revolution … and a tiny, and increasingly powerless, upper class.’1
The chav caricature has obscured the reality of the modern working class. We are fed the impression of a more or less comfortable ‘Middle England’ on the one hand, while on the other the old working class has degenerated into a hopeless chav rump.
It certainly used to be easier to answer the question: ‘Who is the working class?’ When the historian David Kynaston was writing his book on post-war Britain, Austerity Britain, he had no trouble identifying the three emblematic occupations of the 1950s. ‘They were, in no particular order, miners, dockers, and car workers.’ But, partly because of the ruinous economic policies of successive governments, the mines have closed, the docks are deserted, and most of the car factories are empty husks. As these old pillars of working-class Britain crumble, it has become easier for politicians and pundits to claim that we really are all middle class now.
The long, lingering demise of the industrial working class began but did not end with Thatcher. The Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott points to the three major culls of British industry: the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the current recession. ‘All of them have been caused by bubbles bursting and by macro-economic mistakes. We were told after the first cull in the 1980s that British industry was leaner and fitter. Then there was another cull in the early 1990s, and we were told after that that British industry was ready to meet the world—and then there was another cull.’
When New Labour swept to power in 1997, manufacturing made up more than a fifth of the economy. A paltry 12 per cent was all that was left by the time Tony Blair left office in 2007. Back in 1979, there were nearly 7 million people working in factories, but today’s number is just over 2.5 million.
The policies of governments besotted with City slickers must take much of the blame. ‘Labour bought into the whole myth of the boom in the financial sector and the City,’ says Elliott. Like previous Tory governments, New Labour presided over an overvalued exchange rate, rendering our manufacturing goods deeply uncompetitive abroad. ‘It paid lip service to its old industrial base, but did absolutely nothing to help it, and in fact actually made things a lot worse for the manufacturing sector.’
With all the talk about the ‘information economy’ and a country where more people work in pop music than down the mines, it is easy to overstate the point. Nearly four out of every ten men are still manual workers. But there is no denying an obvious trend. Industrial occupations are vanishing with every passing year.
Already embattled sectors suffered yet more crippling blows at the hands of the Great Recession of 2008. The crisis may have been caused by the greed of bankers, but manufacturing paid the price. It lost well over twice the proportion of jobs as finance and business services in the first year of the crisis. The City’s share of the economy has actually grown since 2005, leaving us more dependent on the part of the economy that caused the crash in the first place. As former City economist Graham Turner puts it, it is ‘a staggering outcome of this credit crunch’.
With industrial jobs steadily drying up, it might seem bizarre that the British public stubbornly continues to self-identify as working class. Matthew Taylor recalls reactions to Blair’s ‘we’re all middle class’ speech: ‘It was quickly pointed out that, interestingly, more people in Britain call themselves working class now than did in 1950.’ Opinion polls show that over half the population consistently describes itself as working class, but one poll in 1949 recorded it as just 43 per cent.2 That was a time when there were a million miners, most people worked in manual jobs and rationing was still in full swing. In the era of de-industrialization, how can most people honestly regard themselves as working class?
You could be forgiven for thinking that there is an identity crisis going on. Multi-millionaire businessman Mohamed Al Fayed once described himself as working class. I have heard of stockbrokers with telephone number salaries who ask with faux puzzlement: ‘I work, don’t I? So why aren’t I working class?’
If you look at the polling numbers, it is true that some people in the top socio-economic category describe themselves as working class. Equally, some in the bottom category think that they are middle class. This triggered my curiosity. When I asked a childhood friend, whom I considered indisputably working class, if he agreed with that characterization, he was almost affronted. ‘Maybe in terms of income, but middle class in terms of things like education.’ He felt that being working class meant being poor, while being middle class meant being educated.
The vilification of all things working class seems to have had a real impact on people’s attitudes. In the run-up to the 2010 general election, the Guardian journalist Simon Hattenstone asked a former bus driver, who had retired in 1981 on £50 a week, which class he belonged to. ‘Middle class,’ he said after a bit of thought. Why? ‘Well, I’m not down on my uppers. If I was on my uppers I’d call myself working class, and I always worked for a living.’ He associated being working class with being broke. As Hattenstone put it: ‘It’s not just for the politicians that the term working class has become pejorative.’3
With so much confusion about class, what does it mean to be working class? When I put this question to New Labour ex-Cabinet minister James Purnell, he thought a big part of the answer was ‘cultural identity’ and ‘a sense of history and a sense of place’. He represented the northern working-class constituency of Stalybridge and Hyde where, he said, people lived in ‘Coronation Street rows of houses’ and ‘where I think people think of themselves as working class because of the community where they grew up, and things they do together and all the shared understandings which come from being from a particular place.’
I grew up in Stockport, a few miles from Purnell’s former constituency, and a sense of place, shared community and common values certainly were a major part of many people’s working-class identities. People grew up with each other; mixed groups of families and friends would do things together, like watching football in the pub; and people felt rooted in a community that they and their families had lived in all their lives. The younger generation would often move only a few blocks away from where they grew up, and they still went out on the town on a Friday night with friends they had known since they were born.
But the reality is that this sense of rootedness has been breaking down for a long time, partly because of the collapse of industry. Entire working-class communities used to be based around a particular factory, steelworks, or mine. Most of the men would work at the same place. Their fathers and their grandfathers may well have worked there and done similar jobs. When industries disappeared, the communities they sustained became fragmented. As Purnell puts it, the working class is no longer made up of ‘a whole bunch of men who left the house at the same time to go to broadly the same factory, and then socialize broadly in the same way’.
It is often tempting to think of class in terms of income. So, you could stick a ‘working-class’ label on someone earning £14,000 a year, and a ‘middle-class’ label on someone earning £60,000. Yet there are small businessmen—who, after all, live off their profits—who might only make a few grand. A well-paid skilled worker could be getting twice as much as a shopkeeper brings home.
