Is being a registered nursen a working class occupation

[BubbleIceTea]

I've spent the morning reading through the Lucy Letby press conference thread, 40 pages long.
In the thread, one poster has stated that registered nurses are working class, in a working class occupation.
Is this true?
I'm shocked by this.
I've always regarded trained registered nursing as a resolutely middle class occupation.

I can't edit my title. Excuse the typo.
Registered nurse, not nursen🙄

I'm not sure jobs and class are as straightforward as they used to be. I think nursing has been skilled working class in the past, a bit like firefighters. Now it requires a degree it's more of a profession, but I'm not sure it's middle-class.

It’s a professional occupation but anyone from a member of the royal family down to a person from a very underprivileged background can qualify and practice as a nurse.

Nurses get paid shit wages for what they do. They deserve a whole lot more.

So maybe for that reason it's not so aspirational for middle classes.

FWIW the few nurses I know are working class. The few midwives I know are more of a mixture.

Aren't most jobs with uniforms traditionally working class roles? Except perhaps pilots?

Traditionally working class jobs aren't necessarily unskilled jobs though?

The trades for instance include many skilled jobs.

(Not sure if that's what you're saying to be clear! I'm sharing thoughts on your post not disagreeing with it!)

As can many other professions ,s

You need a degree to register as a nurse now so I would say no it isn t a working class occupation.
I would say although many working class occupations require sometimes very specialised skills they are not educated to degree level

It’s one of the jobs that is “classless” in my opinion- people from all walks of life (maybe less so aristocracy!) go in to nursing, whereas some jobs/professions will be more heavily made up of people from working class backgrounds vs others from a middle class upbringing.

Nurses are highly skilled professionals, gone are the days when they were handmaidens to the Doctors, theu have to have a degree for a start and many nurses do extra training and aquire extra skills .

I'm a Mental Health Nurse. Everyone I know pretty much is from a working class background, but that might be because I live in a Midlands Ex mining town who haven't forgotten about Margaret Thatcher! You get people from all walks of life doing nursing, but I've defo never met anyone from an upper class background in my profession.

Class imo is more about your background/education, and attitudes, than it is your job. My brother is very well off now, but still comes across very working class.

Back in pre second world war times I believe in order to become a nurse you had to have finished secondary school and passed the School Certificate.
This is very much a middle class thing as working class children didn't get to go to secondary school unless they passed the scholarship and their parents could afford the uniform.
In WW1 it was considered "better" to become a volunteer nurse than working in a munitions factory - so again it was middle/upper class women who did that. The working class ones were down the factories.
Obviously that's back then.
No idea what people think these days.

It depends what newspaper they read and what media they interact with really.

Almost all of the nurses I know are working class except for a few that became Advanced nurse practitioners or managers.

Nursing and teacher are both lower middle class by income. But class is measured by attitude, not income, so some nurses and some teachers will be middle-class, some lower middle-class and some upper working-class (skilled workers).

Lots of WC people have degrees.

I had a very privileged upbringing ,privately educated and most definitely MC .
I qualified in late 80s and would say the majority of my cohort came from similar backgrounds.

At the risk of sounding disingenuous, how do you decide if a colleague is from a working class or middle class background, assuming they haven't announced that themselves....accent? Taste in clothes or TV? Area or type of house they live in? I find this a bit baffling,

It's a weird munsnet thing if you are essentially living a middle class life style i eye roll when people insist on being described as working class it's all supposed to be background but it's all so blurred together

I’d say it’s largely ‘classless’ in the sense that anybody can, and does, pursue this as a vocation. I do know people with very different backgrounds who are nurses. Most nurses that I’ve ever interacted with have been working class though.

Does it matter ?

I think if you are forced to sell your time / your labour in order to have the resources to support yourself in this capitalist society of ours, then yes, you are working class. You work, to survive. You may have a degree, you may be a doctor, airline pilot, chartered accountant for example, but if you’re selling yourself, your time, for wages, then you’re working class. Middle class is something invented by working class people who aspire not to be seen as working class. But they are. Most of us are. Upper class is people who do not have to sell their time in order to survive.

Define "matter".

It's obviously of interest to many people othrwise these thread wouldn't exist.

And I'd say it does matter for various reasons not least that people in professions deemed working class are often underpaid.

Nurses are definitely underpaid. The question "does the perception that nursing is a working class job affect pay and conditions" is a reasonable one IMO. Just preternding everyone is the same harms those with leat priviledge IME.

I would hazard a guess you're educated middle class with socialist / marxist leanings - am I close? (This describes me FWIW).

It's only ever middle class people who try to merge working and middle class into one group, disctinct from upper class IME.

I mean, I get it from a Marxist standpoint if we're talking the means of production etc - but in real life this makes me uncomfortable as class disctinctions are also cultural.

Personally I grew up solidly middle class but in a very mixed area of London, class-wise, and many of my friends were working class. I'd never dream of trying to claim I'm working class - on a surface level, my working class friends would take the piss out of me for trying to pretend this! Working class and middle class culture is different. It gives Pulp "common people" vibes to try to pretend differently IMO.

But also, it's insulting to working class people when middle class people claim they're also working class IMO. My middleclass upbringing was different to my working class friends' upbringing socially in ways that class did define and it ran deep. Neither being better or worse, just different. I would feel it was overstepping a line to deny all of that.

If you can get a traditional degree in it, it's not a working class job.

Well that's one way of looking at it.

But say there's a profession that traditionally attracted working class people and had no degree. But now you have to do a degree - however it remains a low paid, long hours profession that attracts people from predominately working class backgrounds - like nursing.

Is that a middle class profession - really?

I mean it's a incredibly skilled profession, for sure. But if most people doing it are working class and the wages aren't such that it's an aspirational job, then why are we saying it's middle class?