Die Abstiegsgesellschaft Quotes

“Women remained in an underprivileged position under social modernity. The ‘male breadwinner model’67 brought with it new inequalities. Since housewives were not employed, they were excluded from many insurance benefits, or minimally covered by these. The care and reproductive work that women performed in the household was neither paid nor integrated into the official order of social modernity. In other words, while social modernity attenuated the conflicts and risks induced by vertical inequalities (between classes), it reproduced new inequalities on the horizontal level—weighing especially on women and migrants.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Under capitalism, labour is a commodity that is bought and sold on the labour market, and workers are consequently exposed without defence to the dangers of this market—poverty, sickness, old age and unemployment. The welfare state succeeded in limiting the degree to which labour has this commodity character; it is a ‘de-commodifying’ institution, since it socializes the aforementioned risks.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Today, however, we could say that in a certain contradictory fashion, at least, the refutation of Marx has itself been refuted. In a broad sense, class society in the Marxian sense has re-established itself. For Marx, class was a relational concept: the exclusion from ownership of the means of production implied a fundamental asymmetry of power and distinguished workers from capitalists.155 Viewed in this way, Marx’s concept of class is completely relevant again today, as never before have more people been dependent on wages, above all because they do not possess any means of production.156 The (working) class-in-itself—as Marx called it—has grown both nationally and globally. At the international level, social distinctions between nations may well have lessened in the recent past, but within states they have increased immensely.157 Nevertheless, we cannot speak of a dichotomous class society as Marx and Engels prophesied in The Communist Manifesto.158 Despite downward mobility, the middle class continues to be important. For a modern class analysis, then, the most appropriate approach is a ‘pragmatic realism’ that embraces the dimensions of power, exploitation, closure and life chances.159”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Germany, downward mobility is producing a new class society. The upper class inhabits a socially sealed-off, stable world. The middle class reproduces itself by the increasing practice of social closure and cultural distinction. The mixture of socialstatus control and discipline, precarious jobs and welfare benefits, is constructing a new underclass,148 fixed in a social situation from which only a few manage to climb out and up. They are not excluded from paid employment, but integrated either indirectly (as recipients of transfer payments) or directly (as low-paid workers).149 Class matters, and its relevance is growing, particularly in terms of life expectancy. The difference in life expectancy between men from the top 10 per cent and men from the bottom 10 per cent has grown from four to seven years since the end of the Second World War.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“The new underclass, so the customary reproach runs, shuns education, is work-shy and has lost its orientation to upward social mobility.139 The status anxiety of the middle class leads among other things to the economic interpretation, negative classification and devaluation of weaker groups, as shown in Wilhelm Heitmeyer’s long-term study on xenophobic attitudes among the German population Deutsche Zustände.140 To a certain degree the middle class has abandoned solidarity with the weak; it has built security by shutting itself off. Where there was previously a certain liberality, more rigorous ideas of morality, culture and behaviour have now returned. With increased fears of ‘contamination’ and ‘infection’, people seek the greatest possible distance and strict isolation from the ‘parallel society’ of the lower class.141 They are generally less inclined to accept society’s ‘encouragements to diversity’.142 The precarious middle classes, who actually experience relative downward mobility, count this as personal failure. Here individualistic and fatalistic interpretations of their own work prevail. They seek at almost any price to integrate into society by competition at work. This also has the consequence of resentment towards the weaker, the supposedly lazy or those considered less motivated.143”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“In parallel with this, we are experiencing a real renaissance of bourgeois zeal. People radicalize the desire for education and social ascent, while secondary virtues such as conscientiousness and discipline have made a return even in liberal milieus. The whole conduct of life serves the project of retaining status.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Social superiority is articulated in terms of better education, elevated manners, refined taste, artistic sense, liberal values and consumption patterns. Consumption in particular is a two-edged sword here, as it is seen as the prerogative of those who can afford it. Its demonstrative character threatens the practice of solid housekeeping among the lower middle classes. The supposedly unjustifiable consumption style of the lower class is therefore often sharply criticized, in a gesture of social and cultural superiority.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Many people are probably familiar with the childhood experience of trying to run up an escalator going down. In a society of downward mobility, many people find themselves permanently in this situation. They have to run upward just to keep their position. This leads to constant worry, and ‘status struggles over the entitlement to prosperity’.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“In Germany, Europe’s richest industrial country, the number of working poor has risen more sharply than in any other EU state.125 The farther down people stand in the occupational hierarchy, the greater their danger of slipping into consolidated poverty.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Since 1995, the number of workers in the low-paid sector has risen from 5.9 to 8.4 million. Five per cent of all employees (1.71 million) actually earned less than €5 per hour before the introduction of the general minimum wage in 2015.