Social class in Luxembourg

Social class in Luxembourg after 1945 is generally based on occupation, personal income, and spending power as well as rights to social welfare rather than birth circumstances and family background. The country's demographic situation has changed considerably since 1945, where a mostly blue-collar working population gave way to mostly white-collar occupations over the second half of the twentieth century.^[1] Differences in consumer patterns between the white-collar and blue-collar workers decreased considerably between 1963 and 1977, causing a socio-economic evolution that saw a wider sphere of access for both working and middle classes to consumer goods such as cars, white goods, and real estate, thus demonstrating an equalisation of social strata in terms of income and spending power. The population of Luxembourg has also altered in nature due to significant growth in numbers of residents and increases in migration patterns since the mid-twentieth century; in 1961 13% of the population consisted of non-Luxembourgers, by 2020, this is at 44.3. At present, 47% of the Luxembourgish population has a migrant background’, and this is as a result of the response to socioeconomic processes that drew large numbers of immigrants to the country in the latter half of the twentieth century.^[2]

In the late 1950s, André Heiderscheid outlined the different social classes in Luxembourg as ‘milieu ouvrier’, ‘milieu agricole’, ‘classe moyenne’ and ‘milieu bourgeois’,^[3] in other words, working class, which forms the bulk of the working population and is mainly found in the secondary sector; the primary sector or agricultural class, which has seen a significant decrease in the latter half of the twentieth century; and proportionally smaller number of middle class and bourgeoisie. These categories are still applicable on a superficial basis, but social changes and improvements in living conditions in the past sixty years have meant that the working classes or those working within what are described traditionally as ‘lower income’ socioeconomic groups are often now on a par materially with those in traditional ‘middle income groups’, and what were typical ‘working-class’ occupations in terms of income have become more ‘office’ oriented, that is, employment in the tertiary sector. There are groups for whom personal income and access to social welfare pose problems, and poverty, unemployment and homelessness also exist in Luxembourg, although perhaps not to the same extent as in other European countries.