for example – when their characteristics (qualifications, position in the hierarchy, tasks undertaken) may vary from one country to another. In view of this, we use a classification of socioeconomic groups in which occupations may be classified in slightly different ways in different countries: depending on the country, nurses may be classed among intellectual and scientific professions, or with associate professionals – but the social hierarchies derived from these categories are similar across the different European countries.32 The second problem is that European data on the most recent job held by unemployed people or by pensioners are usually lacking, with the result that our argument is necessarily based on people in work.33 This restriction of the analysis to people in work under-represents the groups that are economically and socially most vulnerable,34 but it offers an overarching frame of reference for social inequality that opens new avenues for research, particularly for observing the way in which class configurations are constructed in relation to the division of labour in Europe.
Moreover, thanks to two new sources of empirical data, it is now possible to make a statistical study of inequality in terms of class. First, the fact that European studies of employment and standard of living based on large samples have become stably established over the last ten years means that individuals’ occupational status can be correlated with a whole range of indicators without losing the statistical representativeness of the results. Second, the standardised socio-economic classification for Europe, known as the European Socio-economic Groups (ESEG), devised in 2014 and adopted by Eurostat in 2016, has the virtue that it can be used in studies throughout Europe.35
This classification divides people who are in work into seven socio-economic groups and thirty subgroups. We use these as a basis for separating the European social space into three classes: the working class, the middle class and the dominant class. Besides being useful pedagogically, this tripartite division of the European social space is built by weaving together a conceptual approach to social class with the results of the various surveys on which we drew. The method by which these classes were identified (described in Appendix 2) is based on observation of the income, qualifications, standard of living and conditions of employment and work of the thirty socio-economic subgroups. The working class incorporates unskilled white-collar workers and manual workers (cleaners, farm labourers, those employed in the retail and service industries, etc.), skilled workers (those employed in craft; in the food and drink industry; in construction, metallurgy and electronics; and drivers), nursing assistants, childcare workers, home-care assistants, craftsmen and farmers. Those identified as members of the middle class include shopkeepers; skilled white-collar workers (office workers, police officers, receptionists, and customer service clerks, etc.); associate professionals such as IT engineers and technicians health associate professionals (for example, nurses); finance, sales and administration associate professionals (accountants, etc.), teachers, etc.; and self-employed hotel and restaurant owners or managers. The dominant class incorporates most of the intellectual and scientific professions (doctors and healthcare specialists; managers in administration, finance and business; engineers and specialists in science, engineering and information technology; lawyers and judges; journalists; artists; etc.), senior managers and CEOs.
In the French edition of the book, we use the plural to highlight the internal diversity of these three major social classes. Here, we chose the singular following the usual term in English. We take up the expression ‘working class’, which refers to a broad social group including blue-collar workers, unskilled employees and small-scale self-employed. In the same way, we also use the expression ‘middle class’ that includes the petty bourgeoisie and the lower middle class. To identify the top of the European social space, we choose the term ‘dominant class’, which encompasses all workers who have the power to impose rules in professional, social and even political life.36
Combining the use of data from large-scale European statistical surveys with a division of the space into three social classes makes it possible to sketch an initial response to questions that are never posed in debates on Europe: how are inequalities of class manifested in terms of physical strenuousness of work, unemployment and precarity, access to new technology, choice of place of residence, housing conditions, cultural practices and access to health? This set of factors can be used to piece together the jigsaw of classes in Europe, and to understand the political movements and splits that run through the continent.
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.
PORTRAIT OF A SOCIAL GROUP IN COMPETITION THROUGHOUT EUROPE
In recent years, every effort has been made to bring the working classes of the different European countries into conflict with one another, exacerbating the competition arising from the globalisation of trade. Indeed, it is primarily the sectors employing large numbers of manual workers that have been displaced from the centre to the periphery or even beyond the margins of the continent. Chains of outsourcing also developed considerably during the 1990s, and have been strengthened in the East since the 2000s: more than 4.5 million employees in Europe work in an industrial enterprise whose activity is subcontracted by a company in another European country.
