Breaking the Class Ceiling in the age of declining social mobility

We're NOT all middle class now, and we need to talk about it

Welcome to Dr Eliza Filby’s Newsletter,

This community is now over 6000 strong…. stay here to discover the key mega-generational trends that are defining how we live, love, work and consume. Do check out my website for my corporate content and courses. You can also mock as I attempt short form video on Instagram.

In this week’s edition:

• Why class is back on the agenda (as if it ever left)
• Why Ben Affleck has it right on AI
• Do you check your emails (even though your inbox remains empty?)

Breaking the Class Ceiling in the age of declining social mobility

A couple of months ago I was running a workshop for trainees at an international law firm in the UK helping a bunch of extremely bright Gen Z young things integrate into their new workplace. The discussion drifted into one about DEI at the firm. Their response surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have.

‘To me, I think class is the most important issue here, and I don’t think it is being talked about enough’ said one trainee. Another agreed, explaining how in her case, as a council estate kid who was now working at a magic circle law firm and was now on a 100k plus salary, she felt that class and social mobility were woefully lacking from most of the workplace discussions, especially about integration and yet was her defining life experience. To clarify, she was a young, black, working-class woman and was fully aware of the intersectionality in these identities. Her socio-economic background though was in her view the thing that had shaped her the most and continued to distinguish her at work. To be clear, she was not about pitting diversity issues against one another, but rather pointing to what she perceived was the relative silence about class.

It is of course no great surprise that in an inheritocratic economy where social mobility is in decline and where the Bank of Mum and Dad plays such a pivotal role in the professional job market especially, younger generations are talking about class with renewed vigour but maybe with less certainty than previous generations.

The anatomy of class in the UK has changed profoundly in the 21st century. ‘We are all middle class now,’ John Prescott famously claimed in the late 1990s, which coming from Tony Blair’s northern Deputy Prime Minister seemed to carry serious weight. More and more of us were second-generation graduates and had grown up in properties our parents owned. But this was a false reading of British society at the dawn of the new millennium. Class remained critically important, especially where it intersected with race. Britain’s multi-ethnic population was becoming less homogenised, more diverse but also more multi-class in its make-up.

For a brief period in the mid-’90s, it felt like class centred on popular culture rather than wealth or profession. Some indulged in tit-for-tat territorial wars between middle-class Blur and working-class Oasis, but it was Pulp with their satirical anthem ‘Common People’ that really signposted the direction of travel. By the time that Owen Jones’s seminal book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class came out in 2011, the writing was on the wall. The white working class, culturally and politically dismissed, were becoming a point of both ridicule and fascination for the chattering classes (thereby revealing the increasing distance of the middle class from working-class spaces except on TV). Up to that point, class definitions had focused on an individual’s job, educational status or income, and possibly geographical location too. But by the 2008 Financial Crisis, with poverty on the rise and a first generation of asset owners getting wealthier, there was a need for a more nuanced definition.

In 2013 the BBC ran the biggest class survey in history asking people a series of detailed questions about their income, housing, wealth, social network and cultural tastes. The class calculator, in turn, told participants which class they belonged to.

If the UK was in any doubt that it was confused but consumed by class in the 2010s, consider that 9 million people – then more than one in five of the British adult population – clicked on the BBC’s class calculator when it was launched. It became one of the most important and talked-about data sets of all time. There’s even evidence that it triggered changes in behaviour. Demand for theatre tickets in London, for example, increased by 191 per cent in the week after the survey launched, presumably because theatregoing was deemed a critical indicator of middle-class status by the class calculator.

‘This survey has really allowed us to drill down and get a much more complete picture of class in modern Britain,’ announced Professor Savage, the academic behind the study. Rather than the traditional three social classes, the survey revealed that there were in fact seven different classes in Britain.

See if you can find yourself amongst them:

Firstly, there were the ‘elites’, deemed the wealthiest and most privileged group in the UK. They held the most in terms of social, cultural and economic wealth and power, attending the top private schools and best universities, and representing 6 per cent of the population.

The second group were the ‘established middle class’, representing 25 per cent of the population. They worked in management or traditional professions, hailed from middle-class backgrounds and experienced a diverse range of cultural activities.

These were followed by the ‘technical middle class’, which represented 6 per cent of Britons, again predominantly middle class in origin but worked in science or tech and preferred non-traditional culture.

Then there were the ‘new affluent workers’, which represented 15 per cent of the population. They were economically secure without being well off. They engaged in emerging culture, emanated from working-class backgrounds and lived in old manufacturing centres in the Midlands and north-west.

Then there was the ‘traditional working class’, which made up 14 per cent of the population. They scored low for economic, social and cultural status, but many did have financial security, owning their own home.

Then there were the ‘emergent service workers’, which made up approximately 19 per cent of the population, who were financially insecure with low savings and living in rental accommodation. They were engaged in emerging culture and congregating in inexpensive large cities.

Then, finally, was the ‘precariat’, which made up 15 per cent of the population and represented the poorest and most deprived group with more than 80 per cent in the rental sector.

