This is the text of a paper for the Resources for National Renewal programme, History and Analysis Series 13 May 2021. For the final report see: Labour’s Covenant (January 2022)
Version with images of this paper here
In this paper I want to develop some themes adumbrated so well by Jon Cruddas and Peter Dolan, and also extending the story to include British capitalism. I certainly agree with their key points that we need to both take work seriously, and that the Thatcher revolution did not reverse the British decline.
Declinism and Revivalism
On overall point I want to make is that in lots of deep ways the supposed trajectory of British history has been central to British politics for some time. We are two often trapped within tawdry narratives which mislead and confuse. We need something better. We need, for example, to be clear that the pictures painted by declinism and revivalism both were far from empirically sound.
Declinism was central to discourse on the British economy from the early 1960s onwards. It was central to the politics of Harold Wilson, who put forward a coherent set of arguments from a declinist perspective in 1964. It was also central to the politics of Margaret Thatcher, which were all about reversing the decline, and got transformative energy from the sense they had of the vital importance of that task. But declinism continued to central to the politics of the left. Indeed a central left argument was that Thatcher’s policies would make the decline worse, since they were precisely those which had led to it in the first place.
Declinism was also at the heart of crucial left-intellectual framings of British history. It was central to Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the UK. It was and remains central to the Nairn/Anderson tradition. Both posit a deep continuity thesis in which the UK was frozen in an Edwardian time warp, when it was liberal, global, imperial, financial, City-dominated. The consequence was the persistent weakness of the national economy, of the productive economy. This idea, this national and nationalist critique of British political economy, was the central mantra of the left, and were the core theses which informed the Alternative Economic Strategy.
New Labour involved a repudiation of such analyses. The Thatcher miracle had worked, she had been right to close the mines, to get rid of inefficient manufacturing, to let the gales of creative destruction do their work. The result was a new ‘cool Britannia’, an inventive nation, with a big role to play on the world stage. The economy could look after itself, and could be taxed to fund a more ample welfare state; in essence this was a replay of the 1950s revisionist welfarism, the real tax-and-spend programme in British politics. Decline was dead.
That idea that decline has been reversed, that the British economy has been entrepreneurial, successful, the envy of eurosclerotic countries, has been very important to British politics since the 1990s. As well as being crucial to New Labour it fuelled Euroscepticism and Brexit. Indeed it is very notable that Brexiters took to complaining about the ‘declinism’ of Remoaners.
The supposed British revival was evidenced above all by claims about a new British genius for innovation, once again to be compared with that of the scientific and industrial revolutions. It was also supposedly evident in the claim that the UK was shifting its trade away from the EU to the world. The first position was and is frankly silly, the second profoundly misleading in that it was true of I think nearly every EU country. Note too that revivalism was an odd position for Brexiters to take: a more obvious one would have been the declinist one that the EU was responsible for the decline (the position of Lexiters in the 1980s). It points to the fact that Brexiters were mostly radical Thatcherite revivalists, as were many Brexit voters.
But there was no revival, no Thatcher miracle. Productivity in manufacturing is still below that of French and German industry, with similar differences to those of the 1970s. Furthermore, for obvious reasons, the UK’s share of world output, R&D, innovation, military spending and so and so forth, is lower than in 1979. In short, we need to understand that the rest of the world has moved on.
That is not of course to say that the UK has merely fallen behind. It has clearly changed radically since the 1970s. However how it has changed is a crucial question, and one which the left has been poor at describing.
Labelling and describing how things have changed
Clearly there are some very particular terms of art out there which purport to summarise and explain how things have changed since the 1970s. This is not the place to go through them all, but only to alert us to the weakness of many of these stories. For example those accounts which insist we have left the age of the Keynesian welfare state and are now in neoliberalism, have some difficulty in understanding the fact as a proportion of GDP welfare expenditures are higher than ever in British history, or that since 2008 massive state intervention has kept economies ticking over. To take another example: since then ‘austerity’ has not been a general policy, but one targeted on very particular public services, excluding, notably, support for the old and the NHS.
