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Working-Class Precarity: An Education
Photo by Tapir Girl The teacher who most influenced me was Raphael Samuel, one of the leading social historians of his time – though I didn’t know that when I studied with him. Raph, as we came to...
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Why Can’t It Be Like That Now? Remembering What We Had and Could Have Again
‘But why can’t work be like that now?’ my colleague Julia asked when I told her about my research into the former Guinness brewery at Park Road in West London. After working on the project for the best...
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Counting on Class: The Continuing Appeal of Meritocracy
Neither faith in nor critiques of the idea of meritocracy is new. Michael Young’s famous 1958 book The Rise of Meritocracy argued that class privilege and advantage were likely to be amplified as...
View ArticleUniversal Basic Income and Working-Class Futures
There have been few good things to come out of COVID-19. We’ve seen a genuine sense of community spirit emerge along with greater respect for blue-collar workers in the front line. In the UK, we’ve...
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Toxic Class Encounters
It’s thirty years this autumn since I began my undergraduate degree at Durham University in the North East of England. To tell you the truth I didn’t know much about the city before I applied there....
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Labour and the Working Class in the UK
After decades of consistently supporting the Labour Party, voters in Hartlepool recently elected their first Tory MP, in a byelection caused by the previous MP standing down as a result of a scandal....
View ArticleAccounting for Class
Recently global accountancy giant KPMG made headlines for its new policy on social class and its mission to increase working-class representation amongst its workforce. In what seems like a...
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Studs Terkel’s Working 50 Years On
As I prepared to teach my module on work this year, I realised that Studs Terkel’s book Working celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2022. It’s a book that both reflects and helps to explain...
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Chums or Comrades: Working-Class Perspectives after Johnson
While Boris Johnson may have lost his premiership in recent weeks, a fascinating and profoundly depressing new book by Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper reminds us of why the story behind the...
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Making Sense of Working-Class Work
Forty years ago this July, I left school to start my first career as a railway worker. At sixteen and with few if any qualifications, I was lucky to find a good job which was fully unionised. As the...
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