Falling white-collar pay and the cost to society

Gaby Hinsliff makes some very interesting points in her article (The death of the middle-class professional spells danger for Labour, 2 January). But as so often, averages hide a range of experience. I look at my own graduate daughters and their contemporaries.

My eldest is 27 and a junior doctor, so she earns more than those average graduate salaries (looking at gross not hourly rates). But some of her friends who graduated slightly earlier with very good degrees have high-flying jobs, earning more than £50,000 within a couple of years of graduation. Others, though, have struggled to find secure, well-paid jobs.

My youngest (aged 24) has a public sector clerical job at about £25,000, and most of her peers are on similar salaries. The expansion of white-collar jobs in the postwar era fuelled social changes. It’s too soon to declare the middle-class professional dead, but the shrinking of that sector will also have profound social impacts. The obvious example is housing. We’re fortunate enough to be able to help both of our children into owner-occupation. But that won’t be the case for all. The effect will be to increase social divides and reduce social mobility. We’ll see a smaller number in high-paid white-collar jobs and some will start to question the value of a university education if all it leads to is debt and insecure employment. It’s not a happy prospect.
Iain Forsyth
London

As Gaby Hinsliff notes, human perception of success is a relative thing, and the expansion of salaries at the top is as disconcerting to those who think of themselves as the middle as the rise of the lowest. In higher education, the salaries of university lecturers are often shockingly poor, considering the qualifications required. Law graduates working for good firms can, within three years, be making many times the pay of those who so recently taught them. Graduates working in finance are even better rewarded. Whatever the economic arguments of taxation for top earners, the government must surely realise that there are much greater – if less immediately obvious – societal benefits to making ours a more equal country.
Lesley Smith
Oxford

Inflation plus stagnant wages plus a terrible job market means the jobs I’m now applying for pay 20% to 30% less than I was paid nine years ago, before I had a master’s and a PhD. As a recently graduated doctor of economics looking for work in the UK and in the public sector, the numbers just don’t work.

I’m a single 36-year-old millennial woman and still live with my parents because of low wages and high housing costs. No wonder the birthrate is collapsing when we can’t afford our own place to live before our 40s – my own fertility window is rapidly closing, while I plug away at job applications rather than dating apps.
Dr Caroline Bentham
Wetherby, West Yorkshire

Gaby Hinsliff rightly highlights Peter Turchin’s book about overproducing elites. As a commentator of the 1790s observed about the drivers of the French Revolution “Beware of poor lawyers!” – an apt description of Robespierre, Danton and others. The pushing down of bourgeoise salaries has been obvious since Thatcher and Reagan introduced neo‑liberalism in the 1980s. Its endgame is a society of the super‑rich and equality for the rest at a level of poverty. This will not be sustainable.
Ken Baldry
Lecturer in European history, London