Another challenge to the existence of the working class came from the almost religious fervour with which Tory and New Labour governments have promoted home ownership. Thatcherism certainly saw it as a means of breaking down class identity. Thatcher’s right-hand man, Keith Joseph, described the aim as to resume ‘the forward march of embourgeoisement [becoming bourgeois] which went so far in Victorian times’. Clearly home ownership has promoted individualism, or even a sense of ‘everyone for themselves’, including among some working-class homeowners. But the fact that millions of people have had to borrow beyond their means, sooner than pay a subsidized rent, does not make them middle class.
Alan Walter, the late chair of Defend Council Housing who never lived in any other kind, spoke of working-class homeowners ‘now scared out of their wits about whether they’ll be able to keep mortgage payments up. The number of people who go to bed every night and have nightmares about getting repossessed is a major issue.’ The living standards of some working-class people are lower than they would have been if they were paying cheap council rents rather than often very expensive mortgages. Indeed, over half the people living in poverty are homeowners. There are actually more homeowners in the bottom 10 per cent (or decile) than there are in each of the two deciles above it. As we know, encouraging so many people to take on unaffordable levels of debt had a detonator role in the credit crunch. In any case, as more and more people have become priced out of home ownership, it has gone into reverse: peaking at 71 per cent in 2002–03 and falling back to 68 per cent six years later.
If it is not community, income or living arrangements that defines the working class, what is it? Neil Kinnock may be the Labour leader who laid the foundations for the party’s dramatic swing to the right, but he still feels most comfortable with how Karl Marx put it. ‘I’d use the broad definition—I always have: people who have no means of sustenance other than the sale of labour, are working class.’ This is very clear: the working class as a catch-all term for people who labour for others. When I asked Birmingham supermarket worker Mary Lynch which class she belonged to, she had no doubt that it was the working class. ‘I just feel we’re working just to pay our way all the time.’ These must be the starting points of understanding what ‘working class’ means: the class of people who work for others in order to get by in life.
But it’s only a start. Is a Cambridge don really in the same category as a supermarket checkout worker? The important qualification to add is not only those who sell their labour, but those who lack autonomy, or control over this labour. Both a university professor and a retail employee must work to survive; but a professor has huge power over their everyday activity, while a shop assistant does not. A professor does have broad parameters within which they must work, but there is ample room for creativity and the ability to set their own tasks. A shop worker has a set of very narrowly defined tasks with little variation, and must carry them out according to specific instructions.
A look at the statistics uncovers the working-class majority. Over eight million of us still have manual jobs, and another eight million are clerks, secretaries, sales assistants and in other personal and customer-service jobs. That adds up to well over half the workforce, and still excludes teachers, health workers such as nurses, and train drivers, who are assigned to categories such as ‘professional occupations’.
Although income is not the deciding factor, there is a link between the sort of job you do and the money you get. A median-income household receives just £21,000. This is the exact midpoint, meaning that half the population earns less. Here is the real Middle Britain, not the mythical ‘Middle England’ invented by media pundits and politicians that really refers to the affluent voter.
Most people work for others, and lack control over their own labour. But many of them are no longer toiling away in factories and mines. The last three decades have seen the dramatic rise of a new service-sector working class. Their jobs are cleaner and less physically arduous, but often of a lower status, insecure, and poorly paid. ‘In terms of the world that we now live in,’ says Mark Serwotka, leader of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, ‘and I look at our members, I think the jobs that working-class people do are changing and quite clearly now there aren’t miners, there aren’t big steelworks in the way there was when I was growing up. But in the new industries, I think we actually see exploitation of working people on a par if not greater than we’ve ever seen before.’
Mary Cunningham, a fifty-five-year-old supermarket worker in Newcastle, is a child of the old industrial working class. Her father was a miner until the pits closed. She left school in the middle of O-levels to look after her dying mother, although school wasn’t for her in any case. Her first job was working on ‘the old, press-down tills’ at the now defunct Woolworth’s, and she remembers being there when decimalization came to replace the old pounds, shillings and pence in 1971.
Mary is an important part of the puzzle of modern working-class Britain. Supermarket workers like her, derided as ‘chavs’ by websites like ChavTowns, are one of the chief components of the new working class. Retail is the second biggest employer in the country, with nearly three million people working in British shops: that’s more than one in ten workers, and a threefold increase since 1980.
Shop work used to be seen as quite a genteel profession, staffed mostly by middle-class women. It has changed dramatically. In the old industrial heartlands, the supermarket has been hoovering up people who once worked in factories—or would have done if it was still an option. ‘I would say that the supermarket now is the biggest employer—it’s taken over from factories and industries,’ Mary says. As well as men from the steel industry, men ‘from the factories are coming now into retail and sitting on the checkouts, because there’s nothing much else really … We have people in our stores who are qualified to do better jobs than they’re doing, but they’re just glad they’re in employment.’
Like Mary, the majority of shop workers are women—in fact, nearly two-thirds of them. ‘There’s a lot of housewives, obviously. There’s also young mothers who are tying it in with picking their children up from school, a lot of them single mothers.’ Retail has changed as it has expanded. ‘I think in the latter few years it has got worse, got harder,’ Mary says. ‘When I started, you could have a little bit of time with the customer, and get to know your customer, you had your regulars that came to you because you had that little bit of rapport with them. Now it’s get on with the job, you have to have targets … you’re supposed to get through so many customers an hour.’ Retail is becoming increasingly automated, to resemble old-style mass production in a factory.
Supermarket workers like Mary are often at the mercy of autocratic or abusive managers. Mary and some of her colleagues were forced to lodge a complaint against one: ‘If you work with her, she’ll bang her fist on the counter and say “why isn’t that done?” in front of customers, and she has grown women that daren’t approach her … She costs the company money because of all the retraining, everyone wants to be off that department, or they leave.’
