Social class in Luxembourg
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.
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.
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.
From the 1960s, an average annual growth of 3.7% for working class salaries allowed for an increase in their purchasing power for articles once considered as rare luxuries such as cars and household goods which were seen as a measure of their materially improved lifestyles.
[8] This situation has caused a considerable increase in temporary migratory work in Luxembourg, where people from Belgium, France and Germany, known as frontaliers, would travel in and out of the country on a daily basis for employment purposes.
[10] With regard to farming in Luxembourg, the late 1940s heralded a permanent change in the social landscape of the countryside; the farming community ‘lost out’ to growth in other economic areas; from the 1950s, landholdings of less than 10 hectares gradually disappeared, and between 1947 and 1970 16,400 people departed from the agricultural sector, where the Trente Glorieuses for the secondary sector was concurrent with permanent decline of one of the two socio-economic pillars of Luxembourgish society.
André Heiderscheid described this section of the population in the late 1950s/early 1960s as those who fall into the ‘middle income’ category, such as retailers, artisans, lower framework employees in industry and civil service and technicians, who quite quickly, for material reasons, became part of the general working classes.
However, one particular group from Heiderscheid's assessment of the middle classes has lost out to economic growth; the individual shop-owner; the arrival of the first supermarket in Walferdange in 1967 seriously affected the livelihoods of the small, artisanal retailers.
[16] Relatively new occupations in the tertiary sector such as wealth management, investment advisory services and senior banking positions began developing and allowing for high incomes and standards of living usually associated with ‘traditional’ liberal professions categorised within the middle- and upper-middle classes.
The Inaugural Wealth Report (2014) published by the Julius Baer Group stated that Luxembourg has the highest proportion of ‘millionaire households’ in Europe, with 22.7% of those in the higher income bracket possessing a net worth of over one million euros; real estate ownership is closely linked to this assertion.
[19] In 2016 in terms of job security and social welfare, the expected loss of earnings resulting from unemployment is lower than the OECD average of 6.3% at 2.1%.
