ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I bring together several debates to answer a question about whether there are new patterns of class-based disadvantage and privilege for young people making the transition between education and waged employment in the first decade of the new millennium. My aim is to counter-pose economic debates about the rise of a new polarized service economy in the UK with sociological and educational debates about the risk society, individualism, social mobility, portfolio careers and the loosening of the traditional structural constraints of class and gender. These arguments find an echo in contemporary popular and policy debates about lads and ladettes, yobs, chavs, ‘bling’ and a form of class condescension that seem to position working-class young people’s behaviour as the cause rather the consequence of their disadvantage. The implications of these latter arguments are that policies focusing on young people themselves, modifying their attitudes and behaviour, are sufficient to challenge their disadvantage, leading to the neglect of structural features of economic change. I focus on the bottom end of the class structure in most detail and on the recent debates
about the position of young people who are unable to gain access to secure employment that provides sufficient income for independent living. Many working-class young people, particularly young men, have been disadvantaged by contemporary changes in the labour market in the UK in ways that challenge their sense of self-identity as masculine. Many of these issues are addressed in more detail in the later section on the labour market.
One of the most significant changes in the post-war British economy, with implications for the ways in which men and women construct themselves as gendered social beings, has been a remarkable shift in the nature of waged work. In 1955, almost two-thirds of the labour force – which at that time was dominated by men – worked in the manufacturing sector – made goods for the expanding industrial economy of the time, both at home
and for export. For boys in particular, post-war economic expansion and the emphasis on manual labour meant that even young men with few educational credentials and skills were able to secure employment that gave them access to a reasonable wage. Although youth were paid a lower wage than adults (and there was a significant gender gap in wages), their employment facilitated the expansion from the late 1950s onwards of a consumer goods industry and the rise of the ‘teenager’. From the late 1950s youth cultures – Teddy boys, mods and rockers, Goths – succeeded one another, distinguishable by clothes, style and iconic consumer durables. While this development – that of youth cultures – is still a marked feature of the ways in which young people distinguish themselves from adults, and while youth purchasing power has continued to expand, 50 years later, the structure of the labour market had been transformed. Manufacturing employment, paying relatively decent wages, is no longer accessible to unskilled working-class youths – boys in the main. The economy of the new millennium is numerically dominated by service sector
employment in which the product typically is not physical goods but forms of service. Britain is now a high-tech knowledge-based informational economy in which education and skills are the main entry requirement to employment: at least to high status and wellremunerated occupations. University education, which in the 1950s was restricted to a tiny middle-class majority, has expanded enormously. In the UK, 38 per cent of the age group between 18-21 now enter university and many students move into well-paid middle-class jobs in the expanding professions and high tech industries. Perhaps the most significant change has been the rise in the number of women with degrees who then enter the labour market on a more permanent basis than women in earlier generations. The old pattern in which women worked for a decade or less and then left waged work when they had children has disappeared as many women take shorter and shorter breaks before returning to employment, although often on a part-time basis. Thus, women’s identity has changed in contemporary western economies. ‘No longer defined in terms of husbands, fathers of boyfriends, women and in particular younger women have been set free to compete with each other, sometimes mercilessly’ (McRobbie 2004: 100). One of the arenas of competition is the labour market. If working-class boys have lost out, it seems as if girls, especially middle-class girls, have been the beneficiaries of economic and social change. What the shift away from manufacturing employment initially accomplished, however,
was a rise in social mobility as young people from a wider class spectrum gained access to education and white-collar work. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, both many boys and rising numbers of girls entered forms of work that brought them social status and a new middle-class pattern of living. In more recent decades, however, social mobility rates, especially for boys, have stagnated and new class patterns of inequality have become evident (Aldridge 2004). Children from working-class families find access to well-paid work is impossible without significant educational capital. At the same time, patterns of promotion ‘on the job’ seem to have been stymied by falling rates of occupational mobility in the workplace. The opportunity to move up through the hierarchical structures of a firm or organization has also largely vanished. Indeed, without a first degree, and it seems increasingly a higher level degree, the entry to well-paid employment is now almost impossible.