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“German reunification not only caused unemployment to rise even further, but also placed an enormous strain on the state budget. The disintegration of the Eastern bloc put further pressure on German capitalism, for it meant not only new markets for German products, but also new geographical opportunities to relocate production. This proved extremely attractive for German companies, which were able to find enough qualified workers at significantly lower wages without modifying their training systems significantly. The introduction of the euro provided Germany with the medium-term advantage that other European countries could no longer counter German wage pressure by devaluating their own currencies. In the end, Germany’s export orientation produced large export surpluses at home, but also caused growing international trade imbalances.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“The fact that women can achieve social ascent by their own efforts far more strongly than in the past is also reflected on the marriage market. Surgeons no longer pursue nurses, but rather anaesthetists or other surgeons. Academic women marry men with similar qualifications and status.104 This educational homogamy is a side effect of women’s increased qualification levels and their improved status on the labour market. It also constitutes an emancipatory gain when women rise by avenues other than a socially asymmetrical marriage, yet it means at the same time that a social closure takes place on the marriage market.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Today, professional ascent no longer necessarily leads to social ascent.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“The following fundamental question therefore arises: what is the importance of occupational upward mobility today? The last section discussed the difficulties of analysing occupational groups in relation to social stability. If the son of a skilled worker finishes secondary education and becomes a journalist, or the daughter of a commercial employee becomes a lawyer, then both have risen in relation to their parents, according to the traditional model. Their jobs bring greater social prestige—however, they may no longer automatically earn more money than their parents. Likewise, whether they are precariously employed and under constant threat of unemployment is generally not taken into account.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Similar phenomena occur in many branches. Frequently, employees with different levels of job security and economic citizenship rights work side by side, and it is even not uncommon for them to perform the same activities. It is above all the younger age groups who encounter worse employment conditions, and manage only very slowly, if at all, to work their way up to the level of their parents’ generation.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Choice of profession also no longer guarantees a high social status. This is bound up, among other things, with fragmented processes of downward mobility within occupational groups. A senior teacher earns a relatively comfortable income and need not worry about the future; they may even be able to retire early. In the same school and in the same class, however, there is possibly also a younger teacher on a temporary contract who has to claim unemployment benefit during the summer vacation and has no prospects for permanent employment. (Many German states now rely on a growing number of flexible teachers who are no longer guaranteed permanent positions.) In the postal service, too, although there are still many permanent employees, newly hired staff generally are not offered any job security (cf. Chapter 5). Among certain occupational groups the differences can be tremendous, as with journalists, for example. Those who began working at major German publications like Stern, Spiegel or Die Zeit ten or twenty years ago could expect a secure future. In the big publishing houses today, on the other hand, not only have precarious jobs and poorly paid groups of online writers proliferated, but not even the established staff can feel secure any more. A growing share belong to the ‘media precariat’ and earn less than €30,000 per year.99 Another example is that of lawyers, formerly the very model of status and prosperity. This professional group now divides into those who continue to earn good money and enjoy a high social prestige while employed in large offices or working for corporations, and a growing flock of precarious self-employed legal professionals, who fail to gain a steady footing in an over-filled market.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“The lubricant of education is supposed to re-energize the motor of social ascent, yet this is a dangerous process, as it is also possible to slip downward in the educational competition. The expansion of higher education, from which the middle classes particularly benefited over several decades, has been increasingly accompanied by a devaluation of degrees and more intense competition.96 A higher education no longer automatically guarantees a rise in status. If everyone stands on tiptoe, no one sees any better. Education has become a paradoxical medium of ascent; ultimately it is still a means of selection.97 It is principally those already better placed who profit from the increased opportunities. Children from the lower classes often see education as an unreasonable demand, a struggle in which they are going to lose. Middle-class children are in a stronger competitive situation, precisely on account of their qualifications. Children from the upper class, on the other hand, have it easier, as their parents transmit to them greater social and cultural capital, and they can often plug directly into their parents’ networks. They have habitually internalized what matters for the elite—taste, behaviour, culture—and so either rise in a relatively frictionless fashion, or simply remain at the top.98”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Among the younger generations, the typical employment biography has completely changed. Children of academics are often still unable to secure a ‘stable career path’ in their late thirties.94 This does not necessarily affect their standard of living directly, as frequently their relatively prosperous parents are in a position to assist them for a time.95 At some point, most of them do reach the secure middle—only a few fall by the wayside completely—but they certainly do so later than earlier generations”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Above all, they feel a growing sense of precariousness for their children, as it is clear that even with the best qualifications, foreign language skills and experience abroad, they will often have to face the treadmill of internships or temporary work, and frequently have to prove themselves before obtaining employment on regular terms.