Social Mobility: And Its Enemies (Pelican Books)

by Lee Elliot Major

People in elite occupations whose parents were employed in semi-routine and routine working-class jobs (‘the long-range upwardly mobile’) earn on average £6,200 a year less than their colleagues from higher professional and managerial backgrounds (‘the intergenerationally stable’). This was the case even after taking into account a host of factors including educational qualifications, job tenure, the ‘London effect’, ethnicity, gender, age, hours worked, firm size, and whether a person worked in the public or private sector. There was striking variation across different elite occupations. At one end of the scale, engineering provided a notable exemplar of meritocracy, with negligible differences in pay regardless of social background. In contrast, the children of the working classes experienced a particularly large pay disadvantage in law, media, medicine and finance.