The class system of the 21st century may now be more fluid than was the case throughout the majority of the 20th century, but the fundamental destinations of those born into the class that engage in low paid employment is still remarkably predictive of that individual’s eventual educational attainment and career destinations (Wright, 1996; Egan, 2005). Such limitations create a situation in which stalled transitions are common, a problem that has been exacerbated further still when wider economic unrest is taken into account. Between the financial crisis of 2008 and the onset of austerity led policy, young school leavers in Britain have experienced this problem in a very tangible sense, coming to encounter paths fraught with immobility (Iannelli & Paterson, 2006).
Social mobility in its simplest form is a pathway out of poverty, and from there supplies a roadmap to prosperity, in theory at least. Townsend & Gordon (2000:443) highlight the failure of this theory, that can be applied across much of Europe, when stating that ‘the scale and rapidity of economic and social
52 development seems to have outstripped the capacities of governments and public to react proportionately’ when catering to the mobility trajectories of a young generation much more highly educated than its predecessors. It is generally assumed that these expectations vary considerably between different class groups, yet Calder & Cope (2005) found that aspirational differences between disadvantaged young people and their control group were relatively similar. The key difference was that the former group faced multiple barriers on the road to reaching their goals, often leading to longer term underachievement as a final outcome. Todd (2018) notes that conversely in the early 20th Century the reality for working class kids who did end up doing well was always one of disparate expectations and unfair standards:
‘In Britain, the longstanding entrenched power of the aristocracy has fuelled a belief that ‘true’ superiority is hereditary and that the very best talents are innate. Middle-class or upper class schoolchildren, bank clerks or doctors might be praised for their effortless brilliance. But working-class entrants had to show themselves ‘diligent’ and ‘focussed’, to be deserving of their special chance. They also had to show themselves – in the words of Billy Fisher, protagonist of Keith Waterhouse’s 1959 novel Billy Liar, about a young man who wants to escape his dull clerical job, as ‘grateful, grateful, grateful’ for their chances.’
The focus on social mobility as a metric for reform of liberal, neoliberal and social democratic governments is one that has fundamentally altered the way in which we view poverty and unemployment. Social mobility has been used by successive governments at a UK level to justify wide ranging reforms as varied as
Workfare, SureStart, and child tax credits (SMC, 2017). The effects of these reforms on young people in particular have been disastrous. The concept of social mobility has also changed the emphasis on what kind of jobs are deemed to be upwardly mobile or suitable for a particular demographic, transitioning from an economy once focused on developing skilled professions with one focused on hierarchical career paths that ultimately lead to positions of responsibility over others as a benchmark for success. In his recent study on young working class men in Russia, Walker (2018) found that traditional ideas of service employment being associated with femininity was now much less prevalent, the key concern was rather the ability of their jobs and prospective careers to underpin wider transitions to adulthood. Roberts (2013) who interviewed young men working in the retail sector in Kent, England found that many of the participants found ways to
reconstitute their role to reflect more traditionally masculine focuses of physical and visibly exertive work and thus adapt traditional ideas to a modern setting. In these and other studies we see not only the presence of seeking to get ahead through adapting transitions to the new economic context but also a mobility in terms of traditional ideas of masculine work (Nixon, 2009; 2018; Jiminez & Walkerdine, 2011; Andersson & Beckman, 2018).
Addressing social mobility is an issue with cross party political appeal precisely due to the fact it is widely seen as desirable objective by all major political strands, the disagreement rests on how it should be carried
53 out (Clarke et al, 2004). Kennedy (2014) notes that the UK Conservative party has long been of the view that tackling child poverty should be about addressing what it considers to be the underlying causes of poverty (e.g. youth unemployment and poor school attainment), rather than focusing specifically on income inequality. During the period of New Labour governance (1997-2010) however the focus was much more acutely on redistributing, albeit in a modest sense, towards those who are less able to offer the time and resources to their children that might aid their mobility, a focus carried on from previous Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s (Bonoli, 2009; Scase, 2016). Reforms of this kind operate in a climate where fourteen million people live in poverty in the UK, which equates to over one in five of the entire population eight million of whom are working age adults (Barnard et al, 2017). Much of our assumptions regarding what social mobility is and how it operates is based on a relatively thin grounding of evidence that does not take into account a vast swathe of individuals and fails to measure well the penetration of poverty into the broader labour force (Grusky et al, 2015).