The bullying doesn’t just come from managers. According to the shop workers’ union USDAW, up to half a million shop workers endure verbal abuse from customers every day. Little wonder that one survey showed that nearly a fifth of retail staff were prepared to jump ship for the same or slightly less money.4 According to USDAW, the average staff turnover for shop workers is 62 per cent a year.
And then there’s the pay. If you work on a checkout in Mary’s supermarket, you can expect to make just £6.12 an hour. Lunch is unpaid. This is pretty standard: indeed, fully half of retail workers earn less than £7 an hour. Shop workers face arbitrary attacks on these already poor wages and conditions. Less than two years into the economic crisis that began in 2007, one in four retail and sales workers had their pay slashed. Nearly a third had their hours cut, and over a fifth lost benefits.5
If you think shop workers have it bad, consider now the call centre worker. There are now nearly a million people working in call centres, and the number is going up every year. To put that in perspective, there were a million men down the pits at the peak of mining in the 1940s. If the miner was one of the iconic jobs of post-war Britain, then today, surely, the call centre worker is as good a symbol of the working class as any.
‘Call centres are a very regimented environment,’ says John McInally, a trade unionist leading efforts by the PCS to unionize call centre workers. ‘It’s rows of desks with people sitting with headphones. There’s loads of people in the room, but they’re separate units. They’re encouraged not to talk, share experiences, and so on … The minute you get in the door, your movements are regulated by the computer.’ Here is the lack of worker’s autonomy in the workplace taken to extremes.
In some call centres he has dealt with, a worker in Bristol or Glasgow who wants to leave fifteen minutes early has to go through head office in Sheffield to be cleared. ‘We’ve likened conditions to those you’d have seen in mills or factories at the end of the nineteenth century.’ Think that’s an exaggeration? Then consider the fact that, in some call centres, workers have to put their hands up to go to the toilet. Computers dictate the time and duration of breaks, with no flexibility whatsoever. Employees are under constant monitoring and surveillance, driving up stress levels.
Many call centre workers have told McInally that the whole experience is ‘very dehumanizing. People talk about being treated like robots. Everything is regulated by machines.’ The working lives of many operators consist of reading through the same script over and over again. According to the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, increasing numbers of call centre workers are being referred to speech therapists because they are losing their voices. The cause? Working long hours with little opportunity to even have a drink of water.
That’s one reason why the sickness rate in call centres is nearly twice the national average. The other is deep alienation from the work. In one call centre McInally dealt with in Northern England, sickness rates had reached nearly 30 per cent. ‘That’s a sign of low morale,’ he says—as is the fact that annual staff turnover is around a quarter of the workforce. And, like so much of the new working class, the salaries of call centre workers are poor. A trainee can expect £12,500, while the higher-grade operators are on an average of just £16,000.
Twenty-eight-year-old Carl Leishman has been a call centre worker in County Durham for eight years. For seven of those, he worked in a bank’s call centre; today he is with a phone company. He works bruising twelve-hour shifts, three days on and three days off. ‘I would probably have started off life as middle class,’ he says of his upbringing. ‘But the way I am now—and obviously the wage I get paid—I would say that I’m down to working class. That sounds awful, but …!’
At his previous job, stiff targets had to be met. Four per cent of his working hours were set aside for needs like going to the toilet or getting a drink. ‘You’d get ratings at the end of each month, and if you’d gone above those percentages, then your rating would drop, affecting in the end what bonuses and pay rises you were getting.’ Carl didn’t need to go to the toilet too often—‘whereas some other people, like pregnant women, could really struggle to stick to that.’
He describes the training at his current job as ‘woefully inadequate’, particularly when it comes to dealing with abusive customers who, he says, are a daily occurrence. His employers have a no-hang-up policy, even if the customer is swearing or being aggressive. ‘You’ll see quite often on the floor people in tears at the way people have spoken to them,’ he says. It is a job that can have consequences for your health, too. ‘Your throat gets incredibly dry. There are people I’ve known whose throats have gone from doing it. A lady I used to work with had to actually leave because her voice was just completely shot.’
At the core of his experience at work is the lack of control over what he does. ‘We’re set in rows, which I hate, to be honest. It can sometimes feel very much like a chicken factory, as though you don’t have too much control over what you’re doing: “This is the way you’re doing things, and that’s it, deal with it, because that’s the way it is, don’t think outside the box” … You don’t need to think for yourself too much.’ Little wonder that Carl says that ‘one of the most fulfilling things is when you do get a bit of time off the phone. But trying to balance that with obviously getting the customer serviced is nigh on impossible sometimes.’ His current employer does offer things like a television in the break room, and free teas and coffees: but these do not offset the basic alienation Carl feels from his job.
Carl’s salary is just £14,400 a year. When the Conservative-led government announced that it would hike up VAT, it was the last straw and he decided he had no choice but to move back in with his parents. Does he think he is paid too little? ‘For the grief you get, definitely! It’s one of those jobs that you’ve got to put up with the abuse of customers and long hours as well, which can be hard work. But I think, definitely, the wages aren’t representative of the amount of work you put in.’
Both Mary and Carl work with a number of part-time and temporary staff. Their numbers have soared over the last thirty years as successive governments have striven to create a ‘flexible’ workforce. In part, they have made it far easier and cheaper for bosses to hire and fire workers at will. But we have also been witnessing the slow death of the secure, full-time job. There are up to 1.5 million temporary workers in Britain. A ‘temp’ can be hired and fired at an hour’s notice, be paid less for doing the same job, and lacks rights such as paid holidays and redundancy pay.
Agency work is thriving in the service sector, but an incident at a car plant near Oxford in early 2009 illustrates where the rise of the temp has brought us. Eight hundred and fifty temps—many of whom had worked in the factory for years—were sacked by BMW with just one hour’s notice. Sacking agency workers was, of course, the cheapest option because the company did not have to give them any redundancy pay. The workers, with no means of defending themselves from this calamity, resorted to pelting managers with apples and oranges. ‘It’s a disgrace, I feel as though I’ve been used,’ said one.6
It is not just agency and temporary workers who suffer because of job insecurity and outrageous terms and conditions. Fellow workers are forced to compete with people who can be hired far more cheaply. Everyone’s wages are pushed down as a result. This is the ‘race to the bottom’ of pay and conditions.
