Working or Middle Class?

[WedTheBed]

What’s the difference between them? As in.. what does one have to be middle class that working class don’t have?

I was talking to my friend, and I made a comment about being working class which she looked at me in shock and said I’m not working class, I’m middle.. but I don’t know how. I feel like we don’t really have anything to show to be middle class?😂

light hearted* I’m just interested to see what people interpret.

Lol at "Oxbridge fast steamers" 💨💨💨

'Yes doctor/lawyer/accountant is middle class. Nurse is a working class job as is civil servant unless you’re the PM!'

This is so rude and wrong, nurses are degree educated professionals, I'm a senior nurse now with a lot of responsibilities. The lines between Drs and senior nurses are minimal these days.

Is nursing seen as WC by some because it didn't used to be degree-qualified? (Not saying it's right by the way.)

I also agree there's a lot more to it than how much money you make. If you watch early episodes of Rich House Poor House there was a clear divide between the 'rich' people who were old money and the more recent episodes where the rich family are new money but have come from very wc backgrounds. The old money, who are MC have completely different lifestyles and homes from their wc counterparts, even though they might be on the same wealth.

Both sets of my grandparents were wc by birth and profession, but my maternal side had a love for art and books, and they travelled abroad on holiday. Paternal side lived in the same council house from marriage until death (they bought it), never travelled or indeed seemed to enjoy life in any way. Both sets left six figure sums aa inheritance.
My DPs both left school after O levels and gained Further education in later life,but worked their way up to middle management and we had a fairly MC lifestyle - own home, 2 cars, horseriding and rugby for us dc, grammar schools, foreign travel etc.

Both me and ex DH were postgrads, me in law, him in STEM. We had a severely disabled child, he had a complete breakdown and was never able to fully recover. I'm now in the feral category as I'm on benefits, but the dc still have a fairly MC upbringing. Museums, NT, travel abroad (took them out of school for the £9.99 flights), grammar schools. I like to think we aren't a complete drain though, I try to give back as much as I can to society and feel that I'm a very privileged feral!

Apparently I am Elite too despite working in a shop for barely more than NMW .

I think people love to fall over themselves to prove they are 'Working Class' or at the very least 'Lower Middle Class'. My mother always likes to insist she is Working Class, just because she happens to mix with some incredibly wealthy people ... but it's really not just about wealth.

See I can tell from this post that your family were only recently MC because you are focussing on "colour by number" signifiers of what it means to be MC. Like the inherent value in rugby or a trip to a NT trust property is that it signals you have the "right".cultural capital rather than just focussing on whatever you enjoy and find interesting.

But the point is all this cultural stuff is just surface, and artifice , the real power lies in where the capital sits. We nitpick over tiny cultural differences while ignoring the fact that the ruling classes are creaming the bulk of the capital away at the moment

I'm a civil servant which has been described as WC here but I'm a grade 6 technical specialist so WFH earning a fair chunk with a good pension, not sure I'd called that WC. The next level is Senior Civil Service and I definitely don't think that's WC.

The customer service roles in DWP could be called WC, but there is a lot of socioeconomic inequality in the CS, it gets quite posh at the top, not as high as the PM! That's why they do blind CVs though to stop bias towards Oxbridge etc, not that it helps.

The most obvious difference between the two is breeding.

Class - I think we have lost something now no one seems to understand how to do a class analysis. Individualism doesn't work overall for most people, yet humans are so selfish that they embrace it.

I hate the mealy-mouthed use of"working classes". What it actually means all too often is "lower classes". Okay when talking about economic activity but if you're not economically active you get the short end of the stick and end up in the pile of unclassified wasters.

@SweetSakura I'm mentioning those because that is what I've seen on MN as signifiers. Growing up I had literally never heard any class talk and I didn't know it was a thing. I think I made it obvious in my post that we are newly LMC, as both sets of GPS were firmly wc? I'm feral now so all that hard work was for nothing 😬

Fucking hell, yes I absolutely understand how the civil service works and of course there will be SOME high achievers in senior roles who are very skilled.

My point is that MOST civil service roles are relatively junior clerk type roles. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the civil service knows this. Also the civil service is fucking massive and has loads of departments and yes obviously they employ lawyers and accountants, but those people would tend to describe themselves as “lawyer for the civil service”.

The outrage that Civil service and nursing jobs might be done by WC people on this thread is exactly why the class divide very much still matters.

Only if "for nothing" if you think it matters in the first place. To me no class is inherently better than another.

(And you sound pretty amazing given all the adversity you have faced, what class you are is an irrelevance)

The civil service is far too big and broad to classify as WC or MC. Some roles within it will be MC but many won't.

Things have changed massively over time and as social boundaries become blurred it's much harder to say (which is a good thing).

