I had to fight my way through class barriers into my job. Why has so little changed?
Ajob interview in Liverpool. I’m Liverpudlian. “Do you write the way you speak,” I was asked. And that was my greeting, I suppose: welcome to the middleclass world. In this case, journalism. Welcome to the closed world of mores and customs and assumptions and inflections that allow class borders to be policed, admitting those who are granted approval while denying entry to others.
Entering a middle-class profession from a working-class background means all manner of things for society. Consider the recent Social Mobility Foundation report on the social class pay gap, which found working-class employees were paid on average about £7,000 less than those from better-off backgrounds. It’s a colossal price to pay for the sheer circumstance of birthplace and family background. The price is higher for women, who face a pay gap of £9,500. Someone from a workingclass Bangladeshi background, or with black Caribbean heritage, can expect losses of £10,432 and £8,770 compared with their white peers. Losses can mount up when forced into playing the UK’s intersectionality lottery of misfortune.
But don’t get hung up on the figures. Think instead of what it’s like trying to navigate the middle-class world of our so-called professional occupations. I’m a senior journalist now, but most days I feel I’m still running after nearly 30 years of tumbles and scrapes as a class-barrier hurdler. I was raised in a chaotically jobless household, in a Liverpool postcode stuck in the most deprived 0.1% of England.
My dad was from that generation of ex-dockers for whom the indignities of TV’s Boys from the Blackstuff aped reality.
Though I tick some of the most obvious boxes (council house, comprehensive, free school meals, first one in my family to attend university), I never felt inferior. I was far from alone in Liverpool as the Thatcher experiment played out. No one I knew seemed to know anyone in a secure job, let alone in something as socially distant to us as journalism. Ignorance was bliss. Where I do differ from many working-class kids is that I’ve been fortunate. Before I could dream of being insulted about my accent, I struck lucky by getting the crucial – and expensive – NCTJ industry qualification for free after enrolling on an NVQ journalism course at a further education college while on benefits, taking advantage of the employment training (ET) programme, or “extra tenner” scheme.
I moved on, breaching the border controls with my first reporting job in 1994 on a weekly paper in Southport. It wasn’t easy. Indeed, it speaks to what is still happening to working-class wouldbe border breachers now. It was six months, all unpaid, doing the same job the middle-class boys in the office were getting paid for. Their salary was about £7,000 – the same deduction imposed on working-class employees even now.
But what choice did I have? I applied, in vain, for the graduate trainee scheme at a Liverpool newspaper. When I got a job there, two gruelling years later, I learned what it was that had held me back: they preferred Oxbridge graduates or youngsters with semi-notable parents. Another class, another lesson, from an organisation that trumpeted its mission to represent proudly working-class readers.
Crossing the class border in London was no easier then than it is now, with house-price inflation leaving so many youngsters in a high-rent trap with no prospect of buying. Who, from outside London and the south-east, can afford to move there? I was lucky: a middleclass partner with a gift for long-term thinking, blessed with parental financial support (help with a flat deposit) unlikely to be found in my workingclass world, where it was about simply “getting by”. But even then, we couldn’t afford the capital. We made a home in Reading.
The first time I sought a pay rise, I was told the sort of people who did these jobs didn’t do them for the money. That screamed privilege to me – an approach to money exclusive to those who had it. And one that explains the elite private schools’ golden grip on Britain’s top jobs. There is a difference here, it seems. I have a job, for which I am paid. Others call it a career. There are elements of this world that will always be a struggle: the unwritten dress codes, the manners, the cultural awareness, the debating style, this accent – even now – the career strategising, the office manoeuvring. It’s that pesky social and cultural capital, or “polish”, as it’s been called. It’s a set of hidden codes: you need to know them. More importantly, you need to know that you need to know them.
Alan Milburn, the former Labour minister who went to a North Yorkshire comprehensive, crossed the class border when he entered politics. As chair of the Social Mobility Commission, he argued for legislation that could force companies to collate and report class pay-gap findings. That would be a vital start. In-house mentors are also crucial. There is always someone to tell you where the loos and the canteen are, but who guides you through the workplace maze of social and class rules, the unwritten codes and practices that quietly determine your future? Those mentors hardly exist. Your best hope, even now, in unfamiliar social terrain, is to watch and learn.
I never did write as I speak: very few people actually do – but even back then, I understood the full thrust of that question. Perhaps it wouldn’t be asked that way today. The etiquette is different, but the assumptions remain intact. Sadly, so does the border.