Within working-class communities of any stripe, there has always been a work ethic that has been held to be the path to, and chief engine of, a version of self-improvement. It is the existence of that work ethic, which may have come about as a response to the existence of the poorhouse, that helps the white working-class be such a ‘resilient’ breed of people.

However, before asking ourselves whether such a thing still exists in the way it once did, let us look briefly at the idea of resilience and see what it is really saying when inculcated into British schools and shoved it down the uncomprehending throats of schoolchildren, both working and middle-class. Resilience is the ability to keep going through difficult periods; it is the ability to get up in the morning when you are exhausted and do a job that limits you, that you feel no love for. To an extent, it is the capacity to endure, perhaps even to tolerate abuse. It is getting up and doing it all over again despite the fact that you might feel you are drowning, despite the fact that you are struggling to put food on the table, despite the fact that you struggle to afford shoes for the children and the gas bill is absolutely astronomical.

You can watch any number of TedTalks about resilience in which academics, grieving parents,^[1] paralympians, athletes of other varieties, cancer patients, charlatan leadership coaches and over-emoting, overacting ‘professional’ speakers, will tell obediently nodding audiences that resilience is some form of super-power that those who can deal with setbacks and obstacles and still keep going possess. Our experiences of survival through the toughest times are a toolbox we can employ. We know that we’ll get through as we always do. According to Lucy Hone, “resilient people get that shit happens.”^[2] They choose where to focus their attention, accept what cannot be changed and attempt to change what is possible for them to do so. In dark times, they ask themselves whether what they are doing is help or hindrance, and they try and stick close to the former.

However, this motivational speech version of resilience which is used – very, very badly and very, very stupidly – in schools ignores a key point. Natasha Sholl, a woman who endured, in succession, the death of her husband in his sleep, the death of her brother and her child being diagnosed with cancer, in a superb article in The Guardian points out, “it’s an excuse for society to place the burden of being OK on the person suffering.”^[3] She also points out that it is not the binary that the motivational talks by the people making money out of stories of tragedy might have you believe. Resilience isn’t an ‘on’ or ‘off’ position; it’s not something you either have or don’t have. As Sholls says, it’s “fluid, not an endpoint.”^[4]There are times in their lives when a resilient person might not be at all resilient, might struggle, might collapse (often). The process of recovering from trauma is complex, difficult and takes a lot of time. Now imagine if that abusive situation is a societal one, and there’s no way out of it. That’s your life. That’s the reality that some/many working-class people inhabit. It is a morally loathsome idea to inflict resilience lessons on working-class kids who the system and their lives have already traumatised.

One reason for this is that, if you are brought up in relative poverty and have watched your parent(s)’ creativity and work ethic in ensuring that you are fed, washed and clothed and have a roof over your head, then you really don’t need a middle-class system lecturing you in how to be resilient as you witness true resilience every day. If you are a student and you are dealing with, not only the fact that the cards are stacked against you, but also that your community is communicating limiting judgements about what it is you can achieve, and, still, you manage some form of academic achievement, then you are already amongst the most resilient of people. It’s a process, not a destination.

Working class ‘resilience’ is a product of culture, a part of our cultural heritage. We are trained into it. It is modelled to us by our parents. We understand it is the secret to any successes we might have had and may have in future. It is an effort of supreme will to work yourself off the bottom of society. Whatever one may think of the idea of social mobility, and for me its presence as a concept in any debate is merely a reminder of Lynsey Hanley’s powerful claim that Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy showed “the scars inflicted on civil society by a collective refusal to value its members equally,”^[5] it is certainly not easily won. You’ve got to work inordinately hard for a brighter future. Working-class children know this as, in past times perhaps, the work ethic was deeply engrained. It is part of our cultural capital.

Bourdieu’s view of there being ‘legitimate’ and ‘vulgar’ forms of culture to an extent misrecognises^[6] that the working class possess valuable forms of embodied cultural capital. But ours is different to the ‘legitimate’ version of the same. It comes in the forms that Yosso, redefining cultural capital as ‘community cultural wealth’, lists as being “aspirational, navigational, linguistic, familial and resistant capital.”^[7] So, the work ethic is part of our aspirational and perhaps even navigational community cultural wealth.

