Why Worry Any More About The Low Paid?

By Catherine Howarth and Peter Kenway

The number of children and pensioners living in poverty in the UK has fallen by 800,000 and 600,000 respectively since Labour took office.

Reducing child poverty by a million by 2004 - the first milestone in the 20 year journey to end child poverty - is a real possibility.

As we survey these achievements with a recognition that a Labour government has delivered on what is unmistakeably a Labour agenda, we ask ourselves - but is something missing?

In our view, the answer is an emphatic 'yes', for despite the importance attached to employment, little attention has been paid to the full extent of low pay or the multiple disadvantages at work which people in low paid jobs frequently face. An anti-poverty strategy which has employment as its cornerstone overlooks pay and conditions at the bottom end of the labour market at its peril.

First, if people are dissatisfied with the jobs they do, merely creating more jobs will do little to foster a 'feel good' effect: a good overall record on employment growth may bring a government little political credit. Second, low paid jobs with poor conditions of work are often low productivity jobs - and low productivity is a major, endemic problem for the UK which the government is keen to address. Third, and most important of all, if low pay and the manifold problems faced by low paid workers are ignored, the drive to lift children above the poverty line will stall.

The trade unions would have a key role to play in making a New Deal for the Low Paid work - but in many ways, the challenges facing them are the greatest of all. With only 15% of low paid workers belonging to a trade union, their capacity to do anything on low paid workers' behalf is currently very limited. The fundamental question, not for individual unions or parts of unions who do represent low paid workers, but for the union movement as a whole, is how to ensure that it can properly be said to represent, and speak for, the low paid.

The immediate problem is to raise the level of trade union membership among the low paid. Neither financing that nor servicing a low-paid membership are easy. The membership of one local government branch in East London spans more than a hundred employers, the result of the fragmentation due to privatisation. It may make sense to look at ways of spreading the cost both of organising and representing low-paid workers across the movement as a whole. The TUC would clearly have a big role to play here.

New Policy Institute October 2004