Craig Berry
Telling people what my dad does for a living is easy. He’s a plasterer. He comes from a long line of plasterers, with my younger brother carrying on the tradition.
My mum is trickier. There are two options. I can say she works ‘in social services’, and you will assume she is a social worker. Or I can say she is ‘an administrator’, and you will assume she arranges meetings and makes photocopies. You won’t follow up by asking where she works, because admin is admin, right?
Well, sort of. She has been an administrator in the aerospace and finance industries, in the NHS, for the Post Office, and now social services. But the main thing these jobs have in common is that nobody has ever really understood any of them, that is, what has made each of them uniquely indispensable.
My dad is the breadwinner, because he has always worked a lot. But my mum earns more per hour. All of these jumps between jobs are not, however, evidence of career progression, rather the toll that caring responsibilities and mental health problems have taken on day-to-day life. Like my dad, she earns barely more at the end of her working life than at the beginning. The typical pattern involved doing a certain job for a few years until the intense workload and meagre pay became too much to bear, then taking a job that seemed less stressful — yet soon finding herself again accumulating responsibilities that she did not ask for.
This is a large part of what social class means. Not necessarily what you do for a living, but the control you exercise in doing it.
But it is easier to visualise class in occupational terms. You would assume that my dad is something like a plasterer if I simply told you he is working class — the specifics wouldn’t matter. What would you assume about my mum, if I told you her class but not her job? When it comes to the economy, working class women are hiding in plain sight.
The thing is, you could probably make some reasonably accurate guesses about my dad’s political views too. We might not adequately reward working class labour, but our political elite certainly acknowledges — or fears — working class politics. Yet our understanding of working class political agency rests on our understanding of working class economic lives. It centres men like my dad.
When we think about working class politics, we don’t think of women like my mum. In this post I explore this forgotten demographic, and the Labour leadership’s fairly rudimentary attempts to remember it as it charts a path into government.
Women’s work
What do we know about the jobs that working class women do? Extraordinarily little.
In the UK, women hold 77% of all jobs in the health and social work sector, and 70% in the education sector. This tells us something, but not a lot. But breaking female employment down by occupation arguably makes the picture murkier rather than clearer.
Source: House of Commons Library
It is no surprise to see women under-represented among the highest-paying jobs. But they are well-represented among the second- and third-placed categories, i.e. professional and associate professional occupations. In the former, surgeons and engineers are grouped with nurses and teachers. In the latter, IT guys and paramedics are grouped with youth workers and librarians.
The average pay of these broad categories obviously does not tell us very much about class status. It is also worth noting that, where women are employed in professional and technical roles, they are much more likely to be working part-time.
Lower down the league table, we find a clear divide among men and women in lower-paid occupations. Blokes have skills; they operate machinery. Women do admin; they provide care; they serve.
The male-dominated occupations are clearly much closer to what we conventionally think of as working class, because they are part of what we conventionally think of as production. The economy has changed, but our understanding of class has not caught up. In fact, we can hypothesise that part of the reason female-dominated 5C jobs (‘cleaning, catering, clerical work, cashiering and care’) are generally paid less well is because they are not seen as authentic working class vocations.
The COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the economic position of working class women, to some extent. Women in low-paid jobs were more likely to have their hours cut, increasing financial insecurity. But when working they were also more likely to be in public-facing roles, increasing health risks, rather than flexing to working from home.
Women also took the brunt, unsurprisingly, of the increased burden of looking after homes and children during the pandemic. Unpaid labour is of course a highly gendered phenomenon from which very few women are fully liberated, but it affects working class women more than middle class women, because the former simply do more of it, and the latter are more able to outsource some domestic and care-giving tasks.
Without this work, society could not be reproduced, and capitalism would not function. Yet we still have not successfully integrated unpaid labour into our understanding of the class system.
