Social Class in Europe. Étienne Penissat
of farmers is no more than 1 per cent.
But there should be no mistake: these small-scale self-employed workers have little in common with entrepreneurs who have several employees under their command. In most cases, they are sole craftsmen, sometimes supported by one or two employees: they are particularly exposed to the vagaries of the economy, and are in a weak position to borrow or to develop their enterprise. In Poland, four-fifths of farmers (around 2.8 million people) work on small farms (less than ten hectares) which earn them little (less than €3,000 per year). Such farms barely meet the needs of self-sufficiency, forcing both partners in the household to work on the land (mixed farming with cereals, sugar beet, potatoes, hay and pasture) and raise a few animals, while supplementing this income through other work.9 The situation is similar, or even more difficult, in Romania, where three-quarters of farms occupy less than one hectare. Very often, these self-employed workers have no protection, and live in real social insecurity. Despite pressure from the European Union to subsidise only large farms, the Romanian authorities, particularly the Social Democratic Party, attempt to support small agricultural units, bypassing European norms in order to allow many working-class households to subsist – and thus secure their electoral support.10
In Greece, many self-employed people work for only one employer. These quasi-employees are, however, still registered with the social-security system as self-employed, and thus assume all the risks associated with the vagaries of the economic situation: they have no right to redundancy pay, or to unemployment benefit if their contract is terminated. In Spain, those known as ‘autonomous workers’ have gradually been granted social rights similar to those of employees, but they have been hit much harder by the economic crisis. In some sectors, such as transport, the self-employed lorry driver has to constantly increase his working hours in order to maintain his income, exposing him to the risk of legal sanction.11 The result is permanent state of competition between self-employed and employed drivers, enabling the large haulage companies to eliminate all possibility of collective action.
Increasing competition can also be seen among employed working-class people, where the proportion of manual workers remains high, particularly in industry. This preponderance of manual work nevertheless has a new geographical distribution: many industrial jobs have been relocated from Western Europe to the margins, in the East and South. Poland offers a typical example. After it joined the European Union in 2004, the country became host to the factories of major electronics and white-goods manufacturers, mainly in the Warsaw region and in the south of the country. American computer manufacturer Dell, for example, closed its production site at Limerick, in Ireland, transferring it in January 2008 to a new plant in Łódź, Poland’s third city. Poland has also become the largest manufacturer of flat screens in Europe. More recently, in January 2017, the Whirlpool group announced its decision to close its tumble-dryer plant in Amiens, in France, and relocate it to Poland, despite having received subsidies to modernise the French site. For the last twenty years these movements have contributed, bit by bit, to altering the profile of the working class in Europe.
Beyond the division between the self-employed and wage earners, what the working class has in common is that it is the group most exposed to international competition, through both migration and relocation.
THE MAP OF THE WORKING CLASS IN EUROPE
The new distribution of production in Europe means that the relative proportion of the working class is far from uniform throughout the countries of the European Union. In broad outline, a contrast can once again be drawn between a Europe of the South and East, including the Baltic states, where the working class forms the largest proportion of the population, and a Europe of the North and West, where the middle class comprises a substantial share.
In one group of countries, then, the working class is predominant among people in work. This group comprises the southern periphery (Portugal, Spain, Greece) and the central and eastern periphery (the former socialist countries) of Europe (see Map 1). In these countries, the proportion of working-class people is higher than the European average (43 per cent), and considerably greater than that of other social classes.12 In Romania they make up as much as two-thirds of the working population. Italy, Cyprus and Austria have a similar class structure: the proportion of working-class people is slightly above the European average, but the middle class is also large.
Map 1. The Working Class in European Countries
Key: Darker grey countries indicate a proportion of the working class in work greater than the EU mean; lighter grey indicates a proportion less than the EU mean. On average the working class represents 43 per cent of employed people, aged twenty-five to sixty-five, in Europe, EU 27 (excluding Malta). Source: LFS 2014.
In Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Portugal and particularly in Greece, a significant proportion of the working class works in agriculture, which remains low intensity. The basic type of farm is centred on the family unit and self-sufficiency: in Poland, these farms occupy 16 per cent of the cultivated land and employ 30 per cent of the agricultural workforce;13 the proportions are very similar in Romania. In Spain, the agricultural sector still employs a large workforce – smaller nevertheless than in the former socialist countries – but in very different circumstances: it is highly dependent on immigrant labour, working on large mixed farms. In addition, temporary employment agencies in Spain provide the services of contract workers from Latin America and North Africa to farmers operating in other European countries, such as France. These workers are in principle affiliated to the Spanish social-welfare system, but in practice have no access to healthcare, and the company deducts from their wages the cost of travel between Spain and the countries where they work.14
In the countries of the former communist bloc, the transition to a market economy has often been brutal. It was accompanied by a rise in inequality throughout the 1990s and 2000s, to the advantage of a small minority usually concentrated in the capitals or the major cities. In some countries, such as the Czech Republic, the working class has, however, been relatively protected by the state during the transition from a planned economy to liberalism. Moreover, the Czech government encouraged the establishment of new industries, for example in the automotive sector where Škoda – the Soviet-era carmaker of Czechoslovakia – was bought by Volkswagen. This kind of change results in major disruption for suppliers: the parts manufacturer Valéo chose to end production in Spain because Volkswagen had relocated its Spanish plants to Slovakia, while at the same time the Czech Republic had supported the development of a network of subcontractors capable of collaborating closely with German constructors and parts manufacturers. However, the long-term unemployed and pensioners were less protected from the effects of the transition followed by the crisis.
Elsewhere, in all of the countries of the southern and eastern periphery, the working class was particularly badly hit by the 2008 financial and economic crisis. In the South this resulted in a huge rise in unemployment, particularly among young people, and increasing job insecurity. The result has been a resurgence in undeclared work, the level of which is probably much higher than elsewhere in Europe.15 The former countries of the East and the Baltic states have also paid a heavy price for the crisis, which first took the form of a sharp increase in unemployment (except in the Czech Republic). Unemployment has fallen since 2011, although youth unemployment remains high in Poland, Romania and Slovakia. In the Baltic countries, many workers have had to combine two jobs, while in Poland and Slovenia the number of short-term contracts has risen sharply.16 However, in