Читать книгу Social Class in Europe - Étienne Penissat - Страница 16

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.