Forgotten history
The possibility that class is an inadequate concept for capturing multiple disadvantage should be taken seriously. Working class women are under-valued because they are women, not only because they are working class. Race is obviously a huge part of this story too.
As a conceptual lens, class might be the ultimate male gaze. There is an interesting historical discussion about how women experienced the industrial revolution. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels, writing in 1884, came to see the opportunity to become wage-earners as emancipatory for women — despite offering a somewhat more nuanced view of whether industrialisation was an emancipatory process for the (male) proletariat in his wider oeuvre.
Since large-scale industry has transferred the woman from the house to the labour market and the factory, and makes her, often enough, the bread-winner of the family, the last remnants of male domination in the proletarian home have lost all foundation — except, perhaps, for some of that brutality towards women which became firmly rooted with the establishment of monogamy… It will then become evidence that the first premise for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry.
The historical record is of course patchy. But the most important counter-point to Engels is that, overall, women appear not to have worked more, as paid labourers, as a result of the industrial revolution. Engels’s friend and collaborator Karl Marx — the key progenitor of the sociological study of class — seemed to understand this, insofar as he barely ever mentioned female workers, although he did note in the first volume of Capital that ‘in England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal barges’ — because they were cheaper.
The literature on women’s participation in industry provides various accounts, from male earnings being sufficient to sustain single-earner households, a lack of demand for female workers as machinery became more complex, and gender discrimination within industry.
More than one of these accounts can be true at the same time; i.e. women worked less because they were not paid enough, for various reasons, to commodify the unpaid domestic labour they were still expected to undertake.
Engels can also be right to point to the benefits of proletarianisation for those women who did work in industry (such as textile workers in Lancashire, i.e. the source of Engels’s lived experience of industry). Again, however, the potential benefits for female empowerment have to be balanced against accounts, such as Women Workers and the Trade Unions by Sarah Boston, which attest that women were not always welcomed with open arms into the male-dominated labour movement.
Morbid intersection
Class is never just class. It is as complicated as the human beings who embody the forces of dialectical materialism. Intersectionality does not simply mean disadvantages are layered on top of each other; instead they interact in a way that means each individual has a familiar but unique relationship with prevailing socio-economic structures.
Let’s take the example of single mothers claiming means-tested benefits. Marxist theory gives us the concept of ‘lumpenproletariat’ to categorise the long-term unemployed (among others). Tony Blair’s Labour Party borrowed (and arguably hollowed out) the notion of ‘social exclusion’ to depict unemployment as habitual rather than structural. Neither is a satisfactory lens for our purposes.
Many single mothers who claim benefits are of course already in work, and many of those out-of-work are required to search for a job. Most want to work, but face insurmountable barriers around childcare, transport and working hours. As women, they have taken on — or been left with — primary responsibility for child-rearing. But if our understanding of class relations is not able to encompass the conflict between capitalist work and the most fundamental tasks of social reproduction, then it is largely worthless.
For some women, their gender intensifies their experience of class. At the same time, class can intensify the experience of gender inequality.
For example, the Social Mobility Foundation found that, for ‘professional-managerial’ workers, those with origins in the same occupational group are paid £6,291 per year more than those with working class origins. But this gap is larger for women: for female ‘professional-managerial’ workers, those with origins in the same occupational group are paid £7,042 per year more than women from a working class background.
Red wall, blue pill
The problem, however, is that women are the wrong kind of working class. The sympathetic image of the working class that has entered the UK’s mainstream political consciousness is almost exclusively male, with a lingering class snobbery seemingly now focused mainly on women. ‘Left behind’ towns are composed of only men, denied their essential manhood by globalisation and Gary Lineker. The ‘red wall’ is made exclusively of bricks with dicks.
The notion that there exists a singular ‘ordinary folk’ perspective effectively silences working class women in this conversation. Being left behind is worse for men, I guess, because it isn’t supposed to happen to us.
