What makes you middle class?

That made me laugh out loud, spill my Moet and almost choke on my avocado on toast 🤣🥂🥑

@Notmyuser

Retirement age is 66 currently… he is 78… so no, you’re right he is 12 years past retirement age.

Teachers always setting up new lessons…….. so you are telling me that the syllabus is changing so dramatically in an annual basis that you can’t use material from one year to the next?!

Unless this is lying minimum annual pay for a teacher is £28,000 going up to about £40,000. Leadership roles £50-120,000.

https://www.nasuwt.org.uk/advice/pay-pensions/pay-scales/pay-scales-england.html

Minimum wage is £10.42. For a 50 hour week that is £27,000 a year, with less time off and a pension nowhere near as good.

I realise wage stagnation needs to be addressed, but stop pleading poverty, lack of opportunity and trying to put yourself in the working class category you aren’t working class.

@Chypre
you are Exempt Class. Prost !

My great-grandparents were declared "exploitive class" (kulak) and sent to a working camp, as former bourgeoise were not allowed to hold several jobs or be drafted into the army (or anywhere near weapons) - just in case they decided to throw a revolution (USSR). My grandparents were born in a camp and became agricultural workers (sharecroppers with no passport or freedom of movement). My parents are civil engineers (education and then mandatory job placement in one of the former republics, stayed there after the independence as well). I was born in an independent republic, have moved to the UK to get my master's and now own a million-pound home. Foreigners don't have class in British society unless they marry into it, but soon I will get my passport and then what? Am I taking after my parents (working class), grandparents (underclass) or great-grandparents (bourgeoisie) or whatever I have made of myself (just ordered 2,000 pound commissioned oil painting so I am standing at "middle" then) ?

According to Jason Manford I believe this makes you Muddle Class 😀

We've got a Dualit toaster but I got it for free on fb marketplace and cleaned it up myself, what class does that make me?

But she won’t have changed her social class via marriage. Sure, her income and lifestyle have changed, and her children, if she has them, may be MC, especially if the men she married were MC, but not working outside the home isn’t a class marker, and nor is a pool or a big house.

i know two women, one in her 40s and one now in her 80s, who married into aristocracy — they’re very much ‘married in’. One met her husband when doing upmarket private catering, the other when she won a beauty contest in the 70s.

The reason why I personally think that top professionals such as doctors and lawyers are always middle class, even if they grew up in working class homes, is that they have a kind of cultural capital that only top professionals enjoy.
Even if they had a working class background, they've had some kind of advantage to get to that place - be it a loving supportive family, excellent mental health, natural brilliant academic ability, great teachers or whatever. I think it's important that we all own our privilege. It's disingenuous not to.

Ok

so if the duchess of somewhere fell on hard times and had to go and work on a checkout in Sainsbury's, does that make her working class ?
no, it does not. Class is defined by much more than your profession/work, sometimes things that are hard to define but everyone recognises it. Education, social circles, family background, sports and leisure interests (normally linked to education and social circles) also play a big part.

Araminta that went to Roedean, plays polo, has a membership at a private members club isn't going to be working class just because she dropped out of uni and now runs a yarn shop in Brighton.

I agree, successful working class people in different trades can definitely afford one.

Although a Porsche (or an entry level Range Rover) “bought” on Finance screams Lower Middle. Paying for ostentatious displays of wealth on the never-never.

I guess there are two different things - the way you'd be classified by sociologists (probably definitely middle-class) and the way you culturally identify, due to earlier influences, which sounds like a mix or working and middle?

You most certainly can.

My family, although not exactly from slums, but certainly from the arse end of a big city. Typical single parent family, little money, blah, blah, blah.

I left school at 16, got a union card and went to work. My sister, just a few years later became an air hostess, first and second marriages to guys she met working in first class, and she now lives the life of Riley, huge house, swimming pool, the lot. She hasn't worked for over 30 years and she's only early 60s. She's absolutely a totally different person compared to who she was growing up and into her 20s.

I've never been out of work and live on a totally different planet to her.

Then he isn’t 10 years past retirement age, is he?

The situation with your parents retirement may be correct; but your parents are presumably not in their 20s or 30s, are they? Teachers still working today have nowhere near that level of investment in them.
Teachers are always setting up new lessons. 50 hours per week is not at exam times (it’s more like 70+ then) - 50 is probably baseline.

Teachers are also effectively unemployed during summer. They are not paid for this time. It is not “holidays”

Having said all this, I'm totally confused about what class I am myself?! A mix of working and middle in my upbringing.

Why does it matter? There may have been a clear distinction between classes years ago but the boundaries and expectations have become progressively so blurred that the whole concept is now an irrelevance for the 99% of the population that aren’t at the very top.

Before I joined MN, social class never entered my head at all. I assumed everybody else was the same. How wrong I was!

haha that above quiz I posted is bonkers. I got "Elite". Don't think so pal!

That's interesting, as I'd say profession and education level are very much class indicators (money less so nowadays, as, as others have stated, many middle-class professionals are less well paid than some blue collar workers).
Maybe neither of us are right or wrong, it's just personal interpretation?

Nevermind, found it: BBC News - The Great British class calculator: What class are you?

I found that one fairly problematic, as it asked nothing at all about your upbringing and/or parents’ jobs, so while I came out as ‘elite’ based on our household income, socialising with everyone from cleaners to lawyers and medical consultants, and my liking for opera, that doesn’t take into account that my parents were a binman and a cleaner, and the vast majority of my family and DH’s family do unskilled, manual minimum-wage jobs. I mean, I am the result of my upbringing as well as my income and tastes.

link please, sounds interesting.

Yes, I did that recently. I think I came up as emergent service worker. There seemed to be lots of new categories, and it showed just how much the class system has changed. It's not clearly defined at all anymore...

The BBC did a survey a while ago you could take to find out what class you were, it was mostly to do with how you spend your free time, education level and level of job as far as I remember.

How so?
Surely social mobility is a reality?
I do agree there's an upper upper elite that is probably virtually impenetrable. But, between working and middle there's lots of movement I think.
Having said all this, I'm totally confused about what class I am myself?! A mix of working and middle in my upbringing. Probably lower middle overall. Definitely a lot of middle class cultural influences. But, due to health struggles I've been held back, and I'm as a poor as a church mouse! Also not a home owner, so middle class feels inaccurate. Genuinely don't know. Can I be classless?

Some people aren’t very observant, though, or have flawed or incomplete notions of the shibboleths of the class they’re aspiring to be accepted into.

John Betjeman’s ‘How to Get On In Society’ (1958) relies on the reader understanding that the poet is mocking the nouveau-riche pretensions of the non-U hostess, and that what she believes to be social conventions that will her allow her to ‘pass’ in the class to which she clearly wants to belong (fish knives, frills on the cutlets, meals being ‘daintily served’, a husband who rides, ‘elevated’ language like ‘requisites’ and ‘vestibule’ etc etc) are in fact betraying signs of her non-U status.

The poem gets its satirical effects from a speaker who has misunderstood the class shibboleths of a social class she wants to be a member of.

And of course some readers don’t get this, either, and as a result misread the poem — the commentary on this website for instance thinks it’s about ‘the superficiality of upper-class society’:

https://allpoetry.com/How-To-Get-On-In-Society

TL;dr — people misread other people’s social class all the time.

The ruling classes are laughing at you over their port and cigars.

education
speech
manners
how you spend/save your money