What we can be sure of is the role of inequality in exacerbating this problem. Higher income inequality in particular directly leads to family background becoming more important in determining the adult outcomes of young people, with those young people’s own work or skills playing a commensurately weaker role as a result (Corak, 2013). This income inequality continues to be ignored on a rhetorical level however, with an overriding focus on what many commentators opt to refer to as ‘Broken Britain’, a deliberate ignorance in order to create a pretext for further spending cuts (Slater, 2012). The major intervention to promote such cuts came through the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, which attacked the four income-based targets on child poverty set out in the Child Poverty Act 2010 Act, withdrawing them and replacing them with a duty to produce an annual report on levels of worklessness and educational attainment. The net effect of these reforms was to take almost £13bn a year from claimants by 2020-21, harming working class
communities indelibly (Beatty & Fothergill, 2016). This decrease in standards led to the State of the Nation reports and the Social Mobility Commission’s (SMC) 2017 report ‘Time for Change: An assessment of
government policies on social mobility 1997 to 2017’, a concession made in order to push through this
neoliberal approach. Foremost among its conclusions were that in-work poverty has for the most part become the driving factor in the deep economic disparities that are now predominant throughout the UK, a factor that is particularly developed in urban areas (McKendrick et al, 2003) . Youth unemployment fell from 14.6 to 12.5 per cent over the period 1997-2017, after peaking at 22 per cent following the financial crisis, a factor largely due to a significant increase in the number of young people in full-time education, rather than those young people being in work (Bell & Blanchflower 2011a). For those young people who are in work, they suffered a decrease in wages of around 16 per cent, starkly worse than the average for all ages of 10 per cent. This trend adversely affected young people with less qualifications in particular. According to the SMC’s (2018) report Social Mobility Barometer 46 per cent of people say that where you end up in society is largely determined by who your parents are. 40 per cent of those surveyed believe that
54 it is becoming harder for people from disadvantaged backgrounds to move up in society. Furthermore, it is typically younger generations who feel more acutely that background determines where you end up, with 48 per cent of 25-49 year olds agreeing with this statement compared with 38 per cent of those aged 65 and over. In turn, this creates a circumstance, as identified by Batchelor et al’s (2017) interview based research, in which immobility penetrates every aspect of young people’s lives – work, home, and leisure, in particular a sense of being stuck in occupations with no chance for progression and poor pay. In work poverty is at the heart of the question of social mobility, during a time that eight million of the fourteen million people in poverty in the UK live in a family where at least one person is in work (Barnard et al, 2017). Yet we have witnessed falls in poverty among families with children, there are two key reasons for this; the introduction of benefits specifically targeted at families and the tax credit system, and the increased levels of employment and pay due to the introduction of the minimum wage (Wills & Linneker, 2013). Decisions of this kind meant that families saw their living standards move closer to those among the rest of the population and were protected from the worst effects of the 2008–09 recession (Barnard et al, 2017).
State led responses to the problems of poverty and social mobility have proven to be viable solutions, even if the data suggests the best it has managed is amelioration. Mendola et al (2009) found that despite the high levels of poverty experienced by young people in Nordic countries in comparison, their poverty experience is often temporary in nature thanks to the generosity of the welfare state provision and the dynamism of their relative labour markets. Conversely in the UK, as Major & Machin (2018) reveal, the inequality gap is widening precisely as welfare provision is decreasing, evidenced by the fact a worker from the top 10 per cent of earners in 1980 was earning 2.75 times more than the worker from the bottom 10 per cent; by 2017 that difference was 4 times. Many writers as a result deem the UK focus on
individualising the problem of immobility as a deliberate attempt to pass the buck, and as such is
thoroughly consistent with the policy focuses of neoliberal governance since the late 1970s (Wiggan, 2012). The picture in the UK however is somewhat muddied by the presence of devolution, and it is here that opportunities have arisen to further redress downwards mobility, even if it is the case that those opportunities have often been missed as Payne (2017) states.