Restructuring Britain: The changing social structure

(1989) - C Hamnett, L McDowell, P Sarre

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Tags:: #paper #BCS #Transition #school-to-work #LabourMarket #Apprenticeships #SocialClass #Background
Cite Key:: [@Hamnett1989]

Abstract

Notes

• Talk of an 'end of the working class'. Perhaps better put as an end to masculine dominated heavy manufacturing jobs
• the 1950s dominated by ration books and austerity
  • the 1960s saw both a 'long boom' and the 'white heat' of Wilson's technological revolution into an affluent consumer society
• Harold Macmillan 'You never had it so good' (1959)
• Whilst the working class benefited by these changes, talk of embourgiesment was criticised by Goldthorpe and Lockwood (1968, 1969, 1979)
• Women entered paid employment in large numbers. Immigration led to West Indian and New commonwealth workers. The service sector growth also led to an increase in professional and technically jobs
• in the 1970s recession wrecked havoc in manufacturing industries of the north with unemployment comparable to the 1930s. The recovery was located exclusively with the growth of service jobs in the south
• The UK has become 'a different country... You have to blink and rub your eyes' (Jaques 1982)
• the share of the top ten percent of income recipients increased before tax from 26% of the total to 29.5% between 1978/9 to 1984/5
• according tot he department of employment 1987 Labour Fore Survey, nearly half of the 1.4 million jobs created between 1983 and 1987 were in the South East
• in 1979 16 and 17 year olds earned 42% of adult earnings on average, by 1987 they earned only 39%
  • 18-20 year olds saw their earnings decline from just over 3/5 of the adult average to only 54%
• Leadbeater (1987) argues that economic change has created a persistent pool of long-term unemployed, and a peripheral workforce of part-timers, temporary workers, and the self-employed
• Thatcher's orthodox policies of deregulations took the form of reducing employment rights and minimum wage which disproportionally impacted the 'vulnerable core' of the segmented labour market