It might sound like a throwback to the Victorian era, but this could be the future for millions of workers as businesses exploit economic crisis for their own ends. In a document entitled The Shape of Business—The Next Ten Years, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI)—which represents major employers—claimed that the crash was the catalyst for a new era in business. The document called for the creation of an even more ‘flexible’ workforce, which would mean firms employing a smaller core of permanent workers and a larger, fluctuating ‘flexiforce’. This means even more temporary workers deprived of basic rights and conditions, who can be hired and fired at a moment’s notice. Indeed, one survey in 2010 found that nearly nine out of ten businesses would either be maintaining or increasing their use of temporary workers.
The other striking feature of the new working class is the rise of the part-time worker. Over a quarter of Britain’s workforce now works part-time, one of the highest levels in Europe. The number has soared during the recession as sacked full-time workers are forced to take up part-time work to make ends meet, helping to keep unemployment figures down. For example, figures released in December 2009 showed that the number of people in work had started to rise despite the recession. But, of the 50,000 new jobs, the majority were part-time—‘confirming the gradual trend towards “casualised” working’, as the Independent reported. ‘Full-time work is still falling, driven by continued job losses in manufacturing and construction,’ according to Ian Brinkley, associate director at The Work Foundation.7
When I discussed the rise of the hire-and-fire service sector with leading Tory MP David Davis, he was soothingly sceptical. ‘There’s no real reason to believe that, let’s say, Sainsbury’s would have any less job security than somebody working in Ford. It’s the reverse in many ways, because they’re growing. So I think the hire-and-fire idea—you’ve just run past me a piece of Old Labour mythology, frankly. The idea that the only good jobs are ones where you have to lift a half-ton weight every day is unmitigated crap.’ But the evidence contradicts him: every passing day sees the further consolidation of a hire-and-fire workforce in Britain.
Many of the new jobs are not only more insecure than the ones they’ve replaced; the pay is often worse. According to 2008 figures, half of all service sector workers were on less than £20,000 a year. But the median in manufacturing was £24,343, or nearly a quarter more. A recent example illustrates how well-paid manufacturing jobs are being replaced by a stingier service sector. When Longbridge carmaker MG Rover went bust in 2005, 6,300 jobs went to the wall. The median annual income of the workers in their new jobs was just £18,728, a fifth less than the £24,000 they were earning back at Rover. For the third or so lucky enough to stay in the manufacturing sector, wages had stayed more or less the same. But, for the 60 per cent now in the service sector, earnings were considerably less.8
It is the same story in other areas hit by the destruction of industry—old mining regions, for example. ‘Obviously the new jobs are cleaner than working down a mine,’ says former Nottinghamshire miner Adrian Gilfoyle. ‘But the money is worse. We used to be on bonuses and all sorts for cutting coal, and you used to earn really good money. Now you’re lucky if you bring in £200 a week. And with the cost of living nowadays, it’s not a lot of money.’
As Eilís Lawlor of the New Economics Foundation expressed it to me, the disappearance of skilled jobs is creating a ‘missing middle’. ‘We’ve seen a polarization of the labour market, as relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs are replaced by less well-paid jobs in the service sector,’ she says. Others call it the ‘hourglass’ economy: highly paid jobs at one end, and swelling numbers of low-paid, unskilled jobs at the other. The middle-level occupations, on the other hand, are shrinking.
Hairdressing is an example of a booming low-paid service sector job. It’s one of the worst-paid jobs in Britain: the median salary for a female stylist is less than £12,000.9 There are over 170,000 hairdressers in Britain today.10 Other rapidly expanding low-paid jobs include data input, security guards, receptionists, care assistants and cleaners. These low-paid jobs are the only ones on offer for growing numbers of workers who, in a different time, would have taken up a middle-level job with relatively good pay.
‘It wasn’t just that manufacturing was wiped out. I mean, in London we used to have a million and a quarter manufacturing jobs, now it’s just over 200,000—that’s mainly high-end printing,’ says former London mayor Ken Livingstone. ‘But there’s a whole layer of really well-paid jobs in the utilities which, as they were privatized, were all wiped out. And so, for a working-class person, the jobs have been dramatically narrowed.’
One of the things that distinguished the old industrial working class was a strong trade union movement to fight its corner. Back in the late 1970s, over half of all workers were union members. Today unions remain the biggest civil society organizations in the country, but their membership has steeply declined from thirteen million in 1979 to just over seven million today. The decline becomes even starker when you consider that, while over half of public sector workers are union members, the same is true of only 15 per cent in the private sector. The new service sector jobs are more or less a union-free zone.
Thatcher’s pummelling of the unions certainly goes a long way toward explaining this weakness. As former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn points out, the laws ‘are more restrictive on trade union rights than they were a hundred years ago’. Their presence on the statute books puts Britain in violation of its obligations as a signatory to International Labour Organization conventions. Not only do they make it difficult for unions to organize in the workplace, the laws also prevent them from fighting on behalf of their members. Unite was taken to court by British Airways in 2010, over a long-running dispute with cabin crew. Despite eight out of ten workers voting for strike action on the back of a 78 per cent turnout, the judge banned the strike. Why? Because the union had failed to give notice by text message that eleven out of 9,282 votes had been spoilt.
Industrial relations specialist Professor Gregor Gall is right to point out that unions were stronger in manufacturing because of ‘the time in which unionization occurred. This was an era of greater union and worker rights, far more progressive public policy and law and less powerful employers.’ The dog-eat-dog individualism unleashed by Thatcherism also undermined the collective spirit at the heart of trade unionism. And it is more difficult for unions to put down roots in the transient service sector. Factories with hundreds of workers who were there for the long haul were simply easier to organize.
