Source: EU-SILC 2014. Population: People in work aged between twenty-five and sixty-five, EU 27 (excluding Malta and Slovenia). Interpretation: 41 per cent of working-class people belonging to a household comprising a lone parent with several dependent children live below the poverty line in their country.
Working-class households in Europe are those most at risk of falling into financial poverty, but those with dependent children fare still worse. Those most affected by poverty are single women with children, the number of whom has increased markedly in the countries of Northern and Western Europe. An ethnographic survey conducted in a large social housing neighbourhood in Nottingham, in the East Midlands, revealed the mechanisms leading to such situations of poverty in the United Kingdom.39 Against a background of deindustrialisation, men, primarily the descendants of Jamaican immigrant workers, are turning to the drug economy and therefore tend to be absent from the home either because they have to be constantly travelling or because they are in prison. Forced to accept precarious jobs in order to meet the needs of their family, women are in the front line of attacks from the social services and public authorities, who accuse them of living on welfare. The exclusion of these women is reinforced by austerity policies, and their children (who are often mixed-race) and their black partners suffer institutionalised racial discrimination, particularly at the hands of the police. The combination of these factors contributes to their becoming confined to their neighbourhood, which becomes the only place where they are safe from symbolic attacks and discrimination.
The financial vulnerability of the working class can be qualified with reference to inequalities in assets. Overall, self-employed workers tend to have more resources than employees, but these small variations are difficult to document over the whole of Europe. Moreover, limiting consideration merely to the financial dimension fails to take into account other forms of exclusion. In order to gain a more reliable representation of social inequality, the picture needs to be supplemented with information on access to certain consumer goods, and hence to cultural, symbolic and physical resources.
Access to consumer goods: inequalities between countries, inequalities between social groups
In the domain of consumer goods, the European working class has a basic standard of living, but with differences between social groups. For example, 80 per cent of working-class people in Europe own a car, but car ownership is often lower among cleaners and manual labourers (72 per cent) than among skilled workers in the metalwork and electronics industries (86 per cent). The divergences between countries are wider: only 41 per cent of working-class households in Romania, and 57 per cent in Hungary, state that they own a car, compared to 90 per cent of working-class households in France.
Access to holidays is another useful indicator of financial inequality between Europeans: half of the working class states that it cannot afford one week’s holiday a year. Skilled workers in the metalwork and electronics industries are the working-class people most able to take a few days’ holiday a year, while farmers and cleaners are the two categories most often lacking: 60 per cent of them never go on holiday. Rather than indicating affluence, this statistic reveals the difficulties that many people in Europe encounter in getting out of an everyday routine characterised by powerful occupational and financial constraints. The generalisation of part-time work and the deregulation of working hours make it difficult to plan leave. In this respect, the lack of holidays has a significance well beyond the confines of leisure: it is part and parcel of a more general shift that tends to confine the working class within national boundaries – except in the case of migration for work.
The digital divide: financial or cultural boundary?
Computer ownership, a further indicator of access to consumer goods, is now widespread throughout Europe: nine Europeans in ten own a computer. The price of computers has fallen markedly, making them accessible to many consumers. And indeed, most (80 per cent) of the working class owns one, although in this domain, too, they are less well off than others.
Their likelihood of having access to digital technology still varies, however. Skilled workers, and white-collar employees in retail and services, are almost as well equipped as the average European. However, working-class people living in the countryside lag behind in this area: only seven out of ten farmers or agricultural labourers own a computer. Among the working class, levels of computer ownership are lower in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and in Portugal. Thus access to digital technology depends not only on income, but also on occupational status and geographical location. The reasons given by respondents for not having a computer are usually other than financial ones, because they do not feel the need for one, or do not feel comfortable with information technology.
The digital divide in effect owes as much to unequal grasp of IT skills as to difficulty accessing a computer or the Internet. More than two-thirds of Europeans state that they have a good understanding of new information and communication technologies (NICT),40 a definition that encompasses the ability to use word processing and calculation software; to copy, save and compress files; to connect a peripheral device; to change software parameters; etc. The proportion is somewhat lower with regard to navigating the Internet, which includes using search engines, sending email, downloading and sharing files, posting messages on sites and forums, and so on. But these figures hide major inequalities. While a little under half of working-class people have a good grasp of new technology, more than four-fifths of middle-class people, and more than nine-tenths of the dominant class, say they do. Similarly, a little under half of working-class people know how to use the Internet, compared to three-quarters of the middle class and four-fifths of the dominant class.
Those who have greatest difficulty with new technology and the Internet are farmers, cleaners, farm labourers, manual labourers and skilled workers in craft, or in the food and drink industry or in construction. At the other end of the scale, executives and most of those working in intellectual and scientific professions have full grasp of NICT and the Internet. The middle class report very similar levels of competence, with the exception of shopkeepers, more than 40 per cent of whom have difficulty with these tools. These disparities in new technology skills to a considerable degree reflect the unequal importance of information technology in different occupations: those who use computers in their day-to-day work are most likely to be able to take full advantage of it at home. But these inequalities are also due to levels of skill and qualification: working-class people with the lowest educational qualifications are those least able to access these technologies. They suffer a double handicap as a result: first, on the labour market, because knowledge of these tools has become imperative even in jobs at the bottom of the social scale, and second, in terms of access to rights, since the development of an administration without counter service and the progressive move to electronic services places users less comfortable
