Tuesday 6 April 2010
An Ordinary Middle-Class Family
The middle class and the working class merged a generation ago. Those who work now sit in the middle, between the idle rich whose ranks they cannot hope to join (David Cameron, George Osborne), and the idle poor to whose ranks they run the permanent risk of being consigned. Gordon Brown did not create this situation. Nor did Tony Blair. Margaret Thatcher did.
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Exactly. This is what you get when you attack labor unions and end State commitment to full employment, and by full employment I mean real jobs that pay a family wage, and not the many service jobs being created by the neoliberals that can barely support a single person, let alone a family.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, Producerists in the U.S. tend to see the idle poor as wholly made up of undeserving poor people, those who are too lazy or generally morally bankrupt to deserve any help. While certainly some of the poor may be morally bankrupt or lazy, I think most people would take a job if they could find one. The problem is the economy is not producing enough jobs for those looking for employment, a result of the abandonment of full employment as a policy.
Of course, this reality is hard for many right-wing populists to handle because it forces them to look at the stark reality of the “free” market, neoliberal policies they have supported for the at least the past 30 years.
The changes to class structure aren't quite as simple as all that. The skilled working class (i.e. those doing manual jobs that others simply couldn't do without a long period of specialised training) was never as large as it seemed. Most workers in industrial Britain were unskilled labourers, machine minders or assembly line workers. In terms of wages, status, consumption and aspiration, the skilled workers had more in common with the middle clas administrators than with the unskilled. The changes to the working classes of the Thatcher to Brown years, for they are ongoing, can be summed up as the exporting of as many unskilled jobs as possible and the opening up of the remainder to competition. This competition has come chiefly from the wives and teenage offspring of the skiled and middle classes, the immigrants having tended to fill areas of labour shortage, such as construction and argriculture. Therefore, while the unskilled face fierce competition and are indeed in constant danger of falling into the underclass (which has always existed), the skilled tradesmen remain relatively secure and well off and still enjoy the same lifestyle as the middle classes.
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