‘There are huge challenges,’ says Jennie Formby, the national officer for Unite’s food, drink and hospitality sector:
It is very difficult to organize in hotels and restaurants and pubs because there are thousands of them. How do you actually have a concentrated campaign to cover every site? There’s a very high turnover of labour and large numbers of migrant workers without English as their first language, particularly in hotels, so it is harder to deliver a sustainable organizing campaign. It is much easier for us to organize factory workers, for example in meat and poultry processing factories—where we’ve been extremely successful over recent years in organizing thousands of predominantly migrant workers—than it is to organize the often almost invisible workforce who work in their thousands in Britain’s hotel sector.
She recalls the very successful Unite-led campaign to stop employers counting tips as part of their workers’ wages. Among the obstacles that the union was up against were the very real threats many workers faced from their employers if they engaged in any kind of union activity, or spoke out about the exploitation they were suffering. Some were threatened with disciplinary action, including outright dismissal. ‘Our members were basically being robbed of their earnings that customers had chosen to give to them to reflect the good service they had received, but companies saw it as a huge threat to their income if the legislation was changed, as they were making millions out of short-changing these hard-working and low-paid restaurant workers,’ Formby says. ‘However, successful as the tips campaign has been in winning for our members, it was actually more about lobbying government and getting changes in the law than it was about organizing workers.’
Mary Cunningham’s supermarket boasts a good union presence. When she took over as union rep there were only fifty-one members, but now it has reached 400. This is a testament to her organizational drive. But as she says herself, this is rare. Since 1996, the percentage of union members in retail has never reached 12 per cent. Not a lot, it would seem—but pretty high by service sector standards. Because of the turnover, Mary says, ‘you’re recruiting just to stand still. You might recruit thirty people in a matter of months, but by that time people have left—you’re losing them all the time … Obviously when you get successes, it’s easier to recruit, so when people can say, “Mary did this, and a worker got their job back”—that’s a positive thing, and people say, “Oh, I think I’ll join.” ’
Again, Mary does not lack stories of management clamping down on unions. ‘At one big company that’s been around for years, I had a hundred people wanting to join the union. I had a meeting off the premises with two ladies, and they took a hundred forms back and most of them were filled in, until the company found out about it and said anybody that filled a form in on the premises, or caught with a form, would be disciplined.’
After three decades of persecution, unions are no longer part of workplace culture—and that is particularly true in the service sector. ‘A lot of people these days don’t even know what a union is about,’ says Mary. ‘Which is sad, really.’
John McInally has been leading valiant attempts by the PCS union to organize call centre workers. He believes that there are real grounds for optimism, because of one key similarity between call centres and old-style factories: large numbers of workers concentrated in one place. But he has no illusions about the obstacles that are in the way, not least because of how regimented the work is. ‘You could have four hundred people in a room, or a couple of rooms, who may see each other every day but never speak to each other,’ he says. Just as factory workers were stuck at their looms in Victorian times, call centre workers are stuck at their desks. There is one major difference, though: unlike Victorian workers who could shout to each other over their looms, call centre workers have earphones plugged in all day and so are prevented from communicating. ‘People are treated like units of production, unlike factories where there is a more organic interaction between people.’
Unions that have been prepared to take action to defend their members have grown, like train drivers’ union the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, PCS, and the Communication Workers Union, which represents postal workers among others. But the reality is that unions continue to shrink in number and barely exist in the service sector. What is particularly scandalous is that those who most need unions are the least represented. According to the 2008 Labour Force Survey, less than 15 per cent of workers earning less than £7 an hour are union members. For those on between £15 and £20 an hour, the proportion is well over four in ten.
It is not the unpopularity of trade unionism that is to blame for its crippled state. According to a poll conducted by union group Unions 21, around half of non-unionized workers think that unions have a future, compared to 31 per cent who think they do not. While women were most likely not to join because of the cost, for men the biggest turn-off was a sense that unions did not achieve anything. According to Trades Union Congress organizing officer Carl Roper, unions had not done enough to recruit in the private sector: ‘There doesn’t seem to be a union approach to how we look at those workers.’11
It is not just that the failure of unions to recruit low-paid and moderately paid service sector workers condemns them to poor wages and conditions. It undermines the collective identity of working-class people. It deprives them of a voice, leaving millions of people virtually invisible and without a means to articulate their concerns and aspirations, which can be easily ignored by politicians and journalists alike. Furthermore, it helps to consolidate the idea that you can only improve your lot through your own individual efforts and that, accordingly, those in poorly paid jobs deserve their lot.
The weakening of trade unions goes a long way to explaining why workers’ pay stagnated even during the boom years. The huge sums being made benefited mostly the bosses, because of the lack of an organized force to win a share of the spoils for the millions working some of the longest hours in Europe. Similarly, this lack of pressure from below explains how workers’ rights have been chipped away, one by one.
Even before the recession hit, the wages of working-class Britain were going nowhere fast. In 2005, for example, company profits were the highest since records began, but workers suffered a hit to their weekly earnings of nearly half a percent. The income of the bottom half flatlined after 2004; for the bottom third, it actually went into reverse.12 Following the crash in 2008, wage freezes became the norm as workers were left to pick up the tab for a crisis caused by the greed of wealthy bankers. The 9.4 million people in low-income households had nothing to fall back on in hard times. The decline in their income is all the more shocking because it happened under a Labour government. Compare and contrast with the much-maligned Labour administrations of the 1960s, when the poorest 10 per cent saw their real income go up by 29 per cent, compared to the 16 per cent increase enjoyed by everyone else.