We need also to look at New Labour’s favourite concepts, technology and globalization, both in the celebratory New Labour mode, and the critical mode of many others. Both concepts were, as Jon Cruddas rightly insists, central to the New Labour project. We also need to recognise their distinctiveness in British political history. It is mistake to equate it with the Wilsonian White Heat, for that was a declinist programme which had at its heart the belief that Labour and socialism alone could make a decent society in the age of automation and international competition. New Labour’s techno-global enthusiasm was a very specific kind of There is No Alternative form of thinking favoured by global management consultants; it was the stuff of airport business books. It was influenced also by a set of New Times stories from a left which had discovered the joys of shopping, anathema to Harold Wilson.
The idea of the nation as a democratic collectivity of real people has disappeared from English politics. The political nation has ceased to care about much of the population, and thinks first of the wealthy as ‘investors’ and ‘wealth creators’; there are no longer workers but entrepreneurs and small businesses; there is no working class but ‘hard-working families’ or the ‘squeezed middle’, and now a fantastical reactionary ‘red wall’. Putting the real national collectivity, not least that of producers, workers, employees, and trade unions, into the political imaginary would be a fundamental step forward.
Jon Cruddas is very right to dismiss technological determinist theses on the left. But there is perhaps more wrong with technological determinism that is apparent. It is not just a matter of a methodological error. Most technologically determinist arguments also get both the technology and what is supposed to be determined wrong also. The discourse on technology and society is an intellectual disgrace, as can be seen by looking at claims for a ‘fourth industrial revolution’. Our accounts of ‘technology’, a brain-macerating concept, are the purest bullshit, - take the droning on about 3D printing when its main use is probably in art schools.
The key point is that we don’t have anything like a good account of the change in the machinery our society uses. We have good information for some, I suppose best for technologies of leisure and everyday personal use. But for the machines associated with work our picture is very limited. More importantly what we have is highly biased towards a very small selection of machines which are granted transformative power, elements of IT, biotechnology, and similar.
But we can usefully start by looking around, and coming to our own conclusions about the nature of the national inventory of machines and how they might have changed our working lives. We might note the very large increase in cars and trucks on our streets since the 1970s. We might note the importance of new kinds of freight handling, not least the container and the juggernaut. We might note the much greater use of tower cranes in building.
Manufacturing industry
The UK had in the years after the war an exceptionally manufacturing oriented economy, it was at peak relative manufacturing in the 1950s and 1960s, not the 1850s or 1860s. It was this period which created a very manufacturing-oriented history of the UK, which is in many ways still with us.
If we were to look at manufacturing industry we might note that most of the type of things being made were being made in 1970, often in the same places. Cars are still being made in Cowley, chlorine in Runcorn, steel in Port Talbot, petrochemicals in Grangemouth. In all these places the productivity of labour has increased – and quite a lot over the last forty years. Many fewer workers are employed.
But we should not assume this is a necessary consequence of technical change. Germany has two massive historical complexes which have no parallel in the contemporary UK. BASF at Ludwigshafen employs tens of thousands of workers making chemicals, 39,000 to be exact.[1] Volkswagen at Wolfsburg, first built as a kind of copy of Ford Dagenham in the late 1930s, today employs 60,500 people.[2] Imagine a Dagenham or a Cowley or an Ellesmere Port employing these numbers! In Japan and Korea too there are gigantic car complexes. Of course they are not huge employers because they are technically backward; the opposite is the case. Note too that these are not low wage countries. German workers are paid more than British ones.
The UK has certainly stopped producing a lot of things over the last forty years. But most of these things are still being produced elsewhere, often in rich countries. The UK is no longer a producer of high-end trains, though the EU clearly is. It no longer builds great passenger ships, an industry which still exists in Germany and Italy.
Since the 1970s UK manufacturing has not declined. Its output is up a bit. It is however, a much smaller part of the economy than it was, and accounts for an even lower proportion of employment. Today the share of manufacturing in the UK economy is significantly lower than that of Germany, though not that of France. But what is especially striking is the lack of UK centred manufacturing firms of significance. There are no longer any ICIs, GECs, or British Leylands. German and French capital much more important in the UK than vice versa – there are no British car plants in Germany or France, no British electrical engineers in Germany. In addition the UK is a massive net importer of manufactures, when once not so long ago is was a huge net exporter. It is an importer not only of finished manufactures (it is a net importer of cars), but also of components. Thus a car exported from the UK will only be partly British made.
