manual workers, low-skilled white-collar workers and farm labourers than among those higher up in the social hierarchy. These tensions sometimes limit the potential for mobilisation. In the United Kingdom, for example, the strategies of the unions seeking to mobilise migrants and local citizens together are tested severely by the wide range of different statuses of vulnerable workers. A recent campaign in the cleaning sector shows that it is sometimes difficult to bring together the concerns and demands of workers who have different status, depending on whether they are British, EU citizens or non-European foreigners, legally resident or undocumented.19 The dilemma for the unions is, then, to know whether they should be incorporated into the campaign on the basis of their position in the organisation of labour, or of their legal status.
SHARED VULNERABILITY IN THE EUROPEAN LABOUR MARKET
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