New Labour loyalist and former Cabinet minister Hazel Blears admits that life got harder for working-class people. She argues that the government was trying to ‘square a circle’, fearing that intervening too much to help struggling workers would make Britain ‘uncompetitive’ and throw people out of work. ‘As ever in politics it’s about striking the balance, and sometimes you get that balance right, and sometimes you get it wrong.’ But she concedes that, in New Labour’s later years,
just getting on day-to-day for a lot of working-class people became increasingly difficult. You’re either on short-time, your wages were depressed, things that you had enjoyed—like taking your family out to eat once a week, going to the pictures, going on holiday—began to be very difficult. And the quality of life, I think, in some families just became work and sleep, work and sleep, with no fun at all.
What makes all of this so spectacularly unfair is that workers’ wages have stagnated even as their productivity has steadily gone up. In the past, growing productivity has translated into rising wages. But the annual increase in productivity has been twice that of wages in twenty-first-century Britain. Overall, wages represent a much smaller slice of the economy following the ravages of Thatcherism. Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s wealth went on wages back in 1973. Today, it’s only a little over half.
It’s not just the legacy of Thatcherism that workers have to thank for their stagnating pay packets: globalization has played a role, too. When China, India and the former Soviet bloc entered the global market economy, Western companies suddenly had access to hundreds of millions of new workers. Not only did this make labour plentiful, it also made it cheap because corporations could get away with paying far lower wages in the developing world, not least because of international deregulation pushed by the likes of the World Trade Organization. This has dealt a crippling blow to workers’ bargaining power. After all, companies can simply relocate to the third world if their Western workforces refuse to stomach low wages and poor conditions.
Stagnating wages and low-paid service sector jobs played their part in the economic crisis. To maintain their spending power, workers began to borrow. In 1980 the ratio between debt and income was 45. By 1997 it had doubled, before reaching an astonishing 157.4 on the eve of the credit crunch in 2007. As people’s purchasing power slowed, more and more credit was splashed out on consumer goods. Between 2000 and 2007, consumers spent £55 billion more than their pay packets, courtesy of the plastic in their wallet or hefty bank loans. This huge increase in household debt is just one reason Britain experienced a credit-fuelled boom before the bubble inevitably burst.
‘If you’re in a situation where your income is not increasing in real terms, and if you actually find yourself in a situation where your income is declining, then one way to meet that gap and “keep up with the Joneses” is to borrow more money to do so,’ says debt expert Chris Tapp, director of Credit Action. And that is exactly what millions of people did, borrowing way beyond their means to supplement the gap left by stagnating real wages. Reckless consumerism played its part, too, as credit allowed consumers to splash out on expensive holidays, televisions, iPhones and so on because, as Tapp puts it: ‘Society screams at us: “This is what you need, this is what you need to be accepted, this is what you need to be valued.” And credit, easy credit, allows you to do that.’
As well as being poorly paid, many of the service sector jobs have a markedly lower status than the manufacturing jobs they replaced. Miners and factory workers had a real pride in the work they were doing. Miners were supplying the country’s energy needs; factory workers had the satisfaction of investing skill and energy into making things that people needed. The jobs were well regarded in the local community. Of course, there are many conscientious supermarket and call centre workers who put real effort into their jobs and into providing good customer service. But there is no doubt that there is not the same pride and prestige attached to their jobs.
‘Despite the problems of manufacturing industry in the 1970s the workers were very well skilled,’ says political historian Ross McKibbin. ‘They were very well paid. They were nearly all unionized. And they had very high levels of pride in work. And I think that has declined. In what one might call the industrial working class, the pride in work is less than it used to be, and the effort to have pride in work has declined.’
Little wonder that, in one survey, four out of ten middle-income workers felt that their occupation had a lower status than their father’s, compared to only 29 per cent who felt that it had a higher status. Those who are now classified by statisticians as ‘lower middle class’—like clerical and admin workers and supervisors, for example—are now mostly lower down the income scale than they would have been as members of the skilled working class a generation earlier.13
That said, the low status accorded to many non-industrial jobs can be grossly unfair. Part of the problem is that we have developed a distaste for socially useful but poorly paid jobs. This is a spin-off from the new religion of meritocracy, where one’s rank in the social hierarchy is supposedly determined on merit. The problem lies in how to define ‘merit’. The New Economics Foundation (NEF) think-tank published a report in 2009 comparing the social value of different occupations. Hospital cleaners are generally on the minimum wage. However, NEF calculated that—taking into account the fact they maintain standards of hygiene and contribute to wider health outcomes—they generated over £10 in social value for every £1 they were paid.
Waste recycling workers are another example. They fulfil all sorts of functions, like preventing waste and promoting recycling, as well as re-using goods and keeping down carbon emissions. The NEF model estimated that, for every £1 spent on their wages, another £12 was generated. But when the think-tank applied the same model to City bankers—taking into account the damaging effects of the City’s financial activities—they estimated that for every £1 they were paid, £7 of social value was destroyed. For advertising executives it was even more: £11 destroyed for every £1 popped into their bank account.14 In modern Britain, you may end up having a low-paid, low-status job even though the contribution you are making to society is enormous.
This decline in occupational status is just one way the death of manufacturing has undermined the quality of workers’ lives and their sense of worth. Another is that the new service sector jobs simply do not foster the same sense of community as industry once did. ‘This kind of strong, community-based working-class culture has certainly been reduced very markedly,’ says sociologist John Goldthorpe, something he has noticed from visiting the former pit village where he grew up. ‘There used to be the occupational culture of mining, too. Everybody knew about mining. There was talk about mining in the pubs and clubs, there was this kind of shared occupational culture as well as the community.’ The service sector has simply not replicated the sense of belonging and community that manufacturing could foster.
‘Society has become increasingly atomized,’ is former Labour Cabinet minister Clare Short’s verdict. ‘In the street I grew up in, all the kids played together, they went in and out of the adults’ houses, everyone knew roughly who each other were, what they did, and helped each other … There were always people in the houses because not so many women worked. It was culturally completely different. And there’s been a lot of loss, in my view, in the changes. They’re not all for the better, and the sense of community and belonging is massively reduced.’