Associated with this is a fall in R&D GDP ratio. The ratio is not only smaller than in the 1970s, but well below that of the early 1960s. There are unjustified nationalist consolations in the case of big pharma and aerospace. In both cases however, the key firms operating in the UK do so as part of much larger framings. UK aerospace makes multi-national aeroplanes; UK pharma is a set of branches of global pharma. Which brings us to the question, did this new dispensation unleash a wave of entrepreneurship and business building in British manufacturing? Clearly there are some cases, but nothing one could call spectacular. It is telling that there are stories about venture capital and high valuations, but stories of significant output and employment are very much rarer. One would be hard pushed to claim a great transformation in British industry driven by British innovation.
Most of the economy
But we must get away from too much of a focus on manufacturing. We need to look at the whole economy. The big thing in output is not replacement of industry, but the addition of service output, on a huge scale. The overwhelming proportion of growth in the economy since the 1970s has been the addition of services. The big shift from industry to services long predated Thatcher – it goes back to the late 1960s.
But before we take the story forward it is important to note that before the 1960s and before 1939 the tertiary sector employed more than half the population. In other words when we think of the ‘traditional’ British working class we should not think first of the factory or the mine, but the mass of tertiary sector occupations. Ernest Bevin’s T&GWU, the largest trade union in the world, was not a manufacturing trade union except incidentally. It was a union of dockers, carters, truck, bus, tram drivers, and other workers engaged in transport activities (excepting railways). It was a union of precarious, often immigrant workers, as was true of the docks. The railway unions were also very large. Indeed, the famous Triple Alliance did not represent manufacturing workers at all – it brought together dockers, carters, bus and tram workers, seamen, the main railway union, and the miners. One has only to think of other great unions – from the shopworkers to the municipal workers to make the point that we should not overemphasise manufacturing, or mining, in the history of trade unions. Furthermore when we think of manufacturing trade unions at the beginning of the twentieth century we need to remember the centrality to the movement of the huge textile workers’ unions, and not just the many shipbuilding and engineering unions.
So what has happened to the workforce since the 1970s? To listen to the public discourse is to assume that there has been a massive shift to creating one’s own business. But while self-employment has increased, it has really returned to prewar levels, a world of many independent shops and other businesses, often tiny. The second image is of a move from secure well-paid manufacturing jobs to precarious ones. While it is true that manufacturing jobs have fallen, and precarious jobs have increased, it is obviously not so simple. Many precarious jobs arose out of the transformation of previously secure service jobs. Another image is of new jobs determined by new technology. Is the stagnation of wages in many sectors, and the emergence of precarious work, the production of new technologies of automation? The answer is surely no: as Aaron Benanav suggests it is more likely due to standard levels of technical change combined with low wages caused by low economic activity and a weak labour force.[3]
But there has been an extraordinary expansion in very, very low tech jobs. Consider for example the spread of the bicycle delivery, or indeed the van delivery, as the necessary supplement to electronic ordering. And note the huge expansion of the care sector. No, the whole framing of work been driven by technical change is a macro fiction based on choosing a very particular micro focus.
And then there is the other great handwaving argument of the era – that globalisation is the force driving down wages and conditions. It does not do it in itself: it is a matter of choice. Most workers are not producing goods that are traded globally but rather services which are traded locally. Capital is mobile and has the power to push wages low, but that it has that power is the result of policy decisions. Take the argument by Martin Sandbu, that rather than reject globalisation what is needed are direct policies for raising pay and reducing inequality, and reskilling the workforce. That will bring in automation and high wages. An example is the hand car wash and the automated one, which need to return. [4]
But much more was happening than any of these images convey. The fall in manufacturing and mining, to be replaced by inferior jobs is only a small part of the story overall though it is clearly the central story in particular parts of the country. In the table below we see surprising stability in some areas (though with much change within them – for example in transport there was a massive shift from docks, trains, buses, ships to trucks). But what is most striking at this level of aggregation is that manufacturing jobs were replaced by
1) miscellaneous services including hotels and catering, which have both obviously boomed in the last forty years, and are often precarious. These are not jobs created by new technologies, but rather by high incomes, and note that under a more sensible industrial classification cooking in a restaurant might be considered manufacturing.
2) professional, scientific and technical services, now employing three times more than manufacturing. Central here are the welfare state professions and activities – health and education. Both have expanded hugely in terms of numbers employed. Health and education have some elements of technical novelty, but neither expanded mainly because of technical change. Nor were the jobs themselves that radically changed by technical changes. Again the key driver is increasing income – as countries get richer they demand and get more education and more health care.
