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.
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