What's your definition of a "working person"?

[bitchstewie]

Not sure this is strictly an NP&E topic so I'll leave that one to the mods but given the term has been used several times in speculation around the budget and on the assumption you can't have 60 million individual definitions of "working person" what would you take the term to mean?

[StoutBench]

To me it's someone who doesn't have other income streams to survive on. Is salaried or paid by the hour, I don't think a salary band comes into it tbh.

[Slow.Patrol]

I guess it is someone who does a job and receives a salary and that is their only income.

Decades ago, probably in the 70s, I think the Labour government had identified "unearned income" which was stuff like interest on savings, rental properties and shares which were highly taxed. I think the top rate was as high as 98%.

Which is why years ago, people used to keep their cash hidden under their mattress

[alangla]

Person who relies on their primary employment or self-employment to pay the bills, so I think this probably excludes people with significant returns from investments, buy-to-let or who have inherited enough to live on. They also pay the vast majority of their tax via PAYE, not via dividends etc.

I realise this probably means that this definition covers some super-rich footballers etc, but excludes directors of small companies, but a perfect definition is difficult to get to I think.

[2xChevrons]

StoutBench said:

To me it's someone who doesn't have other income streams to survive on. Is salaried or paid by the hour, I don't think a salary band comes into it tbh.

If we accept that 'working person' is a euphemism for politicians who are too scared to use the phrase 'working class', then this is the only sensible answer.

The economic definition of the working class is nigh-on universally accepted; those who have no transferable capital and have to sell their labour in return for a wage or salary in order to survive.

I see that SKS touched on this with his recent statement that people whose income derived from assets such as shares or property would not come within his definition of 'working people.'

There are social and cultural aspects to defining what is (and isn't) working class which makes definitions more fluid and more complicated (and leads to people who own businesses and property portfolios insisting they're working class because they like football, flatten their As., didn't go to university and grew up in a council house), but there has to be an acceptance that there is a big difference in the economic position, and relation to capital forces, between those who own capital and those who don't. And between a wage/salary and income from ventures capital or speculation. Or passive income from rent (of any sort, not just in the landlord sense) or dividends.

Edited by 2xChevrons on Friday 25th October 09:42

[Evanivitch]

A person that depends on the income received from their labour.

[Tankrizzo]

I think it was a great Barnumesque phrase to use when campaigning. After all, "working people" could apply to most voters depending on how they view themselves. These Labour chaps, they're going to look after me if they're elected.

Sadly though when it comes to forming actual policy, phrases like this just fall on their arse as they don't mean anything under the surface.

[motco]

Evanivitch said:

A person that depends on the income received from their labour.

Including those who now live on a pension funded by their years of wage or salary earning?

[119]

Evanivitch said:

A person that depends on the income received from their labour.

Who will also be taking it from you.

[IJWS15]

2xChevrons said:

…….

I see that SKS touched on this with his recent statement that people whose income derived from assets such as shares or property would not come within his definition of 'working people.'

…….

Edited by 2xChevrons on Friday 25th October 09:42

So from SKS’ view you can be “working people” until you retire. Pensioners who have any private pension have income derived from assets such as shares or property (indirectly) and fall outside his definition!

[alscar]

KS's latest definition appears to rule out anyone that saves or invests any amount as apparently they are unable to write a cheque for something.
This presumably means that anyone that spends all of their income on either surviving or holidays or whatever ( irrespective of what income that is ) is a working person and no one else is.

[alangla]

IJWS15 said:

So from SKS’ view you can be “working people” until you retire. Pensioners who have any private pension have income derived from assets such as shares or property (indirectly) and fall outside his definition!

Surely a pensioner can’t be a working person as they don’t work?

I’d suggest that people who are over 68 or whatever and work while drawing a state pension but no private pension are probably working people as the state pension is effectively a benefit, similar to child benefit, albeit without the clawback.

People doing a few hours a week while drawing on a private pension wouldn’t count as “working” if the pension is their primary income.

EDIT: this is bringing back memories of a Jeremy Kyle episode I happened to catch years ago. He was out at a market somewhere and was asking people what class they thought of themselves as. One working age tracksuit wearer said she must be middle class, when he asked why she wasn’t working class the response was “Well, I don’t work”

Edited by alangla on Friday 25th October 09:59

[Hants PHer]

Labour were unwise to have used such a vague phrase as "working people", at least without having agreed among themselves on their definition.

Earlier, on Nick Ferrari's LBC show, a Labour minister (James Murray, I think) refused to answer the question: "Is a landlord a working person?" He kept repeating the vague policy about not increasing taxes on working people but simply could not give a clear answer. I suspect that he didn't want to contradict Starmer or Reeves.

