Today we publish new research showing that class prejudice is alive and well in modern Britain.

The key to building working class power is strong trade unions. But class discrimination is so persistent that we need new laws to tackle it too.

Working class graduates miss out on higher-paying jobs

TUC analysis of data provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) shows that graduates with parents in ‘professional and routine’ jobs are more than twice as likely as working-class graduates to start on a high salary, no matter what degree level they attain.

The table below shows the percentage of employed graduates in different salary bands at 6 months following graduation.

It looks at how these differ depending on the occupation of the graduate’s highest-earning parent when they were 14. These figures are for those who graduated in the 2016/17 academic year.

It clearly shows that those with parents who worked in managerial and professional occupations are more likely to enter high-earning jobs after graduation than those with parents in semi-routine or routine occupations.

A graduate from a professional background is twice as likely to be in a job earning above £30,000 per year than someone whose parents worked in a routine or semi-routine occupation.