I fear the plight of the middle class is even worse than Larry Elliott portrays (Welcome to a world of rich and poor with little in between, Journal, 3 May). In addition to being “hollowed out” and suffering stagnant incomes, much of the middle class – public and private sector – has been subjected for two decades to increasing workplace monitoring and micromanagement, bureaucratic control, corporate compliance obligations, target-chasing, constant appraisals and monitoring, the loss of automatic pay increments based on length of service, hot-desking in battery-farm open-plan offices, “presenteeism” and attacks on “unaffordable” occupational pensions.
Much of the middle class used to enjoy relative autonomy, creativity and professional discretion, based on expertise and trust, in performing their jobs; not any more. Now they are treated as automatons, with any sign of individuality or personality viewed with suspicion by management.
While many politicians and commentators like to pretend that “we are all middle class now”, the reality is that much of the middle class is experiencing “proletarianisation” – they are being treated with the same disdain and dispensability as the working classes have always been.
Pete Dorey
Bath, Somerset
• Larry Elliott is correct in his description of the hollowing out of the economy and the reduction of the middle classes. This is particularly the case in Britain, where the share of national income taken by wages and employee compensation fell from just over 60% in 1975 to just under 50% in 2017 (and this includes quite unjustifiably high salaries and bonuses in large corporations and the City). This is the largest fall anywhere except Australia.
He also mentions, as a major cause, the replacement of people by machines as investment goods get cheaper. This has certainly been identified in the economic literature, as has Thomas Piketty’s theory about levels of rent exceeding growth rates. However, recent research suggests that the real culprit is financialisation, and in particular the pressures on companies to use their profits to buy back their own shares or distribute them to shareholders, rather than invest them in plant, machinery, skills or research.
This in turn suggests that any incoming government should target incentives on corporate investment by taxing corporate distributions even at the expense of equity valuation and returns. This will produce squeals of horror from the City and the CBI, but it is the only sure way of reversing the growing inequality and inefficiency depicted by Elliott.
Roger Brown
Professor emeritus, Solent University
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