I am not saying working class men are okay. But let me tell you, this nonsense is not doing us any favours. It has led to a distorted account of working class lives, where what is missing is not power or resources, rather only recognition. It is fertile ground for the right, which can invoke an imagined time, before multiculturalism, Brussels and science, when people worked hard and earned an honest living and looked after their family and loved their country and won the war and watched telly together on a Saturday night before going to their local for a couple of pints and knowing the name of every other person in there.
This narrative arguably privileges whiteness more than working class-ness, but the centre-left has not done enough to challenge this narrative. The influence of the small-c conservative and anti-immigration ‘Blue Labour’ faction has thankfully waned, but many of its core ideas remain important in the make-up of Starmerism. Blue Labour masquerades as a post-liberal perspective, but by depicting class principally as an identity rather than a descriptor for socio-economic hierarchies, it instead replicates one of the things it most objects to in contemporary liberal politics.
There have been some attempts to nuance our understanding of the contemporary working class, such as Claire Ainsley’s influential book The New Working Class. Ainsley served as Keir Starmer’s policy director from 2022 to 2022.
Ainsley starts from the premise that Tony Blair was wrong to prophesise the end of the working class (although note that the infamous ‘We’re all middle class now’ line was actually John Prescott’s). Ainsley describes a larger but more disparate working class, formed of the traditional working class, ‘emerging’ service workers and the precariat in roughly equal parts.
However, Ainsley shows that members of the new working class are less likely to define themselves by their work or occupation. The key argument of The New Working Class is that, while the new working class might not be middle class in terms of economic experience, there are few distinctions in the political attitudes of working and middle class voters.
This led to the conclusion that Labour should move to the right rather than put its hopes in working class radicalisation: The New Working Class represented a call for moderation when published in 2018 under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. There is a focus on job quality, employment support and skills provision, rather than, say, redistribution. Yet despite the argument that working class politics are no longer particularly distinctive, Ainsley dips into Blue Labour territory with an emphasis on pro-family policies and immigration controls.
Stevenage woman
The most interesting feature of Ainsley’s perspective is that it is based on an account of changing demographics within the working class, and implicitly on the notion that these demographic trends are the product of the growth of female-dominated industries in place of manufacturing. This is not the nostalgic machismo of ‘left behind’ or ‘red wall’ discourse.
The gender dimension is not, however, explored in depth. It receives for more attention in Labour Together’s equally influential Red Shift report, which sought to segment the electorate in order to chart ‘Labour’s path to power’. But I am not sure it hasn’t ended up creating further confusion.
The main insight of Red Shift is that there exists a large group of ‘Disillusioned Suburbans’ — 22% of the electorate, larger than any other segment — who will be decisive at the general election. Labour Together have devised the moniker ‘Stevenage Woman’ to represent this group, in contrast to ‘Workington Man’ (representing the ‘Patriotic Left’) who shifted from Labour to Conservative in 2019.
Red Shift does not quite say this, but the Disillusioned Suburban group is made up mainly of working class women, specifically the younger cohort that Ainsley categorised as ‘emerging service workers’. They are:
particularly well represented in the East of England, in London’s suburbs, and in the North East and [North] West. They are young, economically insecure, worried about their finances, and unlikely to own their own home. They are mostly women and, while 75% are White British, they have the highest ethnic minority representation.
This group had previously supported the Conservatives but by April 2023 (when Red Shift was published) had begun to turn Labour’s way:
In 2019, they backed the Conservatives by 44% to Labour’s 35%. Now they back Labour by a wide margin: 51% to 23%. Of the total share of possible Disillusioned Suburban voters, 28 percent are yet to decide who they will vote for.
And it is difficult to over-state their electoral significance:
in 430 of the 573 seats across England and Wales, Disillusioned Suburbans are the largest group. Of the 42 Red Wall seats, they are the largest group in 34. In the 71 Conservative/Labour marginals that sit outside the Red Wall, they are the largest group in 63. Even accounting for the relatively low turnout in this group, their votes carry considerable weight.
