The UK government has announced civil service internships will only be available to those who are working class. What does this really mean? According to the BBC, applicants will be judged by what jobs their parents did when they were 14.
So what jobs are working class? Again, according to the BBC this definition is being sorted by the Comission on Social Mobility. I found this table from The State of the Nation 2024. Table 1, page 25.
As an economist, I don't really know how to think about what class someone is. So the following comments in the document interested me.
First, as with many of these indicators wages differ more within the divisions than between the. Page 26 : Sometimes people in lower occupational classes earn more than those in higher occupational classes. For example, speech and language therapists count as higher professionals, NS-SEC 1, because their job requires a first degree for entry and experience-related training, and the practical application of a body of knowledge to instruct others. Yet, their average salary is lower than that of many working-class
occupations, including some routine manual occupations.
There can also be great variation in earnings within a class. For example,
teaching assistants earn an average of £19,033, and rail travel assistants
earn an average of £36,080, yet both occupations are classified as
‘intermediate’.11 Apart from different salaries, these jobs may also have
very different working conditions.
Second, the treatment of the self-employed.
And, finally, 2 people doing the same type of work can be in different classes if one is an employee and the other is self-employed since the self-employed tend to be classed as intermediate. For example, a bricklayer who is an employee would be in NS-SEC 7, lower working class, while a self-employed bricklayer would be in NS-SEC 4, intermediate class."
I find it odd that being self-employed means you cannot be working class (the document is unclear to me about tending to be classified, I think this means occupations are classified by the ONS into the headings that this commission then choose to be working class).
So what do the ONS do? They have 8 "analytic" classes, https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/otherclassifications/thenationalstatisticssocioeconomicclassificationnssecrebasedonsoc2010, of which one, the self-employed, class 4 are defined by the social mobility people as intermediate and hence not "working class".
Source: table 2, here. . ONS, ‘The national statistics socio-economic classification (NS-SEC)’, 2021.
Other interesting information from the Mobility report
1. the education premium has declined
2. those with the same education, sex and age but coming from different backgrounds have different wage premia
3. in the conclusion they again state the heterogeneity within groups
"For example, children eligible for free school meals (FSM) of Chinese
background perform better than the national average for non-FSM children at key stage
(KS) 2 and KS4 (age 11 and 16 years)."
Which comes from a very striking graph
Blanket classifications e.g. "working class" don't seem very useful to me.
