Re: Goodbye to the Working Class?

Date: 12th Sept '02

Name: A Freedom Party Supporter

The old working class jobs in the factories, coal mines, cotton mills and shipyards may well have largely vanished but in its place a new working class has sprung up in the low skill, low pay, dead end service sector jobs. For example lots of catering, retail, call centre, entertainment venue and fast food restaurant jobs are badly paid, offer little in the way of promotion, are part time and short contact. In many ways they can be deemed working class and in terms of pay, condition, benefits etc. are quite often worse than the factory jobs they replaced. There was a time when manual jobs and manufacturing equalled working class and non manual and service sector equalled middle class but that is no longer true. Given an increase in automation and a requirement for more highly skilled manufacturing workers then in many respects lots of factory jobs nowadays are far better than many service sector jobs.

One of the problems with many far left political organisations is that they have failed to notice this new working class in the service sector and concentrate on steelworkers and coal miners.

Back to discussion page                    RA home page