The Great Recoil by Paolo Gerbaudo

Author:Paolo Gerbaudo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Blue-Collar and Pink-Collar Workers

Divergences in electoral behaviour within the working class map onto the key division between manufacturing and service. The manufacturing working class, often located in peripheral areas is increasingly siding with the right, while the ‘service precariat’ concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, is more inclined to vote for the left – which in recent years has focused its attention on the struggles of precarious workers at the very bottom of the social scale. To appreciate this divide it is necessary to reflect on how the working class, generally defined by manual rather than intellectual labour, has changed in recent decades. The industrial worker in blue overalls armed with a spanner in a large manufacturing plant was always a questionable metonymy: the use of one section of the working class to stand for the whole. The working class has traditionally encompassed a greater variety of manual occupations, including many outside the factory plant: porters, builders, truck and bus drivers, and so on. Only at the peak of the industrial era did manufacturing workers represent a majority of the working class. Their share of the overall workforce and of working-class occupations has declined significantly in recent decades. In the UK, manufacturing now accounts for around 10 per cent of the workforce, from a peak of around 30 per cent at the height of the industrial era.18 At the same time, there has been rapid growth in the non-manufacturing working class. There are now far more manual workers in service occupations, defined as ‘service and sales workers’ in the International Labour Organization’s International Standard Classification of Occupations (coded as ISCO 5) than there are industrial workers, defined as ‘craft and related trades workers’ (ISCO 7). Significantly, the most common occupation these days is sales assistant, rather than factory worker – a reflection of a consumerist society in which distribution and consumption have become more important in terms of value-generation than production.

This burgeoning new ‘service precariat’ tends to the consumption needs of the middle class. It is made up of cleaners tidying up the offices where professionals, technicians and managers work; waiters serving them coffee to maintain their focus on intense cognitive tasks; sales assistants tending to their often extravagant consumption habits; Amazon shelf-fillers handling their parcels; call centre workers dealing with their product returns or complaints; and riders performing meal deliveries to a creative class, apparently too busy with their professions to find time to cook, wash their dishes or do their laundry. This is also the class fraction that encompasses the workers who have come to be celebrated during the pandemic, such as carers and domestic cleaners; people who, while being described as ‘essential workers’, have to make do with very low wages that barely guarantee their day-to-day survival. This service precariat is the class depicted in Ken Loach’s 2019 film Sorry We Missed You. Its two main characters are Ricky, working in the delivery sector, and his wife Abbie, who works as a home care nurse. In the

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