Читать книгу Social Class in Europe - Étienne Penissat - Страница 19

The increase in unemployment in Europe is often presented as afflicting all groups without distinction, but the effects of the crisis, of globalisation and of the spread of new technologies are not undifferentiated in the world of work: the working class is in the front line of this destabilisation of the labour market, making it more vulnerable than all other social groups.

The working class in a position of social insecurity

Unemployment does not affect Europeans at random: it has a more systematic impact on the lower end of the social hierarchy.²⁰ In 2011, three years after the start of the economic crisis in Europe, unemployment among the over-twenty-fives was on average 5 per cent, with wide disparities between social classes: the level was 11 per cent among the working class, compared to less than 3 per cent among the dominant class. Whereas only 3 per cent of executives experience unemployment, it affects 11 per cent of skilled workers and 14 per cent of unskilled manual and white-collar workers.²¹ Moreover, for many households in working-class neighbourhoods, the risk of losing one’s job is doubled, for it threatens both partners. This heightened risk of unemployment is accompanied in most European countries by drastic reductions in unemployment benefit, in the name of promoting an ‘active’ social state that makes any new benefit conditional on the individual taking steps to find work.²²

Table 3. Unemployment among Europeans

	Unemployment rate
Managers	3%
Intellectual and scientific professions	3%
Intermediate professions	4%
Self-employed workers	4%
Skilled white-collar workers	7%
Skilled manual workers	11%
Unskilled manual and white-collar workers	14%
Dominant class	3%
Middle class	5%
Working class	11%

Source: LFS 2011. Population: People in work aged between twenty-five and sixty-five, EU 27 (except for France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovenia, for which the rate of failure to provide ESEG-related unemployment data was over 30 per cent, and which were therefore excluded).

Hit by redundancies, an increase in long-term unemployment and the erosion of social protection, the European working class lives in uncertainty about the future: more than any other group, they fear losing their job within the next six months (+ 3 percentage points more than the average for Europeans overall). But this fear of unemployment is not evenly spread throughout the working class: it is expressed by a quarter of skilled construction workers, 23 per cent of manual labourers and 22 per cent of farm labourers; among drivers, nursing assistants and childcare assistants, on the other hand, only 17 per cent fear losing their job, probably because many of the latter work in the public or quasi-public sector. Thirty years of successive relocations, initially within Europe, then throughout the world, have thus undermined manual workers’ relationship with future employment, particularly among those who work directly with machines. For all of these people, the threat of unemployment is felt beyond the sphere of work: it feeds into a social vulnerability that taints their relationship with the future and produces a persistent but vague sense of abandonment, a process that leads them from being integrated in society to feeling themselves marginal.²³

The working class’s higher risk of unemployment is combined with a weaker status and a level of part-time employment higher than among other employed workers. In 2014 around 14 per cent of working-class people in employment had a temporary contract, compared to less than 9 per cent of the dominant and middle classes. Here again, there was a particularly sharp contrast between unskilled manual and white-collar workers, particularly manual labourers and farm labourers (17 per cent on temporary contracts), and senior managers (3 per cent). In most European countries, these insecure jobs are also the least well paid, regardless of age, level of education and sector, and women are those most likely to be employed in them.

Among women in employment, this precarity usually takes the form of part-time work. At the beginning of the 2010s, women predominated among part-time workers in Europe, whether under the pretext of adjustment of working hours or of flexibility.²⁴ At first sight, this gender inequality seems generalised: part-time work is equally common among the working class and the middle class. But this is only a superficial resemblance. Part-time work is twice as common among the working class as among the middle class, and particularly affects low-skilled women workers.

For these women, part-time work often prevents them from achieving an adequate standard of living, and forces them to find another source of income. The occupations where part-time work is most common are the least skilled: cleaners, childcare assistants, home-care assistants and domestic workers are now included in the sector of ‘staff providing personal and household services’. Between 2008 and 2014, employment in this sector rose by 12 per cent, against a fall of 3 per cent in employment over all sectors during the same period.²⁵ At a time when the number of women in work is rising and the population ageing in every country in Europe, occupations involving domestic work (childcare, care for the elderly and domestic tasks) constitute a sector that is creating jobs, principally for women.

