What constitutes under class?

[Invalidusername88]

Just reading about working class on another thread. It got me thinking about the term under class? What does this mean?

Also what class would you identify yourself as if you had to?

Disabled people are underclass? This is one of the worst things I've ever read on here. You are vile!

I thought it had been coined by an American some decades ago, who warned that we were heading for an underclass in the U.K.

To me it certainly doesn’t include people who are unemployed because of illness/disability. I gathered that it meant 2 or 3 generations who have managed to avoid working at least for much of the time, through choice/inclination.* Often with semi-feral/anti-social/possibly criminal elements thrown in.

*I have known a couple of these - relatively young and certainly healthy and capable - how they managed to get away with it for several years I still don’t understand. They simply chose to live off benefits instead.

One did eventually get their act together, once it finally dawned that nobody was going to knock on the door and offer someone with no qualifications or track record their dream job with a very attractive salary.
The other ended up in prison.

@Secondwindplease if my severely disabled son died and I lost my carers status (and the benefits that comes with it) I think then I'd be a precariat, as although I've post grad qualifications I have had no work history for 15+ years so I'd have to take on precarious jobs to get my foot on the ladder. Ironically in that situation my life would be more precarious than now, at least now I get guaranteed benefits and housing benefits.
DWP definitely see me as underclass though. I have to have a carers work assessment every 3 years and when it's established that I'm not in a position for even part time work, there is great emphasis on me doing essential skills/basic literacy and numeracy courses despite having a masters. When I politely decline and explain my qualifications I'm always told as a long term unemployed person these are the next step 🙄.

They don’t work, living in long poverty, benefits etc. so can’t be considered working class. They’re the class below wc. I don’t consider it an offensive term as such, just a set of circumstance that put someone in that grouping. Pretty sad for a 21st century wealthy country.

The 4.2 million U.K. children who live in poverty and their families.

She means financially (although disability benefits combined can be more generous than some low paid jobs).

Technically a person can't be working class if not working.

Depends - how keen would you have been on sitting in your A Level Sociology lesson when the topic comes up, listening to all the other students parroting the attitudes of their parents about workshy criminal layabouts in dirty council houses, being thick, ugly, fat, violent and enjoying the visceral satisfaction of enunciating the word Underclass for 'these people' - and knowing that they are describing you and your entire life as their faces hardened and their lips curled to say the word?

Like many words and phrases, it became pejorative almost the moment it was coined, at least in part due to the obvious commonalty with Untermenschen.

As a concept, to find a way to describe the poorest, most marginalised and vulnerable without using historical/non English phrases such as peasantry, serfdom, peons, untouchables, pariahs, ghetto (as from Antisemistism and when transferred to Black Americans), etc, it's difficult, because whatever is used is always going to become an insult, just as every word and phrase for describing disability, particular illnesses and needs will become one shortly after it is adopted.

It all feels pretty crap when you know it's a word to describe you, though.

Intergenerational financial dependence on the state, usually with low IQ and social deprivation, which can result in addiction problems. However mainly when the above is also coupled with a lack of any respect for or compliance with society's rules around behaviour in a society/respect for others, eg theft and violence and entitled filthy behaviours. And when you add a bit of teenage testosterone too..
My city has a huge problem with this. The word is unkind, yes, but the problem is a reality.

This is what I mean by it feeling crap to have the word used to describe you.

Low IQ.

Entitled.

Filthy.

Criminal.

BTW Charles Murray certainly did mean it perjoratively. He's new right, the whole point was pointing out the problems for society of dependency and ideological reasoning to drastically cut benefits. Reagan and Thatcher ideology.

For me, "underclass" means the chronically work-shy, tax evaders, law breakers, etc. I.e. the ones who don't have any respect for laws, nor rules, nor even basic civil society. The ones who don't care when they have all night loud parties in their gardens, or openly doing deal drugs on the street, or drive around in untaxed/uninsured cars, ignoring speed limits, parking restrictions, etc., happily buying/selling duty free booze and fags, doing up cars in their driveways with loud revving for hours. The kind of people who the police, social services, etc pretend don't exist so won't challenge!

I would say pensioners stay in the class they have always been in, regardless of their income in retirement.

@feralunderclass

I very much feel underclass when a LL decides to sell and I need to apply for a new rental. Estate agents always ask your profession at the viewing and then I tell them I'm a long term benefits user due to being a carer and you can just see the microshifts in their body language it makes you feel incredibly low and worthless. Housing is my biggest fear, the rents are sky high and the cheapest house I could find is £400 more pcm than the maximum housing benefit. I can only manage that due to 2 sets of DLA. The social/council housing waiting list is years long. I do fear that me and ds will end up in a workhouse type of situation the way things are going.

