The International Labour Organisation (ILO) economists shows the rapid growth of what they term "the developing middle class" – a group on between $4 and $13 a day. This group has grown from 600 million to 1.4 billion; if you include around 300 million on above $13 a day, that's now 41% of the workforce, and on target to be over 50% by 2017. But in world terms they're not really middle class at all. That $13 a day upper limit corresponds roughly to the poverty line in the US in 2005. The key markers were: families had access to savings and insurance, were likely to have a TV in the home and to live in smaller households (four people). They would typically spend 2% of their income on entertainment – plus they would have better access to water, sanitation and electricity. These, then, are the "winners" from globalisation.
One of the most startling results of the ILO survey is that more than half the "developing middle class" works in the service sector. Factory workers form between 15% and 20% of each income group: they are spread from the destitute to the above-$13 group. This, say the researchers, reflects the fact that the industrial sector of the global south now offers as much skilled, high-value work as it does sweated labour.
The reality of being "new middle class" in Brazil, Morocco or Indonesia and the word "comfortable" does not spring to mind. It means often living in a chaotic mega-city, cheek-by-jowl with abject poverty and crime, crowding on to makeshift public transport systems and seeing your income leach away into the pockets of all kinds of corrupt officials, middlemen and grey market people.
Perhaps the lines between low and middle income people are blurred. But other articles from the Guardian certainly show who is not middle class.
Those applicants to food banks who cannot afford to switch on their cookers and are supplied with products that can be prepared by adding boiling water, such as instant soup, Pot Noodles, instant mash and just-add-water porridge, as well as staples such as crackers, cereal and tinned food are not in this 'middle' class.
But most of all, it does not include the richest 85 people in the world who are wealthier than than all the poorest half of the world put together (3.5 billion). Those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1 trillion. Nor are the top 1% with wealth that amounts to $110 trillion (£60.88tn), or 65 times as much as the poorest half of the world in the middle class. 70% of the world's population live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s and 1% of families own 46% of global wealth - almost £70trillion.
Winnie Byanyima, the Oxfam executive director said: "It is staggering that in the 21st Century, half of the world's population – that's three and a half billion people – own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus. Widening inequality is creating a vicious circle where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs from the top table."
Oxfam argues that this is no accident either, saying growing inequality has been driven by a "power grab" by wealthy elites, who have co-opted the political process to rig the rules of the economic system in their favour. Socialists however point out that this is not a 'power-grab'. But the way it always has been under capitalism - a two class system of the rich and the not-rich and those who argue that there is now a rising new global 'middle' class are wrong by definition.
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