The Posh Poor

SOYMB have had a few posts now on those higher paid members of the working class that some seem determined to describe as another class . The Independent has an article that once again demonstrates that the so-called "middle" class share almost the identical social inequalities as the low-paid .

A "middle-class" couple would normally be seen as a success if they had their own large, detached home, two cars in the driveway, nice holidays, a golf course lifestyle and children lined up for private school. But when he handles middle class divorces, the family solicitor Andrew Newbury finds that a growing number of such couples have borrowed their way to apparent prosperity. Unbeknown to the wife,the lifestyle is built on credit cards.And, instead of sharing out the matrimonial assets,the couple will split the debts. The seemingly wealthy are suffering from the business downturn. And they will range in type from the flamboyant over-spenders to the lone mothers, the graduates who lose their good jobs and never get back on track, and the people who are derailed by ill health, divorce or some other problem and gradually sell off their bits of silver as they edge closer to poverty.
Financial adviser Garry Spencer of Wilbury Financial Management stands up for one group that few others would defend: solicitors.
"A lot of them are struggling," he says. "They got as big a mortgage as they could get, and now they are fire-fighting. A lot are having pay cuts. They are cutting their pension, the life cover and cashing in the ISA [Individual Savings Account]. Some of their kids are being taken out of private school. Many are borrowing again, and they are missing payments on their credit cards. That affects their future credit card rating. Poverty is a spiral, and you get deeper and deeper into debt."

Employment adviser Richard Lynch, formerly an official at the union Unite, believes that the combination of 3.7 per cent inflation and pay freezes across a third of employers will ratchet up the pressure. "It's going to be very difficult for people of all levels to keep up."

But those that do get laid off are likely to suffer more. The University and College Union predicted 6,000 job losses among academics and college staff last year, but has just upped that figure to 15,000. The specialists in this sector – like the experts on Romantic poetry may find it harder than others to transfer their skills to a different environment.

People get caught in a rut which wrecks the rest of their life or vastly reduces their enjoyment of it.Young blacks suffer 48 per cent unemployment rates, compared to 20 per cent for young whites, according to the Institute of Public Policy Research. Single parents of whom 57 per cent are unemployed, according to the Government and older, single women who "have a 24 per cent chance of living in poverty", according to the Fawcett Society. These groups are always vulnerable, but can suffer much more than others in a downturn.

Marx points out that the wage is the purchasing price of labour-power . One is paid so much as is necessary to reproduce that labour power in its "normal state" . Marx speaks of reproducing the means of subsistence, but clearly he means a historically produced subsistence as opposed to the minimum amount of food and clothing one could possibly live with. The means of one's subsistence can include sufficient wages to , purchase a car, mortgage a house , take foreign holidays , have the normal range of consumer durables, including any other labour-saving device that allows you to get to work on time and have sufficient hours after the working day to unwind and recuperate for the next eight hours. It would also include support for a family, which is after all the unit through which the labour is replaced. Those who some describe as middle class are now coming to the increasing realisation that they are indeed just workers and wage slaves.