workers of the world - who are they?

        London is awash with young graduates seeking jobs in bars, restaurants and fashion shops.  PhD's can be cleaners, and you can find a young woman with a first-class degree in history of art pulling your pint.   Many are also unpaid interns when they are not busy with the jobs that pay them.
         How did this happen?  Remember Tony Blair's continual emphasis on the importance of young people getting a University degree, of increasing the numbers of those going to University - and he certainly made the figures climb high - and the desirable future for all, seemingly, to join one of the professions?   
           But I cannot remember, in all the days of the New Labour government - and, yes, their title was Labour, their ancestry the working class of the Industrial Revolution - any praise for or singling out, of the people actually doing the work needed to keep the country going.    We need a doctor when we are ill.   We need a lawyer if we run into legal trouble, or to help us with our will.
          The workers we need every day of our lives.  They are there collecting the rubbish, mending the roads, driving the trains and buses, putting up the buildings, harvesting the land, cleaning the windows and streets, doing the electrical repairs..........the list of those we miss if they do not appear could go on.  And if includes the bar and restaurant and shop servers with University degree but not with the skills of the others.
            The lost of the major industries from the UK, the factories, steelworks, mines and clothing factories - took away much of the prestige in which the workers were held.   The miners were once a major political force, and the trades unions, founded against so much opposition, could effect changes in government policy by the strength of the views of their membership.
       New Labour were desperate to get the country out of the clutches of Thatcherism and they did it by making the traditional party "middle class".   Now it was respectable to vote for it, you did not have to be a worker.
       Never have the phrases "middle class" and "working class" been used so intensively to mark the difference in any section of the population, though "hardworking families" has become a popular alternative of praise.   But it is always made clear that the section of society it is best to belong to is middle class.  Most now either claim or aspire to belong to it.   Why is this?   I used to know people who never wanted to be termed "middle class" on the grounds that it was dull and undistinguished, and would say they were either working class or upper class.  The in-betweens were considered boring.
      The workers used to have a long and proud tradition.  I can go as far back as to remember this, the feeling of assurance that came from them as they thronged the buses on the way to work, the sense of pride they had, one that I shared as soon as I brought home my first pay packet and felt myself at last one of them (as well as giving half of it to my mother for my keep.  She didn't need it, but it was all part of the Yorkshire tradition).
       So, please could we have a word for the workers now?   Education has always been important to them - the technical colleges, the workers' educational association, the night schools - not just to improve their pay and position but education for its own sake - that was how it was regarded as important then, and the Open University has carried on that tradition, though degrees everywhere are being seen more for their value as aiming towards jobs.   Classics and history have had to take a back seat.
      One leading political columnist wrote recently about his climbing upwards from ancestors who included a cobbler and others engaged in skilled manual jobs.   He said all this had brought him to his present life, happier in his work and standard of living.  But, we have to ask, who was the most useful to society - him, or the skilled workers in his past?
        And maybe those first-class degree bartenders should have shoved themselves into the world of work they really wanted to do, like so many successful people before them - Richard Branson being a good example.    The education would still have been there for them when they wanted it.
ends