The balance between work and life has also suffered. Four in ten of us put in hours on a Saturday, for example, more than in any other EU country. Another bleary-eyed 13 per cent work night shifts, again higher than most European countries. As well as working irregular hours, we spend more time holed up in our workplaces than elsewhere in Europe. The downward trend in working hours skidded to a halt in the 1980s—and has gone the other way. By 2007, full-time workers were putting in an average of 41.4 hours every week, up from 40.7 hours a year earlier. In the EU, only Romanian and Bulgarian workers put in longer hours.15
Shamefully, Britain negotiated an opt-out from the European Working Time Directive that caps the working week at 48 hours. In theory, workers can only work longer than this if they agree to. But, according to a survey conducted by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), one in three workers do not know the option even exists, and another two in three who regularly work more than 48 hours were never given a choice. We have ended up in the shocking situation in which around one in five of us regularly work more than the 48 hours enshrined in the Directive.16
But there is even more damning evidence of exploitation. In 2009, over five million workers did more than seven hours of unpaid overtime on average each week—and the trend is up. Having so many people working for free is worth a huge amount to bosses. According to the TUC, business made a stunning £27.4 billion out of it—that’s £5,402 per worker.17 It is a figure worth recalling the next time you hear businesses complaining about the cost of sick leave: according to the CBI, the resulting losses are less than half the amount.
We are not even compensated with time away to unwind. British workers get an average of 24.6 leave days a year, below the EU average and well below Sweden’s thirty-three days. No wonder stress has become endemic. A fifth of workers surveyed by the mental health charity Mind had phoned in sick on some occasion because of ‘unmanageable’ stress levels.
We have seen how service sector workers in particular have had an increasingly rough ride over recent years. But what about the one in five who work in public services? After all, both right-wing journalists and politicians have encouraged the idea that public sector workers are overpaid, underworked and living it up at the expense of the taxpayer. When the government bailed out the banking system and suffered a collapse in tax revenues from the City, a political consensus developed around ‘savage’ cuts to public services. The reality of Britain’s six million public sector workers is nowhere to be seen in all of this.
‘Going back many, many years, people may have seen this image of white-collar workers who perhaps thought they were doing alright, had quite an easy job, good conditions and were fairly well paid,’ says union leader Mark Serwotka. ‘I think that caricature has been deliberately put out there by all political parties in order to, firstly, justify attacking them and, secondly, trying to spread a very divisive image: that “Well, they’re bureaucrats who don’t really do anything, we can cut them, they’re not real people who offer stuff to society.” ’
Serwotka believes this ‘demonization of the public sector … was a deliberate political strategy to try and see off any opposition to the massive cuts they announced.’ He bitterly recalls then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown sacking 100,000 civil servants on live TV in 2004. The union was not even consulted beforehand. ‘We saw [former Tory leader] Michael Howard at the 2005 election with his 500 cardboard cutouts of bowler-hatted, pin-striped mandarins, and it’s the same story.’ When the Tories came to power after the 2010 election, they immediately set to work cultivating this image, harping on the 172 civil servants who were paid more than the prime minister as if they were in any way representative of the public sector.
Like the service sector, the public sector has filled part of the vacuum left by the collapse of industry in many working-class communities. Nearly 850,000 new public sector jobs were created in the New Labour era. There were around six million public sector workers before the Conservative-led coalition unveiled its programme of cuts in May 2010. Again, as in services, women dominate. According to economics expert Professor Prem Sikka, eight out of every ten new jobs taken by women since the late 1990s were in public services. In a former industrial heartland like the North East, around one in two women work in the public sector.
Yet the idea that these employees are in any way ‘pampered’ is a myth. Nearly a quarter of workers earning less than £7 an hour can be found in the public sector. ‘We have 100,000 members in the civil service earning £15,000 a year or less,’ says Mark Serwotka. ‘We have 80,000 people on less than the average wage in the country in the civil service. We’re told that they have “gold-plated” pensions yet the average pension of all civil servants is £6,200 a year. If you strip out the top mandarins, it’s £4,000 a year.’
Consider, too, the fact that public sector workers do the equivalent of 120 million hours of unpaid overtime a year. According to researchers at Bristol University’s Centre for Market and Public Organisation, that’s the equivalent of employing an extra 60,000 people. One in four public sector workers put in unpaid overtime worth almost £9 billion a year—compared to one in six in the private sector. Pampered? On the contrary. Public sector workers rank among some of the most exploited, low-paid people in the country.
It is these workers who face the brunt of the cuts programme, because a crisis of private greed has been cynically transformed into a crisis of public spending. But as politicians sharpen the knives, it will not just be those workers directly employed by the state who will suffer. If you are in the bottom fifth of the population, over half of your income comes from state support. In the fifth just above that, it is still over a third. Even in the middle fifth, 17 per cent of people’s income comes from the government. Huge numbers of working-class people depend on having their income topped up by the state to make ends meet—through tax credits and housing and child benefits, for instance, many of which face real-term cuts.18
The great, continuing legacy of Thatcherism is that the working class is, for the time being, on the losing side of the class war. ‘There’s class warfare, all right,’ as multi-billionaire US investor Warren Buffett put it a few years ago, ‘but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’
Over recent years we have witnessed an astonishing wealth grab by Britain’s businesses at the expense of their workforces. At the turn of the millennium, top bosses took home forty-seven times the average worker’s wage. By 2008, they were earning ninety-four times more.19 In some companies, this gap has become mind-bendingly wide. Take Bart Becht, chief executive of Reckitt Benckiser, which makes everything from the painkiller Nurofen to the household cleaning product Cillit Bang. Lucky old Mr Becht makes do with the equivalent income of 1,374 of his workers put together. Or behold Tesco boss Terry Leahy, pocketing 900 times more than his checkout workers and shelf-stackers.20
You might think that the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s would have given major businessmen pause for thought. Not for long, though. In October 2008 it was revealed that boardroom pay had soared by 55 per cent in just a year, leaving the average FTSE 100 chief executive with a wage packet 200 times that of the average worker. This bonanza did not stop them pressing ahead with pay freezes and mass redundancies. And when the Sunday Times published their annual Rich List in 2010, it revealed that the collective wealth of the 1,000 richest people in Britain had increased by 30 per cent. This was the biggest rise in the history of the Rich List.