However, the conclusions drawn about the Disillusioned Suburbans in Red Shift seem to conflict with the data they are actually based upon. The report’s six electoral segments have been created following polling by YouGov, with respondents clustered according to their position on two axes: from socially conservative to socially liberal, and from economically right to economically left. Note below the proximity of — and indeed significant overlap between — the Disillusioned Suburbans and the Centrist Liberal segment on both axes.
Source: Labour Together
Why have the two been separated into different segments, when their attitudes are so similar? The analytical sleight of hand here is that ‘age, geography, income, education, and other demographic characteristics’ have been used to sort voters into clusters post hoc even where their attitudes are similar.
In fact, it is clearly possible for a Stevenage Woman to be more economically left and socially liberal than a member of the Centrist Liberal segment, even though Red Shift’s description of the clusters suggests otherwise.
Projection
Worse, in order to advise the Labour leadership on electoral strategy, the Disillusioned Suburbans are lumped in with the Patriotic Left (the other predominantly working class segment), despite the distance between them on both axes, to make the case for a socially conservative position. Accordingly, ‘Labour must hold its line on social and cultural issues’:
The majority of voters in the UK are socially conservative. This is particularly true of the Patriotic Left, but also of the Disillusioned Suburbans, who are more socially conservative than Labour’s 2019 voters. These voters believe that we should not increase immigration numbers. They believe Britain should be proud of its past. They believe that young people do not respect British values. They believe that certain places should be made safe by restricting entry by biological sex.
This is, frankly, bizarre. Having underlined convincingly the electoral importance of the predominantly female Disillusioned Suburbans, their actual views are then marginalised when assessing how they should be targeted, in favour of the predominantly male Patriotic Left. The Disillusioned Suburbans are seemingly far less socially conservative than three Red Shift segments that comprise almost half the electorate, including the Patriotic Left, and only significantly more socially conservative than the Activist Left segment (less than one in five voters).
The differences and similarities with Ainsley’s analysis are worth reflecting on. They seem to converge around the finding that younger, female cohorts of working class people have similar views to more affluent liberal voters. Ainsley acknowledges this, and it leads her to a position whereby the concerns of the new working class (as Ainsley understands them) are integrated into a broad-based electoral strategy. Labour Together instead downplays it, and instead recommends a more targeted red wall strategy based on the perceived views of older, male working class voters.
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I am not necessarily arguing here that working class women have a radically different political perspective to working class men. The methodology of this kind of analysis is too crude to draw very firm conclusions. The fact that we are not able to adequately capture and interpret what working class women think about politics provides an opportunity to project pre-existing agendas onto them — but this is an opportunity that should be resisted.
Part of the problem is that working class women are rarely afforded the space to articulate their perspectives in national political discourse. Their economic status and experiences are becoming more central to what it means to be working class — yet at this precise conjuncture the right have amplified, if not largely concocted, a male-centred account of working class grievance, in order to advance its own policy agenda.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has largely accepted this privileging. And with Labour set to win the election by a landslide, it would be absurd to suggest that it was wrong to do so. The notion that the Conservative Party had won over the working class needed to be nullified.
What’s more, Starmer has my mum’s vote in the bag! It’s a sample of one, admittedly, but it would be a surprise if working class women did not turn out for Labour in large numbers this time around. However, it would be a mistake to assume that Labour will continue to win the support of working class women over the long term without developing an agenda that genuinely reflects their concerns and ambitions.
Of course, these things have to be discovered before they can be addressed. The problem runs much deeper than the Labour Party, reaching into how social science is conceived and conducted, as well as longstanding biases in the UK’s political culture. However, getting this right brings the possibility of an enduring shift in the landscape of British politics in favour of the left, aligned with how the economy and its constituent class relations are evolving.
A longer version of this essay was originally published on the author’s newsletter, The Political Economy Blog.