Social Class in Europe. Étienne Penissat
very rare.36 There are still more strikes in the countries of Western Europe, despite the fact that workers in some former countries of the East, such as the Czech Republic, have mounted strong campaigns against the liberal reforms and austerity policies imposed by their government. But these campaigns have largely involved public-sector employees, and the process of relocation of industry to these countries has not revived worker activism, except in a few exceptional cases such as the strike that broke out in the Dacia factories (a subsidiary of the Renault group) in Romania in March 2008.
The decline in union activism has paved the way for the implementation of policies aimed at deregulating employment rights, often at the instigation of the European Union. These changes primarily affect low-skilled and unskilled jobs in industry and services. For example, the European directive on working hours sets the maximum number of hours to be worked per week at forty-eight – and even at sixty hours under certain conditions for lorry drivers.37 These ‘minimum rules’ are transposed to the various legislative systems of European states, but with upper limits set so high that labour legislation can vary widely from one country to another. In Poland, companies can now make greater demands for overtime or night working. In Portugal, overtime pay has been revised downwards. In the Czech Republic, Spain, Greece, Poland and Romania, the maximum length of short-term contracts has been extended, and new types of work contract with fewer protections have been introduced. Finally, in the Czech Republic and Poland, redundancy pay has been cut, and in Slovakia the minimum notice period has been reduced.38 And the European Union is continuing to demand that member states pass reforms imposing ever-increasing flexibility on the part of employees.
INCOME AND CONSUMPTION: THE WORKING CLASS SPLIT IN TWO
While the working class in Europe has been severely weakened on the labour market, its situation in terms of level of resources and access to consumer goods gives less cause for concern, particularly compared to their peers in other parts of the world. Moreover, over the last decade, the level of education has risen throughout Europe, helping to bring the cultural practices of the different social groups closer together. Nevertheless, substantial inequalities remain, both in the financial domain and in access to leisure.
Low-income families
A first measure of relative position in the social hierarchy is household disposable income: 22 per cent of the working class in Europe lives below the poverty line, meaning that members of it earn less than 60 per cent of the median wage in their country. This is due to the increase in unemployment, which forces more and more households to depend on a single source of income, and to wage-restraint policies. For these groups, deprivation is evident in every area of daily life. Those most at risk are farmers (40 per cent living below the poverty line), small-scale self-employed workers (29 per cent), low-skilled manual and white-collar workers (24 per cent) and farm labourers (23 per cent). These results offer a glimpse of the financial deprivation of whole swathes of the European working class, particularly in the countries of the South and East of Europe, where a class of small subsistence farmers, together with small-scale retail and craft sectors, persists. The financial subordination of the European working class emerges more clearly still when the composition of households is taken into account (Table 5).
Table 5. Poverty among European Households
| Proportion of individuals belonging to a family living below the poverty line | ||
| Working class | Lone parent with one or more dependent children | 41% |
| Two adults with three or more dependent children | 38% | |
| Two adults with two dependent children | 23% | |
| Two adults with one dependent child | 19% | |
| Middle class | Lone parent with one or more dependent children | 19% |
| Two adults with three or more dependent children | 10% | |
| Two adults with two dependent children | 7% | |
| Two adults with one dependent child | 6% |
Source: EU-SILC 2014. Population: People in work aged between twenty-five and sixty-five, EU 27 (excluding Malta and Slovenia). Interpretation: 41 per cent of working-class people belonging to a household comprising a lone parent with several dependent children live below the poverty line in their country.
Working-class households in Europe are those most at risk of falling into financial poverty, but those with dependent children fare still worse. Those most affected by poverty are single women with children, the number of whom has increased markedly in the countries of Northern and Western Europe. An ethnographic survey conducted in a large social housing neighbourhood in Nottingham, in the East Midlands, revealed the mechanisms leading to such situations of poverty in the United Kingdom.39 Against a background of deindustrialisation, men, primarily the descendants of Jamaican immigrant workers, are turning to the drug economy and therefore tend to be absent from the home either because they have to be constantly travelling or because they are in prison. Forced to accept precarious jobs in order to meet the needs of their family, women are in the front line of attacks from the social services and public authorities, who accuse them of living on welfare. The exclusion of these women is reinforced by austerity policies, and their children (who are often mixed-race) and their black partners suffer institutionalised racial discrimination, particularly at the hands of the police. The combination of these factors contributes to their becoming confined to their neighbourhood, which becomes the only place where they are safe from symbolic attacks and discrimination.
The financial vulnerability of the working class can be qualified with reference to inequalities in assets. Overall, self-employed workers tend to have more resources than employees, but these small variations are difficult to document over the whole of Europe. Moreover, limiting consideration merely to the financial dimension fails to take into account other forms of exclusion. In order to gain a more reliable representation of social inequality, the picture needs to be supplemented with information on access to certain consumer goods, and hence to cultural, symbolic and physical resources.
Access to consumer goods: inequalities between countries, inequalities between social groups
In the domain of consumer goods, the European working class has a basic standard of living, but with differences between social groups. For example, 80 per cent of working-class people in Europe own a car, but car ownership is often lower among cleaners and manual labourers (72 per cent) than among skilled workers in the metalwork and electronics industries (86 per cent). The divergences between countries are wider: only 41 per cent of working-class households in Romania, and 57 per cent in Hungary, state that they own a car, compared to 90 per cent of working-class households in France.
Access to holidays is another useful indicator of financial inequality between Europeans: half of the working class states that it cannot afford one week’s holiday a year. Skilled workers in the metalwork and electronics industries are the working-class people most able to take a few days’ holiday a year, while farmers and cleaners are the two categories most often lacking: 60 per cent of them never go on holiday. Rather