One in five people in the UK live below the government’s poverty line. Many of these will be in temporary work, dependent on employment agencies,trapped in a cycle of low pay- now pay work.
The latest qualitative research from the JRF based on 60 semi structured interviews provides an insight into what life is like trapped in this cycle and challenges the stereotypical notion that the ‘poor’ are a bunch of welfare scroungers.
The research paints a bleak picture of people lving in two deprived areas in the North East of the UK who want to work, but, through lack of opportunity, can’t find permanent employment. The study reminds us that this is structural –
To quote from the study
Teesside has undergone dramatic restructuring and has lost much of the skilled work in steel, chemicals and heavy engineering upon which the local economy had, until relatively recently, been based. In line with national trends, service-sector employment was widespread
amongst the sample, but was not the only sort. Interviewees got jobs as care assistants, as cleaners, in call centres, as shop assistants, in food processing and textile factories, serving in bars and fast food restaurants, and as scaffolders, drivers and construction workers.
Three things united these jobs: they were low-skilled, low-paid and insecure. Employers often seemed to operate ‘flexibly’ in terms of the hours of work offered or required and the pay given. There was limited support for workers in respect of sickness and holiday leave or training. Interviewees described: not being paid for extra work done; being required to do extra hours at very short notice; having to work ‘unsocial hours’ and being denied time off for pressing family reasons; being required to undertake unreasonable tasks;being sacked for taking a day’s sick leave, and so on.
Food processing factories in particular were reported as offering easy-to-get but hard and demeaning work:
The management, they just don’t care about the staff. They treat you like robots … If you went over and said ‘I’ve cut my finger off’, they’d just say ‘make sure you don’t get any blood on the food’. That’s what they were like. (Alfie, 46)
To my mind this study is relavant to the A level syllabus because… it demonstrates the relative powerlessness of the ‘unskilled manual’ class compared to the Capitalist class who demand flexibility
It is a good illusttration of how the causes of localised poverty are historical and structural – industry moves out the in 1980s – creating thousands of unemployed people in its wake, then new industries move in – being able to demand more flexible working hours,and lower wages.
Finally, it illustrates graphically the declining power of the atomised, fragmented working class in relation to their employees.
The research was carried out in two very deprived neighbourhoods of Middlesbrough, in Teesside, an area that has experienced widespread deindustrialisation and socio-economic change and based on semistructured interviews with ten local employers; semistructured interviews with 13 agencies that supported people into jobs; and qualitative interviews with 60 local residents (aged 30 to 60).
