What makes you working class?

[Bdueb]

Was listening to an interview with oa well known actor talking about their childhood and growing up working class. For them a key part was lack of travel and having not left their local area much etc. That was 20 years ago. What about now - what do you think distinguishes working and middle class childhoods of today?

Being solidly working class growing up, nursing was definitely seen as aspirational and a more MC profession.

Obviously everyone's ideas on what equates to a MC job will differ, but my definition is one that generally requires a higher level of education and qualifications - nursing falls under this.

London pricing makes the traditional class system irrelevant. A Dr would struggle to buy a house and live there with the cost of living as it is. What salary do you believe is high enough to make one MC in London?

I think nursing is interesting. I am 64 and nursing attracted many middle class girls in the mid to late 70s and in the 50s/60s too but the introduction of degree nursing in the 70s provided a temporary boost. Four girls from my class did degree nursing. Two are directors of nursing at significant trusts, two married doctors.

When I visit hospitals nowadays, I don't come across many nurses who appear traditionally middle class. Those that do seem to be practice nurses. It's difficult nowadays to work out who is and isn't a nurse however, as the HCA's all seem to be dressed up in nurses uniforms.

I wonder how many nurses graduating with nursing degrees will end up in senior management posts.

My aunt was a nurse (just retired) and very much MC/upper MC (parents both doctors from wealthy families, her husband a doctor,.she was bright enough to be a doctor but was ill for much of her teens)

She always struggled socially with her nursing peers bar a select few, as they had quite different (more LMC/WC tastes and interests). I've never minded mixing across the classes but she really struggled to, perhaps a product of her fairly sheltered upbringing (private prep, boarding school).

nursing probably spans a spectrum and certainly at the highly skilled end is MC. When looking at finances you would need to look at the whole package (eg the meaty pension and sick pay etc ). My aunt may have earnt less than some of her peers but her pension now enabled her to retire early and still have a healthy income.

Well obviously have you seen the way they all get together at Christmas.

I already made a Mumsnet thread asking this but I'll ask again here 😄 what class are people doing shared ownership seeing as we pay rent and a mortgage

I fall firmly into the emergent service worker category and shared ownership sounds like the primary way someone would own property in that demographic.

ESW sounds to me basically like the typical millenial affected by generation rent.

@Justforfun123 Surely it depends on whether or not they manage to buy the whole house over their life time? My parents were on a similar scheme on the 90s and now have a four bed house in central London having gone up a few rungs of the housing ladder. Being mc is firmly linked to house ownership so it might be a bit of a wait and see situation

there is a lot more to being considered middle class than having money, eg education, occupation, status etc

Eg, a college lecturer may not be on a very high income or own their property but because of education and occupation be considered MC

Alternatively a drug dealer could have a lot of money and own their property but would never be considered MC

Behaviour, manners and general behaviour would also come into play, I think very brash people who like to flaunt wealth can come across as quite common / LC

Oh I was talking about myself not my parents. Only bought it last year. Does it depend on whether your share is over 50% or under?

It's cheaper than regular rent in this area though so am I bottom class ?

Why would you assume they lack anything? What a snobby question.

Working class doesn't mean poverty or chaotic lives.

Sorry for the what ifs but what if one older sibling is recieving free school meals and lived in a tiny flat (one room apartment so they slept on the sofa) till they were nine then their parents moved to a house and got promoted at work more siblings are born who don't receive free school meals and have always lived in a house?

The older sibling is technically working class and the younger ones are middle class. Interesting shit

The thing I noticed when I started at Oxford (bottom of the WC and very poor) was how much more life experience I’d had than my middle-class peers, who felt very young and sheltered to me. I had way more life experience.

It's amazing to me how many posters think that being working-class means simply needing to work to pay the bills. That's not how the class system is defined at all.

They’re purely an economic measures so completely miss out the cultural side of class. I think the assumption is the financial stability the younger sibling experienced will afford them better opportunities than their older sibling but it’s not really that simple.

Still better than the decades of ignoring the impact of class on career trajectories/recruitment I guess but not all encompassing.

I mean I sort of get what you're saying but they'll have had pretty much a completely different childhood like not just economically but culturally with the sleeping on the sofa not having a garden and not as much food etc whereas a sibling a decade younger with the same parents same DNA etc will have had their own personal space and will only ever have known that. Be less embarrassed about inviting friends over which helps them socially too. Like it's a completely different experience.

Siblings can have very different childhoods. A friend was born when her parents were in their forties with a business that was doing well, living in a big house, with lots of money. Her much older siblings were children when her parents were establishing their business, they lived in a small house and had little spare money.

It's an interesting question whether education necessarily negates your night to define yourself as working class. I am working class yet having a degree seems to allow society to remove that particular identity for me which I feel curious. If we define working class as not having a degree then you may in future years have an ever decreasing working class.

There is to my mind a very fragmented working class culture now due to the demise of heavy industry in this country. The loss of monolithic industries like coal mining has meant there was a breakage of common occupation which could be easily used as a class label leaving the working class a more indistinct grouping with as said earlier a new underclass possibly partly due to the collapse of industry.

The whole thing becomes even more complex when considering the high immigrarionnlevels into the country and the fact many immigrants take up less skilled jobs in this country than they would in their country of origin.

Lack of opportunities and not mobile, lack of aspirations; inverted snobbery.
lack of understanding, better childhoods, more food, snobbery. I’ll let you work out which is which.
grew up in one, now probably in the other. Scourge of our society, class and it’s limitations. Work to illiminate it and the future is a better place.

Totally agree with working class indistinct grouping

No, no. I think that's a lower middle class trait!
I don't think wc want to be mc.
And then you get some of the upper mc who try to make out they are really wc!

What about Alan Sugar? He's a Lord, but regards himself as WC?

Born to teen parents, lived in social housing til aged 12, with little money though they worked and paid rent, dad had a manual job, mum parttime admin, went to state schools but got into Uni - 1st in family to ever do so, vote Labour and always will. Grew up on the breadline til teen years then it got better as parents prospects did.

I now have a thoroughly MC life, professionally job, MC kids, house etc but my upbringing shaped me so I consider myself WC in opinions etc. that’s not changed.

A cleaner and an inheritance are middle class markers for me.

They don’t, the working class that is…and yes it’s more underclass actually. White working class boys statistically the biggest losing group when it comes to education and opportunity. They are a very challenged group, the most likely to miss out upon everything. Whole estates whose life expectancy is reduced by ten years compared to other groups in the country just because they live there. Source of national shame…There are still technical apprenticeships and new educational evolutions here already and developing. Immigrant workers are not only in non professional jobs. Medicine, computing, nursing, teaching, interpretation, midwifery and dentistry to name a few. Asylum seekers also have professional qualifications, doctors, technical and professional in fact many professions who are willing to work but we won’t let them….mystifying…