Social Class in Europe. Étienne Penissat
Source: LFS 2011. Population: People in work aged between twenty-five and sixty-five, EU 27 (except for France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovenia, for which the rate of failure to provide ESEG-related unemployment data was over 30 per cent, and which were therefore excluded).
Hit by redundancies, an increase in long-term unemployment and the erosion of social protection, the European working class lives in uncertainty about the future: more than any other group, they fear losing their job within the next six months (+ 3 percentage points more than the average for Europeans overall). But this fear of unemployment is not evenly spread throughout the working class: it is expressed by a quarter of skilled construction workers, 23 per cent of manual labourers and 22 per cent of farm labourers; among drivers, nursing assistants and childcare assistants, on the other hand, only 17 per cent fear losing their job, probably because many of the latter work in the public or quasi-public sector. Thirty years of successive relocations, initially within Europe, then throughout the world, have thus undermined manual workers’ relationship with future employment, particularly among those who work directly with machines. For all of these people, the threat of unemployment is felt beyond the sphere of work: it feeds into a social vulnerability that taints their relationship with the future and produces a persistent but vague sense of abandonment, a process that leads them from being integrated in society to feeling themselves marginal.23
The working class’s higher risk of unemployment is combined with a weaker status and a level of part-time employment higher than among other employed workers. In 2014 around 14 per cent of working-class people in employment had a temporary contract, compared to less than 9 per cent of the dominant and middle classes. Here again, there was a particularly sharp contrast between unskilled manual and white-collar workers, particularly manual labourers and farm labourers (17 per cent on temporary contracts), and senior managers (3 per cent). In most European countries, these insecure jobs are also the least well paid, regardless of age, level of education and sector, and women are those most likely to be employed in them.
Among women in employment, this precarity usually takes the form of part-time work. At the beginning of the 2010s, women predominated among part-time workers in Europe, whether under the pretext of adjustment of working hours or of flexibility.24 At first sight, this gender inequality seems generalised: part-time work is equally common among the working class and the middle class. But this is only a superficial resemblance. Part-time work is twice as common among the working class as among the middle class, and particularly affects low-skilled women workers.
For these women, part-time work often prevents them from achieving an adequate standard of living, and forces them to find another source of income. The occupations where part-time work is most common are the least skilled: cleaners, childcare assistants, home-care assistants and domestic workers are now included in the sector of ‘staff providing personal and household services’. Between 2008 and 2014, employment in this sector rose by 12 per cent, against a fall of 3 per cent in employment over all sectors during the same period.25 At a time when the number of women in work is rising and the population ageing in every country in Europe, occupations involving domestic work (childcare, care for the elderly and domestic tasks) constitute a sector that is creating jobs, principally for women.
Whether they respond to a need or to a desire for comfort, these occupations now comprise one of the largest elements of the working class (except in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe). Some researchers see these caring professions (‘care’ for short) as a new marker of an increasingly globalised capitalism.26 Thus the persistence of the patriarchal system – childcare, elderly care and domestic work are still predominantly the province of women – combined with the rising number of women in work in Western countries, particularly among more highly educated women, means that these tasks are taken on by working-class women who are very often immigrants or foreigners, and low-paid. In some countries, such as Germany and Austria, public policy has encouraged the employment of domestic staff on precarious contracts for low wages, reinforcing inequalities related to class and national origin among women.27 Among cleaners, the proportion of non-European foreigners is 16 per cent, compared with an average of 6 per cent in the working class as a whole. In Austria, Spain, Estonia and Latvia, between 20 and 30 per cent of industrial cleaners are foreigners from outside Europe, and in Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Denmark the figure is between 30 and 65 per cent.
The working class as a whole is burdened by an accumulation of disadvantages that have intensified since the 2008 crisis: regular full-time work is increasingly less common, being replaced by hybrid forms of insecure jobs. The employers and the most liberal governments have taken advantage of the crisis to flexibilise the labour market, to the detriment primarily of manual workers and low-skilled white-collar workers. Rapid turnover, temporary contracts and part-time work have thus become the general rule, to the detriment of certain sections of the working class. Those particularly affected by unemployment and insecurity are women, non-European foreigners and young people. These destabilising factors prevent them from becoming integrated into the labour market and reduce the protection they are entitled to. Insecurity, moreover, is not confined to young people: unlike those in managerial and intermediate occupations, the working class is at risk of precarity at any age, including those aged over fifty. Job insecurity remains a constant in their working life.
Onerous working conditions
Working-class people in Europe are also those most likely to face hard and dangerous working conditions (Table 4). Contrary to popular belief, the technological advances of recent decades have not in fact put an end to the rigours of low-skilled and unskilled labour.
Table 4. Hardness of Working Conditions in Europe
| ‘Does your main job involve …?’ | Repetitive hand or arm movements | Painful or tiring positions | Carrying or shifting heavy loads | Exposure to loud noise | Exposure to smoke or dust | Working standing up |
| Dominant class | 54% | 29% | 12% | 13% | 8% | 16% |
| Middle class | 52% | 32% | 17% | 20% | 9% | 23% |
| Working class | 71% | 58% | 50% | 38% | 24% | 65% |
Source: EWCS 2015. Population: People in work aged between twenty-five and sixty-five, EU 27 (excluding Malta). Note: onerous working conditions are usually defined as those in which survey respondents report being subject to them for at least one-quarter of their working hours. Those defined as working standing up are respondents who reported that their job ‘never’ or ‘almost never’ involved working sitting down.
For the vast majority of the working class in Europe, work involves ‘repetitive hand and arm movements’ (+ 20 percentage points more than in the middle class). To these are added ‘painful or tiring positions’, which are much more rarely encountered