?There was a time when one in four of the world?s big ships were built on the Clyde and more than 1 million of the UK?s workers were coal miners. Today the supermarket giant Tesco?s employs just over 250,000 workers?making it the biggest private sector employer?.1 So began a report on BBC 2?s Newsnight. The programme took for granted the ?common sense? argument that the traditional working class in Britain is in terminal decline and is being replaced by a low paid, unorganised, part time, casualised workforce based in the service sector.

These conclusions are drawn from two main assumptions. The first is the decline in all major capitalist countries of manufacturing industries. The second argument, and one promoted by the likes of New Labour, Polly Toynbee and Will Hutton, is that the majority of people in Britain are now home owning, white collar and middle class. They cite the huge expansion of white collar jobs in teaching, local government, the civil service, design and technology, which were regarded as middle class professions, as proof that the majority of people are middle class.

They believe the country?s workforce looks something like an hourglass, with a large glass bowl at the top, containing around 70 percent of the population, which is doing very well or reasonably well. The bottom glass bowl contains the other 30 percent?the poor (unemployed, part time workers) and low paid service sector workers. Toynbee believes that the growth of the service sector means workers do not have the economic power or the industrial muscle that their forefathers had. The politics underpinning this assumption is Margaret Thatcher?s and subsequently Tony Blair?s belief that we live in a ?classless society?.

Yet arguments about the death of the working class are nothing new. Over the past 50 years they have regularly been resurrected. For instance, in the 1950s academics claimed that workers in the motor industry had become ?embourgeoisified? because they could afford fridges, cars and holidays abroad. French theorist Andre Gorz declared in an article written in early 1968 that ?in the foreseeable future there will be no crisis of European capitalism so dramatic as to drive the mass of workers to revolutionary general strikes?, and the historian Eric Hobsbawn made a series of assertions that the working class was in terminal decline in the1980s.2

Are we all middle class now? What does the working class look like in Britain today? Are the trade unions finished? These are the questions I want to attempt to answer. I also want to refute the notion that the working class is in decline, arguing instead that it is becoming larger and more diverse in its make up.
Who is working class?

Before we look at who makes up the working class in Britain today, it is important to define what makes someone working class.

Marx argued that under capitalism there are those who own the means of production, the factories, offices, railways etc?the ruling class; and the working class who sell their labour power in order to survive. In the Communist Manifesto he argued that the ruling class has developed ?a class of labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market?.3 In other words, class is a social relationship.

The Marxist historian G E M de Ste Croix put it the following way:

    Class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure. By exploitation I mean the appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others: in a commodity-producing society this is what Marx called ?surplus value?. A class (a particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of ownership or control) to the conditions of production (that is to say, the means and labour of production) and to other classes.4

However, today the structure of capitalist society is more complicated than simply being divided into two diametrically opposed classes?the ruling class and the working class. There is a substantial ?middle class? in Britain. Sociologists claim it represents about 15 to 20 percent of the population?foremen, low grade managers, doctors, head teachers, etc. These people face contradictory pressures. On the one hand, their wealth and social position mean that they buy into the system; on the other hand, because they sell their labour power they too can find themselves in conflict with the system and look to a collective response. The class forces around them shape their reaction to events.

It is interesting to note that a growing number of people describe themselves as ?working class?. In 1994 51 percent of those surveyed by Mori described themselves as working class; by 2002 it had risen to 68 percent.5

But Marxists reject the popular notion that what defines your class background has something to do with your lifestyle, income, accent or how you feel about your class position.