Social Class in Europe. Étienne Penissat
of employment) in the member states of the European Community have tended to converge, but this process has been interrupted by the successive expansions to incorporate new countries, and by the varying reactions to the crisis of 2008. Plans for reducing national debt, imposed under the Stability and Growth Pact, have been much more drastic in Ireland, in the countries of the South and in the former socialist countries. The proportion of young people under thirty who are inactive – not in education, employment or training – reveals a growing contrast between two groups of countries, with a European average of 16 per cent in 2013, and major disparities between nations. On one side, the level was around 8 per cent in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden; on the other, it was around 25 per cent in Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.6 Underlying this disparity there are differences in economic growth but also in social policy: the pressure from the European Union to reduce public spending is superficially comparable in each country, but not all states have the same capacity or the same desire to resist, as is manifested by the increasing national differences in expenditure on health, education, family support and unemployment benefit.
Thus the experience of unemployment and precarity may vary from one country to another, depending on the level of benefits and social protection established by the different states.7
The two faces of European deindustrialisation
While deindustrialisation has led to the decline of manual labour in the six founding members of the European Union, this is not the case at the level of the twenty-seven countries that now make it up. In most Central and Eastern European countries and in the Baltic states, industrial production accounts for between 20 and 30 per cent of workers, compared with the European average of 18 per cent. This significant share held by industry is partly due to successive waves of relocation, especially in the automotive sector.
In the countries of the South, some regions which previously specialised in the textile industry, such as Tuscany or northern Portugal, have been hit hard by the departure of entire factories, speeding the decline of the manual sphere in these countries. Overall, the tertiary sector represents a comparable proportion of economic activity to that in the countries of the North and West, but this apparent equivalence is deceptive: these are activities mainly involving unskilled tertiary work, in sectors such as retail, transport and personal services.
Thus the years 1990–2000 were marked by a combination of a new division of production with the deterioration of conditions of employment in Europe. Differentiations within social structures were exacerbated by increased competition between workers. The working class was caught in a vice on both sides of the continent: on one side, those in the countries of the East and the South are forced to accept low wages or even to emigrate to find work; on the other, those in the North and West face company relocations and have to accept wage restraint and job flexibility in order to keep hold of the jobs that remain. This gives an idea of the social shock that has hit the whole of the continent, in the context of expansion of the European Union without any requirement for social convergence.
Graph 1. The Employed Labour Force in European Countries by Sector of Activity.
Data: LFS 2014. Population: Employed persons aged twenty-five to sixty-five, EU 27 (excluding Malta).
The countries of Europe can thus be divided into three large groups, on the basis of economic structure: in the West and North, skilled service jobs predominate; in the East, industrial jobs remain central; the South is characterised by the persistence of a traditional and unskilled tertiary sector. Finally, while little remains of the agricultural sector in the North and West (making up 1 per cent of jobs compared to an average of 5 per cent in Europe as a whole), it is holding firm in the countries on the margins of Europe, which are also the least developed: Greece, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia and Bulgaria. The former countries of the East and those of the South effectively constitute the workshop, the market garden and the breadbasket of countries in the North and West of Europe.
Small-scale self-employed workers still present in substantial numbers
If we now consider the social characteristics and working conditions of those at the bottom of the European social scale, we find a number of common features that allow us to draw a group portrait.
One of these common features is that, on the European scale, working-class people who are in work are predominantly men: they make up 60 per cent of this group, compared to only 45 per cent among the middle class. This over-representation is due, first, to the fact that women who work tend, in all European countries, to have higher educational qualifications than men. Furthermore, where qualifications are equal, they tend to work more in administrative jobs, while men are predominant in manual or technical professions.8 Working-class women are also more likely not to be in work, particularly in Southern Europe, thus automatically increasing the proportion of men among people in work. And although there may be considerable differences between countries, the employment rate for men remains higher than that for women in all European countries, without exception.
The working class in Europe consists predominantly of low-skilled and unskilled manual and white-collar workers (40 per cent) – mainly manual workers and domestic cleaners – and skilled workers (38 per cent), most of them in industry (Table 1). To these are added other, mainly female, occupations such as nursing assistants and childcare workers.
Table 1. Socio-economic Groups within the Working Class in Europe
| Skilled white-collar workers (7%) | Nursing assistants, childcare workers and home-care assistants | 7% |
| Small-scale self-employed workers (15%) | Farmers | 7% |
| Craftsmen | 8% | |
| Skilled manual workers (38%) | Skilled construction workers | 6% |
| Skilled craft or food and drink industry workers | 4% | |
| Workers in the metalwork and electronics industries | 12% | |
| Machine operators | 7% | |
| Drivers | 9% | |
| Unskilled manual workers and white-collar workers (40%) | Retail and service assistants | 19% |
| Manual labourers | 10% | |
| Cleaners | 9% | |
| Agricultural workers | 2% | |
| Total of working class | 100% |
Source: LFS 2014. Population: People in work aged between twenty-five and sixty-five, EU 27 (excluding Malta).
Over Europe as a whole, the proportion of self-employed workers – farmers and craftsmen – is fairly substantial. But this average masks wide disparities: in the regions of the East and South, being in paid work is far from the norm in all sectors, and a large number of the working class work for themselves. This situation contrasts strongly with that in France, the United Kingdom and Germany, for example,