But, as Mike Savage later explained in his book on the subject, class definitions were changing amongst the under 45s, chiefly because they were operating in a completely different context to their parents; an economy defined by asset inflation, parental aid and wage suppression.

So how does this relate to social mobility and class at work in the 2020s? Firstly, we need to be careful about definitions. If I take myself as an example. My father was a labourer, later a cleaner and I was the first person in my family to graduate with a degree. But this obscures the fundamental fact that reveals my true class and family wealth; my parents were homeowners, my mum had bought an additional London property in the 1980s (then just ￡28k). I grew up in a culturally working-class household, which probably makes me ‘class confused’, but definitely not working class. Moreover, I had a place to stay in London rent-free throughout my twenties. In this era of housing difficulties, the Bank of Mum and Dad and a cost of living crisis, companies need to ascertain how many of their staff are still living with their parents, or are being forced to live beyond Zone 6 or pay more than half their wages on rent. It is potentially as revealing as data on whether they are a first gen graduate or their parents profession.

Secondly, companies need to be interrogating whether there is a class pay gap. Research commissioned by the Social Mobility Foundation has recently found that working-class professionals are paid an average of ￡6,287 – or 12% – less per year than their more privileged counterparts in the same occupation. The Social Mobility Foundation is calling on the government to mandate class pay gap reporting as a step toward driving economic growth and breaking down workforce barriers. Currently, companies with over 250 employees are already required to report their gender pay gaps, and the recently announced Equality (Race and Disability) Bill will soon introduce mandatory reporting for ethnicity and disability pay gaps. Under the Foundation’s proposal, large employers would also need to gather and disclose data on their employees' socioeconomic backgrounds. Progress is already underway, with 26 organizations from the Foundation’s 2024 Employer Index, including Co-op (the first retailer) and PwC, now measuring their class pay gaps.

But surely, there is so much more to be done when it comes to true inclusion. I recently spoke to a young accountant from Newcastle who has worked across the top four firms. He shared a striking observation: he often found himself as the only working-class person in the room. Beyond that, he expressed frustration with organizations that made little effort to foster a sense of belonging or integration for people from his background. Despite his talent and professional success, he felt like an outsider navigating spaces that seemed built for others.

This isn’t to suggest that all workplaces are failing—many organizations are making strides in inclusion and breaking down barriers. However, for every company leading the way, there are countless others where progress is painfully slow. As the conversation around class grows louder amongst younger generations, it’s clear that how we identify, assess, and integrate individuals from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds into professional spaces is becoming a louder issue, and not one to be silenced.

The Reading Room

1. The culture of pro-natalism gathers pace. Last week, the New York Times published a piece entitled “The Unspoken Grief of Never Becoming a Grandparent.” As more and more millennials choose to be child-free, the article aimed to highlight the sense of loss and longing their parents experience. Unsurprisingly, a backlash ensued. “Maybe if?Boomers?and elder Gen X had focused on voting for policies that benefited their children rather than themselves, they could have had grandchildren,”?claimed?one reader on Twitter/X. But UK The Times showcased one positive initiative that may offer some hope; it cited the rise of schools linking children (especially adversely impacted by Covid) and social care homes bringing together old and young in a way that frankly bypasses the need to have kids and also certainly benefits both old and young. Now that seems like a much more productive initiative and fruitful interaction.
2. I’d never take marriage advice from Ben Affleck, but who knew that he was the person to listen to on AI? This brilliant exposition on how AI will impact his profession tells you one thing. Hollywood stars, that were on the back foot when it came to the switch to streaming, are determined not to be left in the slow lane when it comes to the revenue potential of AI. Here Affleck talks about its capacity to monetise existing intellectual property (rather than steal it). But Affleck points to something fundamental about AI that few have talked about. We casually assume that it’s the future but what if its greatest cultural potential is in regurgitating the past? It is a LLM built on what has gone before; just look at the guy who turned his father into a bot. I’ve already heard of creating AI board members (who have unparalleled institutional memory) and one family business creating an AI chatbot of the founding father. The past is the future it seems.
3. At a recent Gen Z workshop I was running, one new recruit told me that she refuses to download Microsoft Teams on her phone, confident that she can keep pace with inbound messages on her computer but also determining not to let work infiltrate her downtime unnecessarily. I commended her on her commitment to boundaries. But not many can exercise such discipline it seems. A new study by Robert Walters found that 29% of professional workers are losing sleep over their inability to log off effectively. Why? The expectation that they should always be available. The key word here is expectation. Is that a real or imagined? Particularly if it is your first job and you are keen to impress. Most revealingly, more than three-quarters admitted to checking work emails or calls, but only 20% said their employer contacted them after hours. In other words, I’m not the only one who logs on when their inbox is in fact empty.

This week I’ve been in Dublin talking to businesses about the future of work, and another webinar on upskilling older workers in an ageing workforce and in the era of AI co-pilots.

Also last week, I was on LBC talking about Inheritocracy and focus grouping new graduates on the workplace…… Roll on December…..

Thanks for reading

Eliza