Whether they respond to a need or to a desire for comfort, these occupations now comprise one of the largest elements of the working class (except in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe). Some researchers see these caring professions (‘care’ for short) as a new marker of an increasingly globalised capitalism.²⁶ Thus the persistence of the patriarchal system – childcare, elderly care and domestic work are still predominantly the province of women – combined with the rising number of women in work in Western countries, particularly among more highly educated women, means that these tasks are taken on by working-class women who are very often immigrants or foreigners, and low-paid. In some countries, such as Germany and Austria, public policy has encouraged the employment of domestic staff on precarious contracts for low wages, reinforcing inequalities related to class and national origin among women.²⁷ Among cleaners, the proportion of non-European foreigners is 16 per cent, compared with an average of 6 per cent in the working class as a whole. In Austria, Spain, Estonia and Latvia, between 20 and 30 per cent of industrial cleaners are foreigners from outside Europe, and in Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Denmark the figure is between 30 and 65 per cent.

The working class as a whole is burdened by an accumulation of disadvantages that have intensified since the 2008 crisis: regular full-time work is increasingly less common, being replaced by hybrid forms of insecure jobs. The employers and the most liberal governments have taken advantage of the crisis to flexibilise the labour market, to the detriment primarily of manual workers and low-skilled white-collar workers. Rapid turnover, temporary contracts and part-time work have thus become the general rule, to the detriment of certain sections of the working class. Those particularly affected by unemployment and insecurity are women, non-European foreigners and young people. These destabilising factors prevent them from becoming integrated into the labour market and reduce the protection they are entitled to. Insecurity, moreover, is not confined to young people: unlike those in managerial and intermediate occupations, the working class is at risk of precarity at any age, including those aged over fifty. Job insecurity remains a constant in their working life.

Onerous working conditions

Working-class people in Europe are also those most likely to face hard and dangerous working conditions (Table 4). Contrary to popular belief, the technological advances of recent decades have not in fact put an end to the rigours of low-skilled and unskilled labour.

Table 4. Hardness of Working Conditions in Europe

‘Does your main job involve …?’	Repetitive hand or arm movements	Painful or tiring positions	Carrying or shifting heavy loads	Exposure to loud noise	Exposure to smoke or dust	Working standing up
Dominant class	54%	29%	12%	13%	8%	16%
Middle class	52%	32%	17%	20%	9%	23%
Working class	71%	58%	50%	38%	24%	65%

Source: EWCS 2015. Population: People in work aged between twenty-five and sixty-five, EU 27 (excluding Malta). Note: onerous working conditions are usually defined as those in which survey respondents report being subject to them for at least one-quarter of their working hours. Those defined as working standing up are respondents who reported that their job ‘never’ or ‘almost never’ involved working sitting down.

For the vast majority of the working class in Europe, work involves ‘repetitive hand and arm movements’ (+ 20 percentage points more than in the middle class). To these are added ‘painful or tiring positions’, which are much more rarely encountered in other occupations. There are significant class differences in physical hardness of work in terms of jobs that involve regularly carrying heavy loads, regular exposure to loud noise or to smoke and dust, and those that involve working standing up. A number of occupational groups are particularly affected: half of all machine operators work exclusively with repetitive hand and arm movements; a quarter of skilled construction workers report working all or almost all of the time in painful or tiring working positions; a quarter of manual labourers state that they routinely have to carry heavy loads. These factors particularly affect workers in the metal-work and electronics industries, whose working conditions are much more onerous than those in the service industry, and who continue to suffer physically stressful working conditions as they get older. Small-scale self-employed workers are not exempt: they also have to carry heavy loads, and are relatively likely to be exposed to dust and smoke and to loud noise.

Working-class women seem to suffer less from some forms of harsh working conditions associated with industrial labour. For example, they are less often exposed to smoke or dust. However, they experience other forms of physical hardship, such as shifting heavy loads. The majority of cleaners, nursing assistants and child-care assistants have to remain standing for virtually the whole of their working day. Overall, 70 per cent of working-class women in Europe report that their work never or almost never involves working sitting down; this is the case for only 20 per cent of dominant and middle-class women.

Being regularly subject to the hardest working conditions significantly affects the relationship that working-class people have with their professional future: only two-thirds of them think they will be able to do the same work when they are sixty, compared to more than four-fifths of the dominant class. While this proportion is roughly equal between men and women, it varies markedly with age. Young people are more likely to anticipate being worn down by work: among the working class, a little of over half of those aged under thirty-five state that they would be able to do the same work at sixty, compared to three-quarters of those aged over fifty. This disparity relates both to socialisation at work and to changes in people’s relation to the future over the course of their lives. The disenchantment born of a difficult start to working life in manual or unskilled jobs prevents people from imagining that they might continue in this work for many years. By contrast, once past a certain age, the fear of redundancy can make working conditions that younger people find intolerable seem acceptable.

