By Guest
Nicola Smith is a Senior Policy Officer at the TUC, who launched their Fair Work campaign last week.
The UK is currently moving out of the deepest recession since the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs, and many remain at risk of long-term worklessness. Continued government support to help people move into work is vital.
But unemployment is not the only challenge facing post-recession Britain, as work itself is not always a route out of poverty: increasing proportions of working households have an income of below 60 per cent of median income (the Government’s preferred measure of poverty), and nearly half of poor children are in working families.
There are multiple reasons for persistent in-work poverty, including low pay, low in-work benefits for families without children, poor progression opportunities for many in low-paid jobs, a lack of access to services such as good quality childcare and the ongoing gender pay gap. But there is seldom any discussion about the ways in which poor rights at work can consign people to poverty. This is an issue that the newly formed Fair Work Coalition will be highlighting over future months.
While the UK has weaker employment protection than many other European countries, many people do have important rights at work including access to sick pay, maternity and paternity leave, a written statement of terms and conditions and protection from unfair dismissal. But a significant group of working people are denied the most basic standards of job security and fair treatment in the workplace. Under UK employment law these people are not classified as ‘employees’ but as ‘workers’. There is also a growing trend of individuals being falsely classified as ‘self-employed’ (even though they have many of the characteristics of economically dependent workers, and should therefore have better employment rights). People in both of these groups are often described as having ‘atypical employment status’ – and the realities of their working lives are illustrated by the case studies highlighted in the Fair Work report.
There is an important link between people’s employment status and their chances of being in working poverty. Those who are ‘workers’ can legally have their regular employment terminated at a moment’s notice, have no guaranteed hours and are ineligible for rights including maternity leave or the right to request flexible hours. For those whose wages are already low, this insecurity of employment means they have an even greater chance of a persistent low (and fluctuating) income. The complexity and uncertainty of employment status law also means that it is relatively simple for unscrupulous employers to falsely classify their staff as ‘self-employed’. Those who find themselves in this group (including some hairdressers, courier drivers, construction workers and homeworkers) are at high risk of receiving even fewer rights. This can include being paid less than the minimum wage and being denied access to paid holiday or sick pay. And atypical employment status increases the risk of any rights workers do have being disregarded – for example those in such precarious jobs face higher health and safety risks and discrimination at work (a point graphically illustrated by the recent EHRC report on the treatment of agency workers in the meat processing industry), finding it very difficult to complain if they are treated badly – their employers can simply tell them not to bother coming back.
Such poor protection at work also has wider consequences for people’s lives. Those in low-paid and insecure employment are far less likely to receive training, more likely to cycle between benefits and work, more likely to have poor health and be at greater risk of poor working conditions. As the Marmot review recently concluded: “work is good – and unemployment bad – for physical and mental health, but the quality of work matters. Getting people off benefits and into low paid, insecure and health-damaging work is not a desirable option.”
The Fair Work Coalition estimates that at the very least 500,000 low-paid workers are in this position, and believes that there is no moral or economic justification for the high risks of extreme hardship that these workers and their families face. Our position is that if those whose jobs are restructured, who need to work flexible hours or who cannot find permanent work are to have fair treatment in the workplace, the law on employment status needs to be modernised. The Government needs to act to make fairness at work a reality for all working people.
This post is part of Community Links and Church Action on Poverty‘s project looking at working age poverty, contributing to the European Year Against Poverty
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