Social Classes

From top to bottom, roughly speaking, the socio-economic structure of Union City looks like this:

The Corporate Classes
The corporate echelons of Union City consider themselves a breed apart from their neighbors and constituents, whether or not the city charter says it's so. Though a capitalist-elitist mindset is shared across this class, in practice it breaks down into three subclasses of ranking power and prestige.

Corporate Upper Class
A posh and powerful blend of political technocrats and corporate owners, this subclass includes CEOs of major corporations and career politicians of city government. Their lifestyles are totally automated and AI-dependent, with every whim taken into automatic consideration; their families are well-fed and invariably live in one of the Corporate Enclaves. Their children are raised in corporate klatches and molded from an early age into “talent clusters”.

Corporate Middle Class
Corporate Managers & Technologists make up the second tier; specialists in advanced scientific fields as well as abstract realms of logic and creative thought into which AIs have not yet proved consistently productive, or where people are not comfortable trusting artificial intelligence to do the job. This subclass includes everything from VR/AR designers to computer programmers to visionary marketing executives, product designers and professional consultants with any skills that can be exploited by the mass market. Members of the Corporate Middle Class live very comfortable, highly-automated lives, typically residing in the Enclaves. They are the drivers of mainstream fashion and entertainment trends, enjoying access to all the modern world has to offer. Highly successful media personalities often rise to this level, having become lucrative “brands” for their employers to manage and exploit.

Corporate Lower Class
The lower levels of the corporate world are filled with captured contractees, clerks, sales reps, lower-level technicians and service specialists. Always on the verge of losing their jobs to automation, downsizing and reorganization, their lives are comfortable but stress-filled. Though it is a large subclass, it's a particularly fluid one: there's a lot of churn within its ranks. Members of the Corporate Lower Class usually reside in the Projects of their employers, though some succeed in making the jump to the Enclaves, while others struggle to get out of the Sprawls.

The Independent Classes (aka Labor Pool)
The majority of the population (and crowdsourced labor force) belongs to the “independent” class – which means they are not tied by contract to any particular corporation (nor do they receive any of the perks and benefits of corporate employment). The Indie Class can be subdivided into two subclasses: Upper and Lower.

Independent Upper Class
The most ambitious and fortunate small business owners and hustlers rise to a comfortable level of existence, often leaving their Sprawl origins for the Enclaves (where their presence is noted with social disdain). Members of the Indie Upper Class are typically well-educated or naturally-talented, and have established themselves in their career. This subclass includes all manner of independent professionals such as doctors, engineers and farmers, as well as machine or server owners, and many popular musicians, artists, news investigators and online celebrities. They live well above the UBI standard of living, and typically have very high reputation scores.

Independent Lower Class
The largest class by capita, the independent lower class consists of everyone from full-time students and struggling gigworkers (crowdsourced laborers) to mincomers who are happy to subsist on 1,000 credits a month (which can go pretty far if you also participate in various advertising and datasharing programs). Indies usually make their homes in the Sprawls, but ambitious hustlers can sometimes afford to move up to the Projects.

Resource Zone Workers
The city acquires many of its important raw materials and recyclables from the far-flung Resource Zones, which include both naturally-occurring resources (oil, natural gas, minerals, lumber, etc) and scavenged artifacts from the ruined cities of the previous century. The Resource Zones are worked by a combination of indentured laborers (i.e. convicts working off their debts to society) and rugged, hard-working individuals trying to amass enough wealth to move up the social ladder or retire comfortably. Resource Zone jobs pay well but carry high risks. Most RZ workers are in the system and many of them maintain cheap living quarters in town, even though their work requires that they spend weeks or months far from city life.

Squatters and Urban Homeless
The class known as “Urban Homeless” includes a mixed bag of squatters and scrumblies, mincomers, gang members, religious and ideological refugees, drug addicts, neurotics, paranoids and drop-outs who choose to live on the streets. They can often be found begging or bartering for food, and doing odd jobs (often illegal) around the city. Some of these people are clinically insane; some of them eschew modern life for personal reasons (religious, philosophical, or legal), and many of them simply had the misfortune to have been born to poor parents in a bad period of history. The economic crash of the previous generation took a serious toll on the most destitute districts: areas such as Bosing and Derova were effectively left to rot, and now house many thousands of dispossessed families and groups. Over the years these groups have formed into clans, gangs, subcultures and political networks of their own, often trading in fitted tech or black market goods to get by.

HOMELESS HOMES – Despite the implications of the word “homeless”, most street people have a place they call their own: they tend to stake out personal spaces in the densely-crowded Squatter Towns, living in decrepit hovels, shanties, tents and modified vehicles. Bolder individuals create makeshift living quarters under highways, within abandoned buildings or in the maze of tunnels beneath the city. What these places have in common is a very low level of network activity, with few sensor networks tying them to CitySystem.

HOMELESS CITIZENS – Thanks to public outreach programs, charities and police involvement, many of the Urban Homeless are actually citizens―i.e. they are in the system―but remain aloof or distrusting of CitySystem's lifestyle advisories. For whatever reason, they chose to participate only minimally in the electronic economy, preferring to spend their UBI on personal fancies (such as drugs or individual obsessions) rather than rent. This subclass also includes criminals and fugitives whose fines were so great they chose to flee, forfeiting their monthly UBIs to the legal system.

Discons
Those who eschew the system completely, who have no PIDs and utilize no electronic services, are called “Discons” or “the disconnected”. They live on the fringes of society, usually alone, and may be found roaming in and out of incorporated territory. Some Discon groups have organized into trade networks, bringing in scavenged booty from the Resource Zones or fencing stolen goods in town.