The prospects for improving job quality at the lower end of the labour market in the UK – pay

Introduction

Frederick Engels once wrote that labour is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself (1934). A person’s job helps define who they are. The level of income, time spent working, and the quality of the job, highly influence a person’s life. As Sweet and Meiksins say: “work occupies most of our waking hours; it is a crucial part of identities and influences life chances.” (2008, p. 1)

As it has always been, employers are mostly looking for hardworking, well-educated people with particular sets of skills. These days education has become the Alpha and Omega of employment – as Daniel Bell puts it: “If capital and labour are the major structural features of industrial society, information and knowledge are those of post-industrial society.” (1973, p. 211)

With the rise in the number of people with higher education, one would expect a rise in higher, well-paid jobs. But in the UK, the situation is quite different. Not only is there a lot of low skilled service sector jobs with low wages, which result in poverty, but there is also growing pay inequality. The worst off are those on the lower end of the labour market who receive a pay of the bottom 20-25% and hold low-skilled jobs which are routine and semi-routine, and require no qualification. The most common job among these is that of the sales assistant. The number of these kind of low-wage workers in the UK is a staggering 20.6% (OECD 2011).

This kind of inequality brings health and social problems. Studies show that more unequal countries have worse health and social problems such as lower life expectancy, higher mental illness and obesity, more teenage births and infant mortality, more homicides, etc. (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). This is quite a logical deduction to make, since a big part of an individual’s life is his/her job, and dissatisfaction with one’s job – which is directly linked to the dissatisfaction with one’s income – greatly influences the physical and psychological health of the said individual.

Changes in the new economy

In recent years, there has been a shift from the old economy to the new. These terms were thought up and are used by Sweet and Meiksins in their work – Changing countours of work. There they state that the old economy represents the various ways of assigning and structuring work that developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution through to the mid-20^th century. It included systems which were built around mass production, gendered divisions of labour, unionized labour, etc. The new economy brought about changes. For one, good jobs that require a limited education are disappearing, which forces a big group of people to take on menial, low-paid jobs with little prospects for future advancement. This system partially stems from Frederick Winslow Taylor who introduced his philosophy at the beginning of the 20^th century. He argued for the separation of ‘thought’ from ‘execution’, which resulted in the creation of legions of deskilled jobs and the decline in the individual worker’s ability to control the conditions and rewards of work. (2008, p. 10).