But in order to be resilient, you have to have hope and the strong belief that, if you work incredibly hard, you might one day do as well as your parents. This birth-right has been stolen from the generation of children currently in schools, and it doesn’t appear that it will come back any time soon, if ever. Many of them are devoid of hope. They are aware they will possibly/probably not be able to afford somewhere to live; they know that graduating to adult lives will be difficult for them; they are pretty cognisant, if not of politics, but of how society has stacked the cards against them. Is it any wonder that so many refuse to buy the fundamental lie and reject an extended education that will leave them in substantial debt?

The current societal structures and the government of this country over the last decades may have resulted in many of these traditional values being eroded to be replaced by a “dog eat dog individualism”^[8] in which successive governments have taken away working-class agency and given them the blame for things that have been done to them. The initial accenting of this was in the seventies when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Owen Jones remarked that at the core of Thatcherism was “”an offensive against working class communities, industries, values and institutions.”^[9] In destroying working class industry, she destroyed the pride of purpose, began the journey towards the destruction of hope that we see in the eyes of many school students today so that many now see that the working-class valuation of the work ethic as little more than a veil to hide the fact that you are being sold into a version of slavery.

There are various myths that accompany the public view of the work that working-class white people specialise in: one of which is that it is easy; another is that there is such a thing as an ‘unskilled’ job – there isn’t. If you think back to the period of lockdown and Covid, the people that do the jobs that society cannot function without are broadly those done by working-class people (though it transpired that teachers are quite important too). People came out of our homes and banged pots in their praise, blithely unaware of how absurdly hard they work, how difficult their jobs can be, how invisible and ignored they usually are by the people only then realising how utterly dependent we are on them and how quickly our lives turn to chaos without them. If you have never actually wiped someone’s hairy arse for a living (and I have) you will perhaps be unaware that some people have to do this and that it isn’t without its challenges. There are people who literally clean up other people’s shit, who spend much of their lives mopping repulsive substances. They may even take pride in doing it well, but they are not at all well paid for lives spent in shit. “There’s money in muck,” I recall a foreman in a warehouse once saying to me. Is there hell as like?

Working class work is often physically arduous, sometimes dangerous, sometimes extremely unhealthy, often painful, often very poorly paid and can be enormously challenging, demeaning even. It can also be repetitive to the extent that one minute is exactly the same as the next and the next and every minute after that (for decades) that it causes some mortal injury to the spirit so that one, on gazing at one’s fate, wonders how on earth did I end up here, doing this? Surely, I’m worth more than this. The way British society is organised, feller, tells you you’re sincerely not!

If we go back to the time when coal was the engine driving the industrial revolution and to the pre-war period, we have to acknowledge that the industrialisation that drove the ‘improvements’ in British society were driven by the back-breaking efforts of coal miners. Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier^[10] documents how astonishingly difficult the lives of these men were. What is little known but relatively obvious about a coal seam, if you think about it for a moment, is that it does not remain static where the pit has first been sunk. Miners didn’t just get in a lift and start mining immediately they got to the bottom. They would first have to traverse long walks in which they’d have to crouch and shuffle along for up to three miles to get to where they were expected to extract coal that day. They would have to use special modes of walking that would develop specific muscles to outlandish rates and then, after their day being suffocated by coal dust, seriously risking mortal injury daily (at the time Orwell was writing, one-in-twenty miners would lose their lives over the space of a forty-year career), covered in coal dust, they would have to walk the same distance back while completely exhausted. The walk or crouched shuffle could add up to an extra three hours to the working day. Orwell asks us to imagine a line of such soldiers, bent over, shovelling vast amounts of coal at furious speeds. He also admits that he felt himself to be “inferior”^[11] to them. H G Wells’ Morlock and Eloi evolving as two different species in which they Eloi lead lives of leisure and the Morlock lived underground doing all the work was clearly taken from real life.

The miners would then return home covered in coal dust, eat an often-meagre dinner and somehow manage to wash themselves in a single basin of water.^[12] There was no hot water. There were no baths. The people who built the housing assumed the miners wouldn’t want them, that they preferred to live in the way they had been forced to live.

Working class work often involves being subject to abusive corporate behaviours cooked up by people who choose not to care or understand what working class life is like, who inhabit separate universes and who are only able to hang onto their own view of themselves as somehow a better bred and a superior culture because another class of people are doing all the work.