Unfortunately you could say the same about relatively low/middle paid workers who face exactly the same problems due to expense and lack of rental properties for them to live in, especially in and around the more expensive areas. When there is such high demand for rental properties, it's no surprise that landlords take their pick of all the applicants. My son took six months and dozens of viewings to secure a tiny flat and he's pet free, smoker free, earning slightly above average wage in a secure full time job - he still had to pay a years' rent in advance to secure his flat, and offer more than the asking price. Apparently they restricted it to just 10 viewings and all 10 wanted the place and had to make their "best" offer to the landlord to get it. We're millions of homes short in the UK, and everything you say applies to workers too, not just carers/disabled etc. It's all a real mess and I don't see any solution unfortunately. Some of my son's co workers who also started their first graduate jobs this Summer are living in hostels - that's people earning more than average wages!

Im working class from Council Estate upbringing and I recognise who is underclass.

Any 2 (often all) of these attributes

Choose not to work. Ever.
Petty criminals, drug dealing, shoplifting
Feral kids, high truancy
Every sentence they speak contains the word Fuck.
Car on bricks in front yard.
Sofa in front yard.
Old fridge in front yard.
Mattress in front yard.
Family dog is Bull breed.

@Badbadbunny yes of course the housing situation is a nightmare for everyone, my point is that when I tell them I'm a long term benefits user you can see the look change on their faces. I'm well spoken and don't come across as a drunken waster, but you know immediately they don't want to even consider me after I tell them I'm on housing benefit. At least if I had a job they might consider me!

That's pretty much it to most of us who are working class or were, and now are considered not by MN.

There was always a difference between WC and the group you have identified which had nothing to do with poverty or being marginalised by society but was more cultural than anything else.

What crap. I'm working class, worked all my life, but had a serious illness 2 years ago which has left me unable to work (I get PIP so am classed as disabled). I'm certainly not in the same category as those workshy sods who have been on the dole their whole lives

This, exactly. We all know the type who ARE actually without any class - all those on that list.

I see it as a descriptive rather than a derogatory term.

It's more than just being out of work and on benefits - somebody middle class could be unable to work due to circumstance but if they're from a middle class background, and possibly well educated, they're still middle class imo. It's highly unlikely that a member of the underclass would be on a MN thread discussing it.

It's generational poverty, generational lack of educational attainment, and so lack of opportunity, leading to a cycle of being on benefits, often addiction, crime etc.

There are some awful posts on this thread. Labelling people with low IQ and disabilities as 'the underclass' - really? Is that what Mumsnet has come to?

Is there a presumption that disabled people are uneducated and poor?
I know a few who most certainly are not.

Didn't the term originate with Marx (not sure)?
The lumpen proletariat - tolerated by the ruling class and useful for war, inciting action, etc. Tabloids still doing a decent job there!

Yes, and I am recalling when the senseless austerity measures arrived regular working people lined up to scorn the disabled for claiming hefty benefits and having it too good!
If they are inherently underclass, surely the classes who judge them wouldn't envy their benefits.

Yep.

I think people who have never been in the 'working class' category or their parents or Grandparents have never been, who think it's just a perjorative term used to put down poor and uneducated people. Which it wasn't in most cases.

My Grandparents were miners (the men) and factory workers (the women) who were distinctly working class. And when my parents were kids, they were very aware of was like them and who was 'common' or 'rough' in those days which didn't equate to poor or ignored by the rich because that applied to every mining and factory working working family in the North. It was people who had different attitudes and behaviours to the rest of the working class.

When my parents left secondary modern schools at 15 in the 1970s, they went into full time work pretty much immediately. As did most of their peers. But there were still those families that didn't work, didn't look after their homes, had everything on 'the council' and were different to the majority of working class families.

A poster upthread said the difference between WC and the underclass was that WC people had 'skills they could use for work' and the underclass didn’t so could at best, access minimum wage jobs. There never was a school for WC kids where they were given skills that the underclass don't have access to and still isn't now.

I think some people still think 'working class' is that you have a trade and/or skill when working class always meant unskilled, minimum wage at least at first.

Chronically unemployed, think nothing of having screaming matches on a regular basis, get drunk on cheap drink of a weekend, think nothing of squaring up to you for a fight if you do something they don't like.

'The underclass' is - in the present day, whatever its origins - a derogatory and discriminatory term used to 'other' and feel superior to certain individuals and groups.