Not a new term. Was coined in the 70s to highlight the discrimination many women faced in employment. Women were slotted into a few major occupations, which tended to be paid less compared to jobs that had similar responsibilities and educational levels. A large focus of the feminist movement in the 70s was to open doors to careers that were culturally closed to women.
In English at least, keep in mind that “class” has usually had strong social implications - your class dictated who would and wouldn’t associate with you, not just how much money you would make.
Bear in mind that it is British in origin, where ‘class’ is a social position. Not necessarily, ironically, an employment status. You can be both working class and unemployed.
Class and social capital in the UK is predicated on income and assets; it’s merely an indicator that lags by a couple of generations.
True, but doesn’t negate my previous statement - if your family have been unemployed for three generations, you’d still be tagged ‘working class’.
Or possibly “royalty”.
I have to admit that this is exactly what I was thinking. Rightly or wrongly, I would source the term to the UK, where (based on my experience) “class” is more frequently recognized. I also think that the term is used more inclusively in the US, where politicians use the term for both lower and middle class groups. US politicians like to use the term as the opposite of “fat-cat bankers and people who don’t deserve their money” when stirring things up.
Aha. So, just as UK politicians use “hard-working people”?
‘Hard working families’ is what I always hear, as if the childless don’t deserve anything!
Barristers were gentlemen, Attornies and Solictors were not.
Army Officers were gentleme. Naval, depended
A doctor was a gentleman, a surgeon, not so much.
This survives in the UK, with some professions being seen as “Middle Class”, regarless of the background of the person involved, Military officers, Doctors, clergy, Advocates/Barristers, higher civil services etc. While very rich businessman would only be middle class if they were born to middle class parents; Alan Sugar is a Billionaire, but he is still working class.
Brits will deny it until they turn hoarse, but the are the most class conscious people on the fucking planet. And the whole thing makes little sense.
You might think so, but from where I sit, in Middle England, I don’t see it. “Upper Class” is usually followed by “twit” as a mild insult to anyone who thinks they are somehow ‘better’ than the speaker. “Aristocracy” is confined to the Royals and a few of the old aristocracy who have managed to hold onto their wealth. “Middle Class” is so loosely defined as to be meaningless but would probably contain anyone with a professional qualification. I do agree that the whole thing makes little sense. Margaret Thatcher wrote in 1992 that: “Class is a communist concept. It groups people as bundles, and sets them against each other.”
As a long-time follower of this forum, I do get the impression that Americans are more hung up on class than we are. I suspect that most people here would use different labels: Street people, Chavs, toffs, and everyone else.
I think usage varies so widely it can be really tricky to decode it. I have noticed that in a lot of cases “working class” is basically being used as a summary tag for “the people at the bottom” which years ago meant people who did manual labor, but these days means people who are dependent on social security and short-term jobs. It’s amusing that left-wing sources talk about “the working class” as those who can’t get work while the right-wing sources bang on about “the working poor” meaning that specific subset of the “working class” they theoretically don’t hold in contempt
I’m not sure about that, but I would agree that as a sweeping generalization the US is very hung up about class and race, no matter that the citizenry will also deny that until they turn hoarse.
Race, absolutely, but class, not as much. No American would consider a millionaire working class, no matter the circumstances of his birth.3
Except politicians trying to justify their own wage increases or tax cuts for the moderately wealthy.
Even they’d call them “middle class”.
But I’m talking about people like Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton. Brits might consider them working class, but Americans generally don’t.
But that also has to do with their lifestyle and occupation - no one in the US would have considered Bill Clinton working class when he was the governor of Arkansas earning about $35K , which was not a high salary even in 1990.
And I think part of the reason that Brits and Americans use the term differently is because Americans focus more on money than Brits do. I'm going to leave the Bill Clinton types out of this, because they are examples of the exception - but Americans as a rule, conflate the concepts of class and income, so that a 65 year old high school dropout who earns $50K a year is put in the same group as a 22 year old college graduate who earns $50K a year even though they may have nothing in common other than their income.
Clinton probably would be thought off as middle class, as said certain professions are Middle class regardless of backgrounds and law is one of them.
He dines with movies stars, Nobel winners and foreign royalty. For Americans, that makes him upper class.
Law is definitely an upper class profession, depending on which firm and what sort of law. There is a whole class of old professional services firms (law, accounting, consulting, banking) called “white shoe” firms - Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Sullivan & Cromwell, so on and so forth.