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.
The quantification of ‘political and trade union activity’ on the European level is imprecise, and this broad view needs to be supplemented by figures on union membership. In all countries, except for the Scandinavian countries (Finland, Sweden and Denmark), Belgium and Spain, levels of union membership fell overall in Europe between the early 1980s and the 2000s.28 The picture in individual nations varies widely, owing to the fundamentally different systems of industrial relations. In countries where the unions have responsibility for services such as unemployment compensation (Scandinavian countries, Belgium), union membership has remained very high, and even increased, since belonging to a union is a way of ensuring priority access to support. In Belgium, for example, the unions are members of the organisations that pay unemployment benefits, and thus serve as intermediaries with the National Employment Office.29 By contrast, in countries where union activity centres on mobilisation of workers (France, the United Kingdom, Italy, etc.), the erosion of membership has played a major role in shifts in the power relation with employers, particularly since many governments – following the British example – have fostered this shift by passing laws limiting workers’ right to protest. In Spain, three general strikes were organised between 2010 and 2012 in opposition to reforms aimed at flexibilising the labour market, but faced with the government’s refusal to back down, the unions changed strategy and broadened the campaign to the whole of the population,30 with the risk that demands relating to the world of work became lost amid wider protest movements.
The socio-economic groups organised by the unions have altered substantially, in line with economic changes. Trade union presence in the industrial sector has declined, and unions still have difficulty gaining a foothold in services and retail, where the number of low-skilled jobs has risen. In Germany, campaigning activity has shifted from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, but this development has not checked the crisis in union representation.31 In the public sector and in major corporations where employment is more secure, the unions are stronger; employees are represented by one or more organisations, whereas this is rarely the case in the small and medium enterprises that make up an increasing proportion of European economies, owing to the growth in outsourcing. In addition, European employers have introduced many anti-union measures (blacklists of union activists, wrongful dismissals, wage discrimination, in-house unions, legal guerrilla tactics, the obstruction of union rights, etc.), backed by a flourishing market in consultants who specialise in discouraging activism. Thus a growing proportion of the working class has never been, or is no longer, represented in the workplace by a trade union.
This disadvantageous relation of power has repercussions on the capacity of the working class to mount protest actions. The legal regulations governing strikes vary from one country to another, and there is as yet no standard method for counting strike days.32 The fact remains that in the majority of European countries, the number of strike days per employee has been falling since the late 1980s.33 While a number of campaigns against factory closures and restructuring have hit the headlines (Arcelor-Mittal and Peugeot in France, Caterpillar in Belgium, Thyssen-Krupp’s AST steelworks in Italy, etc.), many redundancy plans have been made behind closed doors, with limited resistance. Mass strikes have shifted from private industry to the public and transport sectors. In retail, job insecurity severely limits social activism, despite a few exceptions such as the campaign by the cleaners of luxury hotels in Paris, Uber and Deliveroo delivery staff in the United Kingdom, and Amazon employees in Germany.34 The situation varies from country to country, depending on the social balance of power and legislation relating to the right to strike. In France, the level of conflict remains high, but is manifested in fragmented and isolated campaigns.35 In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, legal restrictions on the right to strike and the weakening of the trade unions make recourse to this kind