Although there is a very large range of conditions of work within health and education it should be noted that here we have a very significant expansion of white collar, secure and often unionised work. This part of the story clashes profoundly with the end of the welfare state and drive to precarity narrative. Can put it this way too the number of miners fell radically, the number of academic grew. There have been more academics than miners from early 1990s.
See
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/compendium/economicreview/april2019/longtermtrendsinukemployment1861to2018
Trades Unions and labour support
The lazy assumption made in so much of the discussion about the Labour Party that the working class at some point all voted Labour is a pernicious error. We should reject the notion therefore that the Labour party was either the natural party of government, or the natural party of the working class. Both notions derive from a very particular post-1945 moment (see appendix). It ignores the fact that the urban working class made up (uniquely in the British case) some three quarters of the population. Obviously before 1914 only a tiny percentage of this class voted Labour; more voted Labour by the 1930s, perhaps just over a third on average. It is salutary to remember that Labour’s highest vote was in 1951, at just under half. It was thus only in this period attracting significantly more than half the working class vote. We should also remember that that Eric Hobsbawm put the end of the forward march of labour at exactly this point (and not as it is often assumed in the 1970s when he was writing). This was the point at which the Labour share of the vote, and of working class vote, stopped rising.
It is also important to remember something obvious but too easily forgotten. It is that Labour was not the party of the working class per se, but of the organised working class. The party was the party of the organised miners, cotton workers, dockers, railway workers, engineers. The party put not workers, but trade union officials, into parliament. It is useful to ask of today, who are the organised workers?
The number and share of organised workers has diminished, but it is higher than Edwardian levels, and roughly at 1930s levels. But the key point is that the nature of the organised workers has changed radically, reflecting both the changing nature of the workforce, and place in the labour market of particular kinds of workers. Membership of trade unions now much more female than it was. Also trade unions better educated than the population, and more likely to be working in the public sector. This should not be taken to mean that trade unions, like Labour supposedly, are institutions of the metropolitan elite. It is rather than younger people are more likely to be workers, and be better educated than the population as a whole, and that in the workforce overall there has been upskilling at least at the level of qualifications.
Trade Unions with over 100,000 members 2017.
UNISON (mostly female, public sector) 1,369,114
Unite the Union (mostly male, private sector) 1,291,017
GMB 613,400
National Education Union 510,000 Non-Labour
Royal College of Nursing 432,000 Non-Labour, Non-TUC
Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers 425,700
National Association of Schoolmasters
Union of Women Teachers 333,223 Non-Labour
Public and Commercial Services Union 262,800 Non-Labour
Communication Workers Union 201,900
British Medical Association 152,200 Non-TUC Non-Labour
Prospect 145,000 Non-Labour
University and College Union 115,800 Non-Labour
Source: Wikipedia
One obvious reaction to these figures is to say that the unions have became middle class. And therein lies a crucial problem. In far too much discussion the implied definition of working class is radically different from what it was earlier in the century. For most of the twentieth century the standard definition of working class accounted for say three quarters of the population. Today’s definition is radically different. A standard one is the advertisers’ category C2DE which represents only 43 percent of the population.[5] Worse still the qualitative image of the working class seems to be of old, former workers, retired or made redundant from industries which ceased to matter decades ago. The working class is also contrasted with those who have education; the assumption seems to be that the working class still leaves school at 14. Tories would like nothing better that Labour to take up a nostalgic focus on decayed industrial areas, votes there are unlikely to win, while they would lose in other areas, not least to the greens. Labour is walking straight into the trap.
We would be much better off if we took to thinking of Labour as the potential party of 75 percent of the population, as it was in 1945 say, and refine that to understand that it would particularly attract organise workers, who were always more prominent among the more skilled, secure, and well-paid. That 75 percent are still employees, and they are more different from the top 5 percent, or 1 percent, than they were in the 1950s and 1960s. One can put it another way. Yesterday’s skilled engineer is today’s degree-holding administrator. The children of the million miners of 1920 are the nearly 1.4m health workers of today. We wrongly think of this as social mobility out of the working class – it is not. It is transformation of the working class.
The problem is not being out of touch with the working class, but rather with the real world. The central issue is not that the Labour Party has not kept its contract with the remnants of the working class of the old economic order (and it hasn’t), it is that it fails to understand the working class of today, not least the organised working class, much of which is not even affiliated to Labour. That would have been unthinkable in 1945.