The working class occupies a subordinate position in the labour market, which is manifested in an accumulation of disadvantages that vary depending on gender. In simplified terms, on the one hand are men who work in farming, skilled manual work and crafts, whose working conditions are physically the hardest, involving exposure to painful positions, loud noise, heavy loads, dust, smoke, vapour and repetitive hand and arm movements. On the other are the female cleaners, retail and service assistants, nursing assistants and childcare workers who tend more to work standing up in insecure jobs.

A disadvantageous relation of power: the decline of unions and labour activism

Over the last forty years, the combination of unemployment and increasing job insecurity has had many repercussions on the working class’s individual and collective capacities for resistance. This has resulted in a fall in activism, against a background of increasing intensity of labour. The concomitant decrease in levels of trade union affiliation and in the number of strike days is both the cause and the illustration of a balance of power that has shifted strongly to the disadvantage of the working class.

Continent-wide, in 2015 only 11 per cent of European workers stated that they were active in unions or political organisations, with marked variations between social groups: 15 per cent of the dominant class, 13 per cent among the middle class and 9 per cent among the working class. Within the working class, trade union or political activism remains more common among more skilled groups. Those most involved are skilled workers in the metalwork and electronics industries (13 per cent) and drivers and machine operators (11 per cent), while the proportion falls to 5 per cent among cleaners and skilled workers in craft and in the food and drink industry.

The quantification of ‘political and trade union activity’ on the European level is imprecise, and this broad view needs to be supplemented by figures on union membership. In all countries, except for the Scandinavian countries (Finland, Sweden and Denmark), Belgium and Spain, levels of union membership fell overall in Europe between the early 1980s and the 2000s.²⁸ The picture in individual nations varies widely, owing to the fundamentally different systems of industrial relations. In countries where the unions have responsibility for services such as unemployment compensation (Scandinavian countries, Belgium), union membership has remained very high, and even increased, since belonging to a union is a way of ensuring priority access to support. In Belgium, for example, the unions are members of the organisations that pay unemployment benefits, and thus serve as intermediaries with the National Employment Office.²⁹ By contrast, in countries where union activity centres on mobilisation of workers (France, the United Kingdom, Italy, etc.), the erosion of membership has played a major role in shifts in the power relation with employers, particularly since many governments – following the British example – have fostered this shift by passing laws limiting workers’ right to protest. In Spain, three general strikes were organised between 2010 and 2012 in opposition to reforms aimed at flexibilising the labour market, but faced with the government’s refusal to back down, the unions changed strategy and broadened the campaign to the whole of the population,³⁰ with the risk that demands relating to the world of work became lost amid wider protest movements.

The socio-economic groups organised by the unions have altered substantially, in line with economic changes. Trade union presence in the industrial sector has declined, and unions still have difficulty gaining a foothold in services and retail, where the number of low-skilled jobs has risen. In Germany, campaigning activity has shifted from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, but this development has not checked the crisis in union representation.³¹ In the public sector and in major corporations where employment is more secure, the unions are stronger; employees are represented by one or more organisations, whereas this is rarely the case in the small and medium enterprises that make up an increasing proportion of European economies, owing to the growth in outsourcing. In addition, European employers have introduced many anti-union measures (blacklists of union activists, wrongful dismissals, wage discrimination, in-house unions, legal guerrilla tactics, the obstruction of union rights, etc.), backed by a flourishing market in consultants who specialise in discouraging activism. Thus a growing proportion of the working class has never been, or is no longer, represented in the workplace by a trade union.

This disadvantageous relation of power has repercussions on the capacity of the working class to mount protest actions. The legal regulations governing strikes vary from one country to another, and there is as yet no standard method for counting strike days.³² The fact remains that in the majority of European countries, the number of strike days per employee has been falling since the late 1980s.³³ While a number of campaigns against factory closures and restructuring have hit the headlines (Arcelor-Mittal and Peugeot in France, Caterpillar in Belgium, Thyssen-Krupp’s AST steelworks in Italy, etc.), many redundancy plans have been made behind closed doors, with limited resistance. Mass strikes have shifted from private industry to the public and transport sectors. In retail, job insecurity severely limits social activism, despite a few exceptions such as the campaign by the cleaners of luxury hotels in Paris, Uber and Deliveroo delivery staff in the United Kingdom, and Amazon employees in Germany.³⁴ The situation varies from country to country, depending on the social balance of power and legislation relating to the right to strike. In France, the level of conflict remains high, but is manifested in fragmented and isolated campaigns.³⁵ In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, legal restrictions on the right to strike and the weakening of the trade unions make recourse to this kind of action 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.