by Owen Jones
Another challenge to the existence of the working class came from the almost religious fervour with which Tory and New Labour govern- ments 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 an affordable rent below extortionate market rates.
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, ithas 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 isit? 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 itwas 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 every~ day 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 customerservice 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 politi- cians 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 decimal- ization 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 web sites 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-c-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 increas- ingly 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 USDA W, 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.' According to USDA W, 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.'
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 th
at 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 oflowmorale,' 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 bruis- ing twelve-hour shifts, three days on and three days off. 'I would probably have started offlife 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 Iused 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 gov· ernment 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? 'F or the grief you get, definitely 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, fulltime 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 0xford in early 2009 illustrates where the rise of the temp has brought us. Eight hundred and fifty temps-many of whom had worked inthe 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."
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 BusinessThe 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 inwork 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.
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 ideayou've just run past me a piece of 0 ld 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 Longhridge 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 60per cent now in the service sector, earnings were considerably less.'
It is the same story in other areas hit by the destruction of industryold mining regions, for example. 'Obviously the new jobs are cleaner thanworking 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 Eilis 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 oflow-paid, unskilled jobs at the other. The middle-level occupations, on the other hand, are shrinking.