The final understanding that more or less everything that happens in the world ever is about money comes crushingly, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. The working-class’s general lack of engagement with education ensures that corporations of people who are solely interested in maximising their own ‘share’ of the resources create mini-dictatorships within a democracy in which the dictators will do anything they possibly can to ensure their earnings are maximised at the expense of others’ poverty. We are slaves to merchants who charge us for our slavery and subject us to abuse and punishment which we are then told that we deserve by a class of people whose separate school system ensures they never even get to meet us: a system which perhaps also exists to inculcate a specific ‘version of’ class-based narcissism that ensures many of them do nothing that is at all useful to society but still expect deference from the people they leech off. When doing low-waged work, the bosses will expect us to be “perky and compliant at the same time.”^[13] The miners in The Road to Wigan Pier had to pay sixpence a week to rent the lamp from the company, a sum that would have bought the lamp a good many times within a year. At Walmart in the USA new employees on starvation wages are handed and knife and a tape measure and charged for these.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s masterful and compelling study of low wage America has it that the managers in low waged jobs become a form of “class enemy.”^[14] Workers in low wage jobs can be subject to the Draconian lack of trust and complete control that students in some British schools have experienced since the fashion for teaching in a totalitarian manner came about: subject to line-ups, constant accusations, bag and locker searches. Work becomes totalitarian in its demands and, as in all totalitarian cultures (and I got this from Vaclav Havel’s the Power of the Powerless),^[15] a culture of ratting out your colleagues to management for self-advancement can occur.

The loss of the enforced humility of the apprenticeship system caused a crisis in working class masculinity, and the influx of immigrant labour, particularly in the last decades of the famously hard-working Polish community, has meant that the relatively well-paid manual work monopolised in previous generations by the white working-class is markedly scarcer. Where there used to be a working-class mantra about getting a ‘trade’ under your belt, many of these trades have also now disappeared, leaving the simplicity of old plans redundant and many of our young people directionless. The transition from adolescence to adulthood is no longer as smooth or as simple as it once was; you can no longer just walk into a job at the same firm as your dad, and this has resulted in the proliferation of NEETS – young people not in education employment or training who led directionless lives that may result in criminality or semi delinquency.

As a result, there are, in places, the walking paradoxes of working-class people who don’t work, the non-respectable working class, the non-aspirational working class. These people have not been sprinkled with lazy dust while they slept. If you are to believe the study hard, get good grades, get a good job lie, then you have to have role models from your community who have obtained good jobs, and these can be absent nowadays.

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^[1] There is an excellent one by academic and grieving parent, Lucy Hone, found at https://www.ted.com/talks/lucy_hone_3_secrets_of_resilient_people?language=en

^[2] Hone, Lucy (2019) 3 Secrets of Resilient People Hyde, TedTalk at https://www.ted.com/talks/lucy_hone_3_secrets_of_resilient_people?language=en

^[3] Sholl, Natasha We Need to Stop Talking About ‘Resilience’. I’m Not Here to Inspire you with All the Things I’ve Endured, The Guardian (3^rd October 2024)

^[4] Sholl, Natasha We Need to Stop Talking About ‘Resilience’. I’m Not Here to Inspire you with All the Things I’ve Endured, The Guardian (3^rd October 2024)

^[5] Hanley, Lynsey, Introduction to Hoggart, Richard (1992), The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life(London: Penguin Modern Classics) p.

^[6] Hey sociologists! See what I did there?

^[7] Yosso, Tara J. (2005), Whose Culture has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth, Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8:1, p.60

^[8] Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working-Class (London: Verso, 2011) p.71

^[9] Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working-Class (London: Verso, 2011) p.40

^[10] From which we learn the fascinating titbit that miners were all covered in blue scars on their faces. When they would cut themselves on rocks, the coal dust would inhabit the cut and the scars remained for life.

^[11] Orwell, George (2021) The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Collins Classics) p. 103

^[12] Most of them would take bread and dripping to work with them. If you’ve not encountered this, it’s foul. When meat juices are poured into a bowl, they separate into the congealed white fat at the top and an altogether more meat orientated slurry at the bottom. The slurry is debatably edible, the fat is loathsome. Working class people of my father’s generation and before would spread the fat onto bread and eat it. It just about serves the instrumental function of food without ever really tasting remotely like something you should be eating. Its popularity has faded over the years.

^[13] Ehrenreich, Barbara (2011) Nickel and Dimed: on not Getting by in America, (New York: Picador Modern Classics) p.207

^[14] Ehrenreich, Barbara (2011) Nickel and Dimed: on not Getting by in America, (New York: Picador Modern Classics) p.35

^[15] Havel, Vaclav, The Power of the Powerless: Crimes Against the State in Central-Eastern

Europe (M. E. Sharpe: Armonk, 1985).