Social Class in Europe. Étienne Penissat
professionals such as IT engineers and technicians health associate professionals (for example, nurses); finance, sales and administration associate professionals (accountants, etc.), teachers, etc.; and self-employed hotel and restaurant owners or managers. The dominant class incorporates most of the intellectual and scientific professions (doctors and healthcare specialists; managers in administration, finance and business; engineers and specialists in science, engineering and information technology; lawyers and judges; journalists; artists; etc.), senior managers and CEOs.
In the French edition of the book, we use the plural to highlight the internal diversity of these three major social classes. Here, we chose the singular following the usual term in English. We take up the expression ‘working class’, which refers to a broad social group including blue-collar workers, unskilled employees and small-scale self-employed. In the same way, we also use the expression ‘middle class’ that includes the petty bourgeoisie and the lower middle class. To identify the top of the European social space, we choose the term ‘dominant class’, which encompasses all workers who have the power to impose rules in professional, social and even political life.36
Combining the use of data from large-scale European statistical surveys with a division of the space into three social classes makes it possible to sketch an initial response to questions that are never posed in debates on Europe: how are inequalities of class manifested in terms of physical strenuousness of work, unemployment and precarity, access to new technology, choice of place of residence, housing conditions, cultural practices and access to health? This set of factors can be used to piece together the jigsaw of classes in Europe, and to understand the political movements and splits that run through the continent.
Since 2008, the eruption of the Greek debt and the crisis in public finance have exposed the marked disparities in economic development between different European countries. Despite the constantly reiterated promises that social policy would be standardised, the most disadvantaged groups in some countries have been hit much harder by the crisis than in others. During the 1990s, the received wisdom was that the social and economic structures of the countries comprising the European Union at that time would inevitably converge. Many sociologists have prophesied the inexorable disappearance of the working-class world, and its replacement by a large middle class. Thirty years later, social structure is far from uniform across European countries, and the working class has not disappeared.
However, the term ‘working class’ is singularly absent from most public debate about Europe. The European Commission prefers the terms ‘poor’ – those who earn less than 60 per cent of median wage1 – or ‘excluded’ – all those who lack the means to meet their needs. In technocratic discourse, Europe is summed up as an opposition between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, with unemployment the main differentiating criterion used to measure inequality. By thus homogenising the ‘bottom’ of society, this approach conceals the relations of power and the social processes that are at the root of these subaltern positions. This binary perspective, dividing people into winners and losers under the new rules of the labour market, suggests that inequality can be reduced to differences between individual life paths. The concept of the working class helps to break with this representation of the world in terms of singular viewpoints and mobilities, for it reminds us that subaltern positions are inherited and reproduced.
In this chapter, we seek to highlight those factors that, beyond national citizenship, unite socio-economic groups as disparate as cleaners, manual workers, retail saleswomen, small tradespeople and farmers in order to shed light on the relations of power that operate throughout the continent. Identifying the common characteristics of the European working class is also a way of evaluating the effects the economic crisis has had on these social groups, by revealing their particular vulnerability, and emphasising the obstacles to trade union and political activism among these groups throughout Europe.
PORTRAIT OF A SOCIAL GROUP IN COMPETITION THROUGHOUT EUROPE
In recent years, every effort has been made to bring the working classes of the different European countries into conflict with one another, exacerbating the competition arising from the globalisation of trade. Indeed, it is primarily the sectors employing large numbers of manual workers that have been displaced from the centre to the periphery or even beyond the margins of the continent. Chains of outsourcing also developed considerably during the 1990s, and have been strengthened in the East since the 2000s: more than 4.5 million employees in Europe work in an industrial enterprise whose activity is subcontracted by a company in another European country.2 These movements have major consequences for the social situation within a number of companies that are particularly at risk, where job blackmail has become common currency: adjustments of working hours, wage cuts, productivity pushes and everything else become negotiable, even in the German automotive sector where the trade unions are still strong. Aside from these relocations, the fall in industrial employment in Western Europe is also due to a shift in the division of labour at the European level, mainly between the former Eastern countries and those of the North and West. This increasing specialisation of work between countries alters the shape and composition of social classes in Europe.
The dream of a Europe without proletarians
According to the accepted doctrine currently operative in Brussels, the tertiarisation of the European economy is synonymous with an unstoppable march towards a Europe of the knowledge economy that will become the domain of managers and highly skilled professionals. Manual professions and unskilled jobs would be destined to disappear, through the development of robots and digital technologies that would replace workers carrying out unskilled tasks. In reality, nothing is less certain. Undoubtedly, since the 1970s, industry has been declining in importance in Europe, being replaced by new activities in retail, services, banking, etc. The tertiary sector (services and retail) is now the biggest employer, representing seven out of every ten jobs. This development has by no means led to the disappearance or even the minimisation of the working class in Europe. But the tertiarisation process has also changed low-skilled jobs. In fact, unskilled occupations and jobs have increased markedly at the same time, because these new services also require a workforce that can take on tasks where skill is less recognised. Moreover, the increase in women’s levels of employment, and the ageing of the population in the North and West, create new needs in relation to childcare, care for the elderly and domestic tasks. Thus the number of domestic cleaners, childcare workers, home-care assistants, shopworkers, cashiers, sales assistants and nursing assistants (all jobs occupied predominantly by women) is increasing sharply all over Europe.3 This has led some to conclude that a polarisation of European social structures is under way: on the one hand, highly skilled, well-paid employees and, on the other poorly skilled, low-paid precarious workers.4
But this polarisation is also related to patterns of specialisation and division of labour linked to globalisation. In the countries of the South of Europe and in Germany, the growth in unskilled occupations sits alongside a high number of skilled administrative workers. In most of the former countries of the East, the proportion of unskilled workers remains limited, while skilled manual workers still predominate. In Scandinavia, social-democratic governments have limited the decline in skilled work:5 Finland and Denmark, for example, have seen a sharp rise in the number of skilled female manual workers. In addition to these national peculiarities, disparities persist in the different states’ strategies of intervention. Over the last twenty years of the twentieth century, some social indicators (social-welfare