Call centre worker Carl Leishman recalls being made redundant by his former employer at the height of the financial crisis. ‘I was in the interesting position of working for a bank when it all kicked off. The whole thing is the reason I got made redundant. I think the day after I officially finished with the bank they announced £8.3bn profits. Yeah, that stung a little. “Yeah, by the way, you’ve got no job now, but we’ve made £8.3bn profits this year.” Well, that’s it: everyone suffering for what a few idiots did, and they’re still getting paid millions for it.’
Such is the extreme distribution of wealth that the top 1 per cent scoffs a hefty 23 per cent slice of the national pie. The bottom half, on the other hand, has to make do with a meagre 6 per cent between them. Even this is misleading, because much of the ‘wealth’ of the bottom half is borrowed, through mortgages and credit. The top 1 per cent owns its wealth outright.
This ‘trickle-up’ model of economics has not come about because the people at the top have become more talented or more profitable. It has been driven by the smashing of the trade unions, a hire-and-fire labour force, and a taxation system rigged to benefit the wealthy. Even Jeremy Warner, a right-winger and deputy editor at the conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph, finds something amiss: ‘It is as if a small elite has captured—and kept for itself—all the spectacular benefits that capitalism is capable of producing.’21
‘There’s no doubt that the current tax system is regressive,’ says chartered accountant Richard Murphy. After all, we live in a country where the top decile pay less tax as a proportion of income than the bottom decile. Murphy identifies a number of reasons, including the fact that poorer people spend more of their income on indirect taxes like VAT; that National Insurance is capped at around £40,000; and that those earning between £70,000 and £100,000 a year can claim £5,000 of tax relief a year over and above their personal allowance.
‘We are intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich,’ New Labour’s high priest, Peter Mandelson, once said, ‘as long as they pay their taxes.’ In practice, wealthy businessmen and corporations go to great lengths to avoid paying tax at all. Murphy calculates that tax evasion costs the Treasury around £70 billion a year—that’s seventy times more than the estimates of benefit fraud. With armies of lawyers and tax experts, the economic elite has become skilled at exploiting loopholes and shuffling money about to avoid paying a penny.
‘There’s some quite blatant activity, particularly within the middle classes and the wealthy, where there’s a lot of income splitting going on,’ he says. ‘Tax shifting by moving income from one part within the relationship to another has become an extremely common way of avoiding significant amounts of tax. The self-employed are also past masters at this, through limited companies.’ What better example than Philip Green, a British billionaire businessman appointed by the Conservative government to advise on its spending review. Sir Philip gets away with paying no tax in Britain because he has given his Monaco-based wife legal ownership of key companies such as Topshop.
Looking beyond the statistics for a moment, clearly we are dealing with two groups of people with irreconcilable differences. On the one hand those who scrimp and save, relying on often poor and stagnating wages to pay the rent or the mortgage. Their long hours and growing productivity have gone unrewarded. They send their kids to local schools and when they get ill, they depend on the local GP and hospital. They pay their taxes. With the death of industrial Britain, many of them depend on relatively low-paid, insecure service sector jobs. Their needs and concerns are ignored by the middle-class worlds of politics and the media.
On the other hand we have a wealthy elite whose bank accounts have exploded in value, even in the midst of economic meltdown. They live global, jet-setting lifestyles, with mansions, villas and penthouse suites scattered around the globe. They may work hard and for long hours, but can be paid as much in a day as other hard-working people earn in a month. Many of them pay little or no tax, they send their kids to expensive private schools and use costly private health-care schemes. They have opted out of society. Not that this has dented their power and influence. After all, the tentacles of big business reach far into each of the main political parties. As well as their huge political power, it is this rich elite who run our major newspapers and broadcasters.
The idea that the working class has withered away, with just a ‘chav’ rump left, is a politically convenient myth. But there is no denying that it has changed profoundly over the last three decades. The old working class tended to thrive in communities based around the workplace. Most were men who had the same job for life, which was very likely to be the same as their father and grandfather before them. Many of these jobs had genuine prestige, and were well paid. People were more likely than not to be members of unions, and enjoyed genuine power in the workplace.
The modern working class resembles the old in one respect: it is made up of those who work for others and lack power over their own labour. But the jobs they do are generally cleaner and require less brawn: how fast you type is more important than how much you can lift. They work in offices, shops and call centres, often for relatively less pay and with greater job insecurity. Even before the Great Recession, wages were stagnating or, in many cases, declining. Millions of workers hop from job to job with an ever-growing frequency. A sense of community, belonging and pride in work has been stripped away. Terms and conditions are often poor, particularly for the army of temps who enjoy virtually no rights whatsoever. Entire swathes of the workforce are non-unionized, and labour’s bargaining power is weaker than ever.
A blue-uniformed male factory worker with a union card in his pocket might have been an appropriate symbol for the working class of the 1950s. A low-paid, part-time, female shelf-stacker would certainly not be unrepresentative of the same class today. But this contemporary working class is almost absent from our TV screens, the speeches of our politicians and the comments pages of our newspapers. Tory leader David Cameron spoke of the ‘Great Ignored’ during the 2010 general election. Who has better qualifications for this label than the British working class?
There is an insidious side to the pretence that class no longer exists in modern Britain. Rarely a day goes by without some politician or commentator paying homage to ‘meritocracy’, or the idea that anyone with talent and drive can make it big in modern Britain. The tragic irony is that the myth of the classless society gained ground just as society became more rigged in favour of the middle class. Britain remains as divided by class as it ever was.