Book Review: Hard Work: Life in Low‐pay Britain
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13619322200300020 |
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
| Pages | 39-40 |
| Author | Gregor Henderson |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Book Review
Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain
By Polly Toynbee
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003
ISBN 0 7475 6415 9
ould you live on the minimum wage of
£4.10 an hour or £164 a week? That was the challenge
made by Church Action on Poverty and taken up by the
Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee. In her easy-to-read
book Hard Work, describing her various experiences of 40
days on or below the breadline, she reminds us just how
far we have come in Britain in creating a more unequal
society than at any other time in our history. ‘Since the
1970s the rich have got richer and the poor have been left
behind both in income and in wealth.’
Toynbee believes that ‘people are poor because the
work they do is underpaid’. She also argues that the work
and workers we rely on – like cleaners, care workers,
producers of our essential goods and foodstuffs – are also
significantly undervalued and that there is precious little
equality when the vast majority of these underpaid and
undervalued jobs are done by women and by people who
are from black and minority ethnic communities. And
the scale of the problem? ‘Three and a half million
people in Britain now live in working households on or
below the poverty line.’ There are now more working
poor than there are people who are unemployed.
Armed with her encyclopaedic knowledge of social
policy and with the prospect of several weeks of material
for her newspaper columns, Polly leaves home in
Clapham and moves into a small flat on the
geographically near but socially ‘a million miles away’
Clapham Park Estate. And of course Polly Toynbee
couldn’t live on the minimum wage; she tried, but right
from the outset she was racking up the debts, even with
state aid supplemented with help from local projects and
charities. Her account of starting out and moving from
benefits to her first wage (not paid for two weeks) makes
for a jaw-dropping account of the complexities of the
system that we have created for people to negotiate –
more of a boot-in rather than a leg-up.
We move with Polly from one job to another,
obtained from agencies acting on behalf of large
Cemployers such as the NHS, local authorities, nursing
homes, and the civil service where she worked as an
assistant in a nursery for the children of staff at the
Foreign Office. The changed role of the public sector
from that of a direct employer to a hirer of agencies that
then offer people low paid jobs with no union protection,
no pension rights and poor holiday entitlements is a
recurring theme. Polly moves from job to job, working as
a hospital porter, a dinner lady, a nursery assistant, a
telesales rep, a hospital cleaner, a worker in a cake factory
and a support worker in a nursing home, all at rates of
pay just on or sometimes below the statutory minimum
wage. Employers, and in particular the agencies, have
found ways of working the system to pay even less than
£4.10 an hour.
Toynbee’s accounts continually raise many questions.
How can we achieve the goal of better public services
when people doing the essential jobs our public services
rely on are treated in this way? Wouldn’t our productivity
be better if we felt more valued in our workplaces? Why
must people’s rights be eroded in the name of squeezing
out more profit? Is it right that public services are run by
companies whose bottom line is profit for shareholders or
owners?
Reading the book underlined the links between
work, poverty, health, mental health, opportunity and the
way that one area of government policy impacts
significantly on a whole range of others. In the world of
mental health, raising incomes, particularly the incomes
of those paid the least, improves the mental health of the
population. Reducing inequalities helps build ‘social
capital’ and creates greater ‘social cohesion’, potent
factors in enhancing mental health and preventing
mental ill health. People with more income are not
constantly being reminded of basic essentials they don’t
have and can never buy; better incomes can help act as a
cushion when things don’t go so well; getting more
people into work helps remove social isolation and
reduces exclusion; addressing discrimination at work
helps create more tolerance and acceptance of difference.
The Mental Health Review Volume 8 Issue 2 June 2003 ©Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) 2003 39
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