The nature of British capital
To an extraordinary extent Labour has historically failed to develop an account of British capitalism, and the Tory Party. If it has an image of either it is perhaps the Tory party and the capitalism of the 1930s, as imagined in the 1960s. (Of its is nostalgic for anything it is the Second World War as imagined in the 1960s). There has been a failure to understand Thatcherism as a set of ideas and practices, and even more so Brexitism and Johnsonism. Labour has become, more than it ever was a supine, subaltern party, bereft of an analysis of the society in which it operates. It is a party which (in a very silly way) hates Tories and loves the NHS, which it treats with mawkish sentimentality, wrong believing this wins votes. It needs to be a party with a critique of society, not just its political opponents.
Indeed, as many have argued, Labour has long been weak in defining a distinctive social democratic understanding. It was a free trading party into the 1930s, and emphasised the iniquity of unearned income, the rentier incomes, as radical liberals did (I return to this point below). In the 1940s and later the main argument for nationalisation was that particular industries were letting down the nation, rather than because they were powerful capitalist enterprises. This is not to say that nationalisation had no effects, including very many positive ones, but it is to point out the limits of the Labour understanding of the economy. Under the revisionist programme of 1959 it was held that British capitalism was now working fine – it need only be taxed to increase equality.
Harold Wilson, however, took a very different view. Long an intervener in industry, he took up with alacrity the declinist critique of the British elite and of British capitalism. British capitalism was failing he said – the financiers and aristocrats were in control, not the technicians. This was a powerful national critique which paid off. The critique of British business would develop on the left, and would strongly influence the AES. British capitalism was held to be too internationalist, and not nationalist enough. Labour was out to save British business from itself.
By the late 1990s things changed radically. Labour now thought the UK economy was flourishing, that it was dynamic and entrepreneurial. It was happy to see finance very much stronger and more powerful than it had been in the interwar years. It was time again for tax and spend. It put globalisation and innovation at the centre of its positive understanding of the economy. It was a Liberal party, a radical free trading party concerned to make capitalism work through creating a welfare state based not on universalism, but targeting, what used to be called means testing.
The key changes in capitalism in the UK since the 1970s have been profound. The story of coal is instructive. Under Thatcher output fell only a little, with employment fell by 4/5, and imports increased. Under John Major output halved, and employment fell very much more, and it was privatised in 1995. Under New Labour output halved again, and imports doubled. Imports became larger than domestic production only under New Labour, in 2001, and remained so (see appendix below for the figures). Global coal production is still increasing, and is produced with extraordinary levels of efficiency. Australia produces more coal than the UK coalfield did at its peak in 1913, and with a workforce smaller than Dagenham at its peak.
Since the 1980s a new economy emerged, with London essentially a rich, and very cosmopolitan enclave. The FTSE was no longer a barometer of the British economy, nor indeed of British capitalism. The firms on it very often did more business outside the UK than at home, much of it was owned from abroad, and in any case many of the largest firms in the UK were not listed as they were subsidiaries of foreign companies. The City was not the thing of continuity theses, exporting British capital. It was rather a place where world capitalism did its global and its British business. The UK became a massive importer of capital, which offset the extraordinary balance of trade deficits. Far from offering a new dynamism, creating new firms, developing transformative new techniques or leading the world in some other way, the British economy outside finance does not look strong.
The business is one of creating profits for the owners of property. It is little wonder that one of the most important developments in recent years in left thinking about the economy has been the emphasis on financialization, and in the crucial work of Brett Christophers, a comprehensive analysis of the rentier economy, something which goes much further that our image of the passive owner of stock.[6] It certainly helps make sense of the low production, low productivity, low innovation, but high profit economy we have.
Yet the political response to all this has been muted, amounting to little more that critiques of the use of transfer pricing and tax havens. Even under Covid the extraction of political-contact rents has been treated as mere old fashioned sleaze, when it is clearly much more than that.
