Book of the month: Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain
Authors: Rosalind Stanwell-Smith
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2003)

‘Come away; poverty's catching’, wrote the 17th century playwright Aphra Behn, who spoke from experience, having been imprisoned for debt. In our time, poverty is still like an unmentionable disease, something one thanks one's lucky stars not to have caught. For most of us in the developed world, poverty is an uncomfortable set of statistics rather than a daily reality. The term ‘poverty’ encompasses a range of concepts and attitudes, including moral judgments such as the concept of the ‘deserving poor’ (hard working, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps), the ‘undeserving poor’ (feckless scroungers) and, in the UK, a still relatively untarnished belief that the welfare state has dealt with poverty. While poverty occurs worldwide, some countries have more than a global fair share: over 50% of the populations of some Asian and African countries live in ‘absolute poverty’, with a per caput income of less than, or equal to, $1 US a day.1,2 This ‘absolute’ definition has little meaning in more affluent regions, where relative statistics, such as those earning less than 60% of the national median income, give a greater sense of the social and economic exclusion caused by low income, and, in turn, how this determines their health prospects.3 Between the 1970s and 1990s, the proportion with low income nearly doubled in the UK: one in three children were reported to be living in poverty in 1999.4

In Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain5 Polly Toynbee uses a vivid image to describe the plight of the poor in our population. Imagine a caravan crossing the desert, with the poor bringing up the rear. During the 1980s, those at the back moved more slowly than the sheikhs and their entourage at the front: by the 1990s, the poorest fell even further behind, almost out of sight. This metaphor helps to explain the paradox that, as a nation, we are now twice as well off as in 1970,6 while it is harder than ever for the poorest third to catch up. Seen through this perspective, the 1970s represented the end of a golden age of upward mobility. Does it feel worse to be poor in an affluent country? Yes, almost certainly: Toynbee claims that ‘economic exclusion’ means a large No Entry sign on every ordinary pleasure. So the lack of choice about health-related factors such as nutrition and lifestyle is compounded by the temptation all around to get into debt. As for the prospect of escape, Toynbee challenges the complacency of a society that finds gross inequality morally comfortable, on the basis that people can rise through their own efforts. In reality, the lowest decile of earners inhabit a cycle of no-pay/low-pay job insecurity, with almost no hope of rising further than the next decile up. One in five workers earns less than £6 per hour, or £240 a week. Many of these workers are women in jobs described as ‘ancillary’, a word derived from the Latin for a handmaid or woman slave. Such terminology appears to place cleaning, or assistance in classrooms, hospitals and nursing homes, as in some way extraneous or unnecessary to the smooth running of society. Even the terminology serves apparently to justify low pay and poor conditions.

The novel twist in Toynbee's analysis of the ever-present poor in society is that, to research low-paid work, she moved into the worst available accommodation on a council estate and took on a variety of minimum-wage jobs. Inspired by a similar experiment in the USA,7 she did her best to cast aside the trappings of an affluent life as a broadcaster and journalist and attempted to survive on the minimum wage (then £4.10 an hour, due to increase to £4.50 from October 2003). While living under cover for a few weeks on ‘the biggest and worst estate in one of London's poorest boroughs’, she worked as a porter, hospital cleaner and care assistant, amongst other jobs. Her self-styled ‘social exclusion’ included assuming no network of friends and relatives to help her out, living alongside problem families and long-suffering fellow residents. The reader shares her dismay about the ‘thick crusty aroma of decades of decaying detritus’ in the stairway of her council block and the feeling of confinement in her temporary home, surrounded by the unwelcoming and sinister public space of a run-down estate. Social exclusion is also made real: she found herself in a world where many shopping streets, as well as activities, were denied her through lack of funds—something only to see, as it were, through a glass darkly.

Toynbee writes well and captures both conversation and a sense of place in her various job excursions: although the world she describes is unglamorous, this is not a depressing book. Humour emerges, partly unconsciously, from her foray into unfamiliar territory. She blushes at her ignorance of shopping to a tight budget, but buys garlic to make the ‘very dull food’ bearable, soon understanding why the poor risk debt at outrageous interest rates to buy a fraction of what the affluent take for granted. She wondered whether politicians of her acquaintance would spot her when she took a job in a government department, only to discover that, when kitted out for a lowly ‘service’ job, people become invisible. Pondering on why so many low-paid jobs require uniforms, she asks how fellow Guardian journalists would like to don a uniform of baseball caps and ill-fitting luminous polo shirts, or indeed, take a cut in salary to make for a fairer world. She squanders part of her social fund loan on furniture that the destitute learn to do without (a bedside table and dressing table). She struggles with the byzantine forms and procedures of the social security system and the petty meanness of employers and agencies, smarting at the manner in which workers a tier or two up the ladder chide and sneer at low-status agency staff. On the other hand, she discovers the conspiratorial democracy of minimum wage jobs, the ‘perks’ of free left-over food, and the ways of spinning out the work to justify the hours booked and to fool the ‘time-and-motion men’ studying the computer printouts.

All of these jobs were very short term—between a day and a week: necessary to the journalistic purpose, but possibly unfair to the work experience, since the first day or week is often the worst. Nevertheless, Toynbee makes perceptive observations, especially about the state of our public services. Short shrift is given to the government targets of higher productivity with more flexibility, which translate into ways of squeezing every last penny of efficiency out of each worker. She also notices how ‘outsourcing’ of services, such as hospital cleaning, has produced a demoralized, exploited work force and a management that has lost touch with what the job entails. Contracting out means that it is now impossible to determine accurately how many people work in the public sector: equally important, there is no loyalty to the outsourced staff, nor is any expected of them. High turnover is just one of the costs of this policy. Only 7% of public-sector workplaces now have any low-paid employees left: this vulnerable group has been transferred almost entirely to the private sector. For this group, it is not just a matter of low pay: pensions, holidays, sick pay and overtime have all been reduced to a bare minimum.

It is to Toynbee's credit that she used this experience to question her own values as well as those of our society. She spent hours seeking jobs and waiting to be seen, angrily observing that cheap labour is treated as if it were water from a leaky tap; but then she reflects that she simply is not used to being treated in this way. Educated and articulate, but with the insight that these qualities prevent her from fully understanding a community with prevailing illiteracy and innumeracy, she almost shyly points out that basic education sessions would not go amiss for this undervalued workforce. Training for the job was also deficient in most of the workplaces she sampled, notably in healthcare: the wonder is, as she notes, that so much commitment and dedication is often shown. In a chapter entitled ‘It doesn't have to be this way’, Toynbee turns to solutions: this comes down to raising the minimum wage, whatever the cost. She is unsympathetic to any consequence for small businesses or to pay differentials: arguing that the former provide, in general, poorer conditions for the low paid; and that there is little evidence for ‘knock-on’ effects in pay demands. While the economic argument appears somewhat tenuous here, she makes a strong argument for at least aiming to free the bottom 30% of society from hopeless poverty. It is not a utopian dream to argue for fairer shares, a more cohesive society and a better-educated workforce; or to argue that an improvement in pay rates for women in the service sector would undoubtedly benefit their families too. While her work experience taught her that there is ‘meaning in cleaning’, her sober conclusion is that pay is everything in our society, conveying status, opportunity and health. Pay the poor more and the rich less is the strong message of Hard Work. Toynbee has demonstrated, as George Bernard Shaw observed nearly a century ago, that ‘The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty’.