Or perhaps he was as terminally confused as others in the Labour Cabinet appear to be. Ah well, we'll get clarity on Wednesday....

[boyse7en]

So am I a working person?

I earn average wages by working 40 hours a week for a company, but i also get a small income from renting out my old house.

Am i a working person, or a bloated plutocrat?

[Rufus Stone]

Evanivitch said:

A person that depends on the income received from their labour.

This.

It doesn't matter if someone has investment income or pension income in addition, if they work and receive payment for that work they are a working person.

[oldaudi]

boyse7en said:

So am I a working person?

I earn average wages by working 40 hours a week for a company, but i also get a small income from renting out my old house.

Am i a working person, or a bloated plutocrat?

If you've got any stocks, shares, funds in a pension that you've been saving for your future, you're a bloated person

[wildoliver]

Working class is not the same thing as a working person. Never has been, never will be. Working class has always been a perjorative, used by those who saw themselves as better than people who were "working class". You can be working class and not work. I do think there needs to be a firm distinction between the two terms.

A working person, to me and I suspect most people out there are people who exchange labour for income. So a bus driver, labourer, office worker, doctor, chef. All working people. Self employed plumber - working person.

An entrepreneur, landlord, stock market player, gambler etc. in other words someone who earns income as a result of their actions but not a direct result of hours put in, either luck/skill based with no time/financial reward link or earning money through investment. Not a working person. A tax payer, valuable member of society yes, but not a working person even though what they do is to them a job.

The extremes are easy, a lord who floats around his stately home all day is a working man by no-ones definition, where as the poor sod going down in to the sewer to clear the fatberg definitely is. What about those doing something they love, musicians, footballers, racing drivers.

It's a stupid definition with no value or meaning, utterly irrelevant outside of a politicians speech trying to curry favour with a world that can see through them.

[2xChevrons]

alangla said:

IJWS15 said:

So from SKS’ view you can be “working people” until you retire. Pensioners who have any private pension have income derived from assets such as shares or property (indirectly) and fall outside his definition!

Surely a pensioner can’t be a working person as they don’t work?

And, as Tankrizzo pointed out, this is where using euphemisms and focus-group friendly meaningless phases come back to bite.

'Working' is not the same as (economically) 'working class'. A CEO works. The Duke of Westminster works. But their work serves a very different purpose, and is on very different economic terms, and has a very different relationship to their lives and the economy, compared to someone who performs a role on an 8-hour day in exchange for a wage or salary that they use to pay their living costs. 'Working people' is so general, and so open to individual interpretation, that it's effectively meaningless. As was its predecessor, 'hard-working families' because it would take someone with extreme clarity of vision (or low self-esteem) to think that phrase doesn't apply to them.

Pensioners are usually classed as economic working class, and traditionally are gathered in with unskilled, semi-skilled and manual workers in the "C2DE" category in the NRS social grade classifications. Because while they are not 'labouring', they are on a fixed income (the pension effectively becomes their wage), that income is derived from their labour and - crucially - they don't have liquid capital. They have the same position in the economy, and relationship to it, as the rest of the 'working class'.

(This is, incidentally, why you have to be careful about political and electoral polls claiming that "[Party] has lost/gained millions of working class voters!" - a lot of polls and surveys use the NRS categories to break up their samples, so non-working pensioners get put into the 'working class' category of C2DE. A lot of the 'Working class Tory vote surge" data from the 2019 election was actually pensioners voting Conservative with even more vigour than they usually do, which isn't what the headlines implied or a lot of surface analysis took away from them).

Edit:

boyse7en said:

So am I a working person?

I earn average wages by working 40 hours a week for a company, but i also get a small income from renting out my old house.

Am i a working person, or a bloated plutocrat?

Can you live on just the rental income? If the answer is no, then you're still (by the strict economic definition) working class, and probably within SKS's definition of a 'working person'. It also depends on how easily you could liquidate your capital - your old house - and how much that would release. Because a key part of the economic definition is not having any transferable capital.

Edited by 2xChevrons on Friday 25th October 10:16

[98elise]

motco said:

Evanivitch said:

A person that depends on the income received from their labour.

Including those who now live on a pension funded by their years of wage or salary earning?

I would say no, they are pensioners.

A working person is someone who relies on paid work (ie their labour) to live.

[Wills2]

Rufus Stone said:

Evanivitch said:

A person that depends on the income received from their labour.

This.

It doesn't matter if someone has investment income or pension income in addition, if they work and receive payment for that work they are a working person.

That's not what he said though he said someone who depends on the income received, plenty of people go to work and receive payment for it but do not depend on that payment.

A working person is anyone that works whether paid or not (charity work is work) whether they depend on the money or not, seems to me the new phraseology of "working person/people or family" is just another way of saying the working class but they dare not use that phrase anymore.