A politics of work and critique of the rentier economy
Is there room for a critique of rentier capitalism? James Meadway proposed such a politics for Labour, which he identifies with Chartism, and contrasts with a socialist tradition of attacking all capitalism, and the British revisionist social democrats who went for growthsmanship. I would say in a first response to this that anti-landlordism and anti-rentierism was the central ideology of the Labour party well into the 1940s. It really did not have a socialist phase at all, before moving to growthmanship. But it did have declinist phases, which were similar to anti-rentier politics in that they were critiques of finance rather than productive capitalism. Anti-rentier politics, it can be argued, lies at the heart of the Labour project. The aim today would be ‘a reassertion of labour’s historic claim to the national wealth, rather than claims on its technical abilities to increase that wealth’, all the more relevant in an age of low growth. This at minimum would involve action on tax havens, a proper capital gains tax, corporate taxes, and a wealth or property tax.
The other side of this coin is the support of productive work. And here too there are many political possibilities, especially once one gets rid of a politics of chasing GDP. As James puts it, the strategy would be ‘to mobilise those on the wrong side of the dual economy with at least some section of its winners. It would offer an economic programme centred on the value of specific work, performed in specific places for specific purposes, rather than on the abstractions of GDP or productivity; industrial strategy and related interventions based around the need to sustain valuable work, notably in the care sector; a radical decentralisation of economic institutions towards the places that work can be performed in’.
Labour could renew a social democratic programme. Its essence is a calculus at national level designed to combine efficacy, efficiency and equality. Social democracy insists these go together rather than being in conflict, but achieving this requires collective action by a national state which can take on private and sectoral interests. In this view, the state can and should act to create a national community whose members are more like each other economically than they would be under the rule of property. In this framing, the state acts to ensure a high national floor of income and access to services, to reduce inequalities of income, wealth and geography, not only for its own sake but because efficiency and efficacy would increase also.
The above should not be thought of as a policy for recreating a more generous welfare state, and this is one place a new history comes in. It is wrongly believed that Labour’s fundamental historical policy was welfare, but this was only true in 1959, and between 1997 and 2015. Labour was first of all a party of production, of transformation of the economy, of work, of creating richer lives, as well as of welfare. Labour needs to recover that sense of being the party of a new politics of production and consumption, focussed on work and workers not property; for example, through advocating worker shareholdings and board representation.
This could also involve a new politics of products services and machines. A very good example is the set of ideas around reconceptualising the foundational economy. But there are a whole range of other issues around quality, the life of products, repairability and more: in short the whole way we think about and organise how we produce and consume.
One aspect of this is clearly apparent in the need to transform the energetic basis of the economy and society to stop runaway climate change. It is obvious that both global and national action and conceptualisation is required, and much more than adjusting energy prices. A national framing, and national state action, is needed to effect the necessary coordinated transformation of energy supply with (to return to that trio) equity, efficiency and efficacy. Rentier capitalism will not achieve this.
Another is to think through the political economics of the public sector, including health care and education. Sentimentalism about both has obscured the myriad ways in which privatisation and marketisation are undermining the conditions for good work reflecting educational and health necessities.
Finally, critical attention needs to be given to the nature of the British state – it is clearly deficient both democratically and in terms of expertise and capacity to act in anything but the interests of a few. Hollowed out, mendacious, and grotesquely self-important, it hides its lack of shame by, in a very unBritish way, wrapping itself in the Union Jack.
Last thoughts
We should not assume that the Tories are bound to win, and Labour bound to lose. The Tories are clearly cleverer, more nimble, and have control of nearly all the media. But they have also tied themselves to the old, to programmes they are very unlikely to be able to deliver, and to Brexit, which will damage the economy, not least in former Labour areas.
Labour, if it does not throw away its lead among the young, and among those who voted remain, and crucially, builds its own self confident arguments, has every chance of winning by creating an electoral coalition. Indeed this is a moment of opportunity, as politics has become interesting and dynamic. And that, tragically, is now the problem for Labour – does it have anything interesting to say? And if so, does it dare say it? Is the problem lack of courage of its convictions, or not having any convictions at all?
For the appendix and other images see the version online, link above.
[1]https://www.basf.com/global/en/who-we-are/organization/locations/europe/german-sites/ludwigshafen.html
[2] https://www.volkswagen-karriere.de/en/working-at-volkswagen/sites/site-wolfsburg.html
[3] Aaron Bananav, Automation and the Future of Work (Verso Books, 2020).
[4] Martin Sandbu, The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All, (Princeton, 2020)
[5]https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/25/how-well-do-abc1-and-c2de-correspond-our-own-class
[6] See also https://autonomy.work/portfolio/berry-class-rent/