Low-Wage Work in the United Kingdom

Introduction: The United Kingdom Story

INTRODUCTION The United Kingdom Story Robert Solow By any reasonable standard definition of “low-wage work,” about a quarter of American wage earners are low-wage workers. The corresponding figure is smaller, sometimes much smaller, in other comparable advanced capitalist countries. This fact is not very good for the self-image of Americans. It does not seem to be what is meant by “crown(ing) thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.” The paradox, if that is the right word, is the starting point for the extensive study of which this book is an important part. What are the comparative facts, what do they mean, and why do they turn out that way? A foundation dedicated from its beginning to “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States of America” has to be interested in the nature of poverty, its causes, changes, consequences and possible reduction. Low-wage work is not the same thing as poverty, still less lifelong poverty. Some low-wage workers live in families with several earners, and share a common standard of living, so they may not be poor even while working such jobs. Some lowwage workers are on a reasonably secure track that will eventually move them to better paid jobs, so they are not poor in a lifetime sense. But some low-wage workers are stuck with very low income for a meaningful length of time. For them, low-wage work does mean poverty in the midst of plenty. Of course, the incidence of poverty can be reduced by transfer payments outside the labor market. Nevertheless, in a society that values self-reliance, and in which productive work confers identity and selfrespect as well as the respect of others, income redistribution unconnected or wrongly connected with work is not the best solution except in special cases. In that kind of society, ours for instance, the persistence of low-wage work is felt as a social problem on its own. It first has to be understood if we are to find satisfactory ways to diminish its incidence or alleviate its effects. 1 One obvious basis for low-wage work is low productivity, which may be primarily a characteristic of the worker, as is often simply assumed , or may be primarily a characteristic of the job. If it inheres in the job, equity could be achieved by passing the job around, so to speak, like boring committee assignments or military service, but that would have no aggregate effect. Wherever low pay originates, however, raising productivity provides a double benefit: it diminishes the amount of low-wage work to be done, and it increases the useful output of the whole economy. Low productivity, and therefore low-wage work, tends to reproduce itself from generation to generation. This is an important additional reason why a high incidence of low-wage work is a “social condition” that needs to be improved. Growing up in a chronically low-wage family limits access to good education, good health care, and to other ladders to social mobility. So a persistent high incidence of low-wage work, when confined to a relatively small group, contravenes the widely accepted social goal of equal opportunity. These are among the reasons why, in 1994, the Russell Sage Foundation inaugurated a major program of research on the nature, causes, and consequences of low-wage work and the prospects of low-wage workers. This initiative replaced a successful but more conventional program of research on poverty. It was called, rather grandly, The Future of Work. One of its key motivations was the need to understand how poorly educated, unskilled workers could cope with an economy in which most jobs were becoming technologically advanced, and therefore more demanding of cognitive power and refined skills. This formulation was intended to call attention both to workers and to jobs, the natural subtext being that low-end jobs might be disappearing faster than low-skilled workers. This potential disparity presented the danger that low-wage workers could be stranded in an economy that had no use for them. The research mandate was interpreted quite broadly. The Future of Work program was, as a matter of course, focused on the United States. It produced a large body of useful and original research , some of which was collected and summarized in the 2003 volume Low-Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace, edited by Eileen Appelbaum, Annette Bernhardt , and Richard Murnane. One of the refreshing aspects...