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“This is something I have frequently encountered in my research: an engineer or IT expert working for a car manufacturer enjoys a senior professional position, a good income and a high level of security. But alongside the plant where he works there are now other research and development service companies, where engineers and IT experts work for the same car manufacturer, but on a subcontract basis. They also earn well, but not quite as well as their colleagues employed directly by the main firm, nor do they enjoy the same participation rights. For many highly qualified staff, activity of this kind is quite attractive, up to a certain point. As long as they are young and flexible, they value working for a good salary in different places for a different firm each time. Even a master craftsman, employed by an agency, opined in an interview: ‘When you’re young, you think: never mind, I have two good hands.’ But this generally changes over the years. Then the need for greater security makes itself felt even among engineers, especially if they want to start a family.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“In the last few years, however, with the growing shadow of precarious employment, the middle class has been seen as endangered. Precisely because its members generally cannot rely on the security of property or wealth, they are threatened with downward mobility.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Many of them are employed in public service; child allowances, health provisions and progressive income taxes support their way of life. On the other hand, however, it is also the middle class that pays for the welfare state more than any other group.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“By their readiness to do more than their colleagues, agency workers can be used by management to reduce the ‘comfort zones’ of permanent employees, as a personnel manager explained in an interview. In the average firm, moreover, the permanent staff experience precarious employment as a means of social discipline that bridges the internal and external labour markets; this has altered the ‘reserve army’ mechanism on the labour market.71 In the past, it was the unemployed who filled the ranks of the capitalist reserve army, exerting an external structural pressure on wages and working conditions. Precarious employment now internalizes this function within the firm. The agency workers may be inside the firm, but they have one foot outside of it in unemployment, so their mere presence reminds the permanent staff that their future might also become less secure.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“The attitude of the permanent staff toward those precariously employed ranges from negativity to empathy and solidarity. While many seek a better position for agency workers and their integration into the firm’s social community, I came across cases—for instance, in an energy technology company, where the most unpleasant tasks (with negative health effects) were deliberately given exclusively to agency workers. Many permanent staff see agency workers as a buffer that protects their own employment in case of a crisis or threat of dismissal.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“The traditional career path—joining a firm when young and leaving it only at the end of working life, then going on to draw a pension—has become an infrequent relic of a previous age. On the other hand, ever more people experience breaks in their curriculum vitae, constituting a literal social injury. They fall into a widening ‘twilight zone’, oscillating between employment and unemployment. They may well work most of the time, but their jobs are seldom long-term.54”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Many jobs with normal labour relations, however, consist of indefinite part-time employment (defined as less than twenty-one hours per week), a sector that has more than doubled in size over the last fifteen years. Altogether, by 2016 the number of full-time jobs had fallen by more than a million since 2001, while part-time jobs had risen by 4 million.50 Within the group of atypical labour relations, it is temporary employment that has particularly increased; in 2009, almost every second new job was under a contract of limited duration.51 Precarious conditions, moreover, are not found equally among all groups, but concentrated particularly among the low-skilled.52 In a nutshell, the younger and less skilled you are, the greater your likelihood of atypical employment.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“situation is precarious if it is unstable, insecure and revocable. In social modernity, work provided the foundation for societal integration and stability, and a secure job with protection from dismissal was the norm.46 Yet the sphere of stability is visibly shrinking. In the wake of regressive modernization, we have the ‘institutionalization of precarity’.47 The main cause of the transition to a society of downward mobility does not lie simply in the growth of social inequality, but rather in the deterioration of labour relations.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“Even in a welfare state, however, poverty is not free of real material need: almost 17 per cent of these ‘relatively poor’ people say that they find it difficult to heat their homes, and 27 per cent to feed themselves adequately. Affording a computer is unfeasible for 16.2 per cent of them.44 Yet the dangers of poverty reach even well into the middle class, where one in three people would find it difficult to deal with an unexpected expense of €1,000.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“In other words, inequality between rich and poor has increased considerably in the last twenty years—a key characteristic of a downwardly mobile society.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe

“In short, since the 1990s German workers have received a decreasing share of the economic pie, while the portion going to members of the upper classes has grown.”
― Oliver Nachtwey, Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe