of Europe adjustment to the crisis has principally taken the form of powerful wage restraint, with levels of low pay, and hence of poverty among workers, that are the highest in Europe.
Overall, this first group of countries of the southern and eastern periphery of Europe comprises, on one hand, the winners from liberalisation of the economy, who hold the monopoly on most of the economic, cultural and social resources, and, on the other, the large working class, who often survive by means of small underpaid jobs, meeting their daily needs through informal exchange networks of family and friends.
The working class: destination for migrants
The working class in Europe is also characterised by the high proportion of immigrants among its numbers: it absorbs many more foreigners than all other social groups (Table 2). Contrary to popular belief, this represents the continuation of an age-old process, originating in the Middle Ages and tightly bound up with the development of capitalism and the wage system.17
Table 2. Non-European Foreigners among the European Working Class
| Proportion of non-European foreigners | ||
| Working class (6%) | Nursing assistants, childcare workers, home-care assistants | 7% |
| Farmers | 0.5% | |
| Craftsmen | 4% | |
| Skilled construction workers | 6% | |
| Skilled craft or food and drink industry workers | 5% | |
| Workers in the metalwork and electronics industries | 3% | |
| Machine operators | 5% | |
| Drivers | 4% | |
| Retail and services assistants | 5% | |
| Manual labourers | 9% | |
| Cleaners | 16% | |
| Agricultural labourers | 6% | |
| Dominant class | 2% | |
| Middle class | 2% |
Source: LFS 2014. Population: People in work aged between twenty-five and sixty-five, EU 27 (excluding Malta).
Far from being confined to the richer countries, recourse to migrant workers is also common in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In Czech industry, for example, local employers called on foreign labour before the 2008 crisis, in order to meet labour shortages and particularly to counter the wage demands of workers in the large international firms such as Škoda (motor vehicles, Volkswagen group) and Foxconn (a Taiwanese electronics corporation). Usually working in unskilled sectors, immigrants are also more at risk of unemployment throughout Europe.
These results shed a different light on the discourse among European leaders about the dangers of xenophobia emerging from the ‘lower levels’ of society: unlike the dominant class, which is so ready to promote transnational mobility and tolerance of others, the working class is in fact much more mixed and mingled than all other social groups. The increase in cross-national marriages in Spain in the last fifteen years confirms this: the least skilled workers are the Spanish people most likely to marry a non-European foreigner, usually from Latin America, or a migrant from Central or Eastern Europe.18
In a period of crisis, this greater openness nevertheless manifests in competition on the labour market, leading to more powerful tensions and reactions among manual workers, low-skilled white-collar workers and farm labourers than among those higher up in the social hierarchy. These tensions sometimes limit the potential for mobilisation. In the United Kingdom, for example, the strategies of the unions seeking to mobilise migrants and local citizens together are tested severely by the wide range of different statuses of vulnerable workers. A recent campaign in the cleaning sector shows that it is sometimes difficult to bring together the concerns and demands of workers who have different status, depending on whether they are British, EU citizens or non-European foreigners, legally resident or undocumented.19 The dilemma for the unions is, then, to know whether they should be incorporated into the campaign on the basis of their position in the organisation of labour, or of their legal status.
SHARED VULNERABILITY IN THE EUROPEAN LABOUR MARKET
The increase in unemployment in Europe is often presented as afflicting all groups without distinction, but the effects of the crisis, of globalisation and of the spread of new technologies are not undifferentiated in the world of work: the working class is in the front line of this destabilisation of the labour market, making it more vulnerable than all other social groups.
The working class in a position of social insecurity
Unemployment does not affect Europeans at random: it has a more systematic impact on the lower end of the social hierarchy.20 In 2011, three years after the start of the economic crisis in Europe, unemployment among the over-twenty-fives was on average 5 per cent, with wide disparities between social classes: the level was 11 per cent among the working class, compared to less than 3 per cent among the dominant class. Whereas only 3 per cent of executives experience unemployment, it affects 11 per cent of skilled workers and 14 per cent of unskilled manual and white-collar workers.21 Moreover, for many households in working-class neighbourhoods, the risk of losing one’s job is doubled, for it threatens both partners. This heightened risk of unemployment is accompanied in most European countries by drastic reductions in unemployment benefit, in the name of promoting an ‘active’ social state that makes any new benefit conditional on the individual taking steps to find work.22
Table 3. Unemployment among Europeans
| Unemployment rate | |
| Managers | 3% |
| Intellectual and scientific professions | 3% |
| Intermediate professions | 4% |
| Self-employed workers | 4% |
| Skilled white-collar workers | 7% |
| Skilled manual workers | 11% |
| Unskilled manual and white-collar workers | 14% |
| Dominant class | 3% |
| Middle class | 5% |