I would suggest that requiring a degree (as opposed to happening to have one) might be one marker. As is being paid monthly rather than weekly.

I think there are still activities and interests that tend to be seen as more aligned to MC than WC. So a week skiing in Aspen has very different class connotations than a week AI in Benidorm. Not always right of course but the perception is that one is more MC than the other. Ditto types of dogs (American Bully v chocolate Labrador) and newspapers (tabloid v broadsheet). Lots of other examples as well

It's all so daft now. I personally don't think there is much of a middle class left since 'uneducated' manual jobs such as builders could and do earn more than many 'middle class' roles.

Very good point. How do you untangle class from wealth? The wealthiest person I know is a drainage contractor, he set up a company which has done incredibly well, fabulous house, cars, kids at private school etc. But I guess he would be working class?

Exactly that, I guess if you're going to label yourself a 'class' it depends how pretentious you are and how you want to be perceived. Who cares, life is short, enjoy your loved ones and be kind.

Class and wealth are not necessarily on a trajectory. A colleague I once worked with (academia) was from a very poor family. He was second gen SE Asian, his father died when he was very young and his illiterate mother was left with 6 young children. They were lifetime FSM pupils, but all of them went on to get very good degrees.
This man was something of a prodigy in his field and he became renowned across the academic sphere internationally. He thinks he is very middle class now, but those on MN would beg to differ. He refers to everything as 'posh', to him digestive biscuits are posh. As are any (minor) designer labels, AI holidays, NT days out, football (he grew up the cricket). He was showing me his "posh" holiday accommodation in the Lake District and it was a photo of him in a hot tub (Haven style lodge accommodation). I immediately thought of MN 🤣

Very good point. How do you untangle class from wealth? The wealthiest person I know is a drainage contractor, he set up a company which has done incredibly well, fabulous house, cars, kids at private school etc. But I guess he would be working class?

The BBC calculator asks questions on income level, savings, house value, hobbies and who you socialise with, nothing about your parents, your education level or what type of work you do.

Remember it's 10 years old - so you need to adjust downwards and put in what a just-above-NMW salarynwould have been in 2013 for a more accurate picture.

How many generations can a middle class family be poor until they are considered working class? Surely you can't keep calling dinner - supper and clinging to your bookshelf filled with high brow literature as a talisman against your new working class vulnerability forever?

Very good point. I worked with a few people like this, historical family wealth/Eton/Cheltenham LC etc. a generation or two back. Very ordinary lifestyles/income these days but often still harping back to ‘Granny and her diamonds and getting changed for dinner’.

It isn’t really relevant today is it, class and their outdated view of the class system.

I wouldn’t call it snobbery actually. We all gave mostly the same schooling and many WC eople go to Uni. We all have equal access to google.

The point is that MC gave more interest in the arts, politics, current affairs and enjoy discussing them. An exchange if information which may include subtle name dropping is certainly a way MC people recognise and bond with each other- I’ve seen it in action thousands of times. Similarly, a goal might be to get their children into professions so education would be talked about more and more value attached to it.

WC people have equal access to information but might focus on fun, entertainment and practical help. They might have little interest in politics or the arts. Neither is better or worse, they are just different. I know seceral professionals who still identify as WC despite having a lifestyle ehich would be seen to be MC.

I do think it's relevant but I thing the framing of it is skewed because those who produce the research and literature around class mechanics operate entirely within a knowledge class which is a middle class enterprise.

The results of which seems to be suspiciously kind to the middle class who, we are told, retain their status through poverty through a variety of social signifiers.

This is interesting, especially in these financial times, when those from the middle classes are not easing into the same financial privilege that their parents once had and who are scrambling to retain class status while your average successful wc tradesman has an economic power that leaves many for dust.

But how long does it take for a family to burn through that cultural capital?

I think that especially in London traditional middle middle class professionals can be pretty poor when compared to trades. Plus my impression is that parents who work in the city have never read or care much about Plato. MC that do such as academics, creatives or teachers are often too poor to count as mc and often live in lower middle class or we areas in SE London

It's a subtle thing but as someone who married into an undeniably upper middle class family with a tradition of ending up in senior policymaking positions in Whitehall, being a civil servant is not per se a working class job.

My mum's family were shopkeepers who arrived in this country from abroad in the 1900s. My father's family were Northern cotton mill workers and dockers. As a family we were working class with (on my mother's part at least) middle class pretensions, I would say. I was the first person in my family to go to university and we had very little money. I sounded posh and did well at school so ended up in a profession that is hard to get into and can be very high earning. I'm perceived as upper middle, but that's 50% accent, 30% job and 20% current income. I don't feel upper middle.

I don't think your job defines your class. It's a whole host of different factors at play. Very hard to define when pushed to it.