Maybe naively, I would use following as the test: how much would ones life be impacted if they got laid off next month?
Looking forward to your comments
Part of discussion with my husband over the weekend was is there PMC, or they are just a little bit wealthier members of the working class (as they sell their labour in order to survive).
what's a Professional-Managerial class?
I have no idea what you mean.
Anyone will be impacted if they are laid off in one way or another.
And most people "sell their labour" to survive.
Wikipedia says:
The term professional–managerial class (PMC) refers to a social class within capitalism that, by controlling production processes through occupying a superior management position, is neither proletarian nor bourgeoisie. Conceived as "The New Class" by social scientists and critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1970s, this group of middle class professionals is distinguished from other social classes by their training and education, typically business qualifications and university degrees,[1] with occupations thought to offer influence on society that would otherwise be available only to capital owners.[2] The professional–managerial class tends to have incomes above the average for their country, with major exceptions being academia and print journalism.
You can always adjust a definition so that something "exists", but I am more interested in practical sense, how common is it and how much more independent are they compared to ordinary working people (say a nurse).
Wiki's further explanation gives more context, although it doesn't seem to describe anyone outside of the US:
sounds like middle management. if they are laid off, it's often not so easy to find a similar job. especially if they have been with the company for many years, and used to a certain salary and benefits.
By this definition, all of us, that work in front of a computer screen and have management responsibilities fall into this box. Anyway, I sell my labor for a living, so I'm working class.
There's nothing that ensures that people with higher salary are more independent or better isolated from unemployment shock. What matters in the end is the expenses/income ratio. People with low income and low expenses can have enough savings to life comfortably for a long time, while people in the so-called PMC could be paying 4'500 CHF of rent a month and the supposedly high income disappears in a single day.
Hey, there's the joke around here of the poverty line of 120K CHF a year. For some people this is not a joke and they're truly vulnerable to unemployment.
you can have white collar workers in tech with no management responsibilities still earning a ton of money.
it sounds like more arbitrary division and labelling by socialists to have something to rail against. if they expended their energy in working and applying themselves instead of fighting capitalism, there wouldn't even be a need to 'fight capitalism'.