The degree of supervision is often a more eloquent class indicator than mere income, which suggests that the whole class system is more a recognition of the value of freedom than a proclamation of the value of sheer cash. The degree to which your work is overseen by a superior suggests your real classes more accurately than the amount you take home from it.
Paul Fussell, Class
There’s definitely an enormous difference between getting up at 5 am because you have an early shift assigned to you and getting up at the same early hour because your self-imposed productivity schedule demands it. The difference is rooted in the fact that it’s a lot harder to choose it anew every day than to accept the externally imposed reality. What a society values is what’s rare.
The capacity to contain and discipline the self is the highest class marker today because it’s becoming a rare quality.
Clarissa's Blog 
Ha! I chose the perfect job to leave the workforce on: I had achieved high class!
LikeLiked by 1 person
“The degree to which your work is overseen by a superior”
I think there are two sides to that. There’s the one you mentioned and the other is that the elite are not used to being evaluated (another reason they dislike compliments since they imply evaluation).
It’s also at the bottom of the Claudine Gay kerfuffle, she’d reached a professional level that implies freedom from evaluatiion (apart from criteria very removed from her undistinguished academic ‘career’).
LikeLike
It’s not merely oversight, it’s also about whether the organisation needs that person’s autonomy in order to function.
It’s like how Mycroft Holmes on occasion was the de facto voice of the British government in Conan Doyle’s stories: when presented with the problem of having an authentic voice, why wouldn’t you let someone with near sovereign independence speak on your behalf, knowing they’d get it right, instead of fashioning a makeshift desk and all of its sordid trappings at Whitehall and then expecting this person to rise above it?
And so class is also a function of how much other people need you to be free.
LikeLike