Inside Labour| May Day — the day to celebrate the struggles of the working class — has come and gone. Perhaps it is time for unions to concentrate on providing sound general and political education for workers, writes Terry Bell
— the day to celebrate the struggles of the working class — has come and gone. Exactly one week before the sixth post-apartheid parliamentary elections that have seen a lot of talk about social class.
The main purveyors of this definition are academics — often economists or sociologists. Journalists, and the media as a whole, then play the role of broadcasting and popularising something that can be described as flawed analysis, if not myth. Professor John Simpson’s definition of middle class, reported in City Press last week, focused mainly on income: A person with a white-collar job, earning between R21 000 and R67 500 a month and owning a car.
An old English working class song sums this up at a basic level: “The working class can kiss my arse/ I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.” But a foreman or supervisor invariably remains a seller of labour, an essential cog in a machine aimed at producing profit for a company and its owners.
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