Barrier: Rate of Pay

Social mobility is a fundamental staple in our approach to tackling poverty. The ability to work your way out of poverty is heavily relied upon by politicians to motivate workers. Yet it’s something that, outside of philosophy or political studies, does not get called into question.

People who have experienced social mobility - i.e. have moved up through our class system - have usually done so when they are young, at a time where they have no commitments or dependents, or with help and finance from others.


Anecdote

When I was at university I had a part-time job as a domestic at the local maternity hospital. The job was lined up by my mom, who had been working there many years and insisted I didn’t spend the long holidays sitting at home.

The shift ran from 4pm to 8pm - not a huge amount of time out of my day - and paid £3 per hour. The money was useful, it helped me through university, but the most important thing I gained was the experience.

In the middle of summer my parents went away for two weeks. I agreed to take on my mom’s morning job, cleaning at the cancer registry. A 2-hour shift starting at 8am.

Rather helpfully my student bus pass continued out of term. I could travel to and from both jobs effectively for free but, cost aside, the commute was a time killer.

I would leave home at 7am (always be at least 10 minutes early to ensure you don’t miss the bus, but then expect the bus to be 10 minutes late) and arrive back from my first job at 11am. I’d have a few hours in the middle part of the day before leaving home again at 3pm and returning at 9pm.
In total I was working a 6 hour day, but when you factor in travel time to and from each job, I was actually giving up 10 hours of time.

I was lucky to switch between studying in term time and working during the holidays. There was no way I could have kept working in term without it affecting my studies.

The experience of low paid work was enough to make me realise how difficult it would be to do both at the same time. Many people go through college or university on loans, grants or funded by the bank of mum and dad. They miss the reality of paying for your own education. Social mobility is incredibly difficult, almost impossible, without a leg up.


Discussion

Common thinking: the incentive to achieve a higher rate of pay

Social mobility is sold to us as an incentive to work hard. The idea seems simple enough: you work hard in a low paid job that pays the bills; you use your spare time to learn new skills, gain qualifications and move up to a higher paid job.

Your investment into your skillset pays off with a higher salary.

This approach to self improvement is ingrained into us because it works when we’re young. School and college come at a time when we have support from our parents and from the government, in the form of free education and child benefit payments.

This support, the ‘leg up’ that we are familiar with, disappears as soon as adult life starts. Anyone who misses social mobility in their teens - due to illness, caring for a family member, or any other commitment - misses their chance entirely.

Ask any waitress-wannabe-actress how much time she has spent training, casting or in any way progressing her acting career since she started waiting tables. It’s a distant second place to working - i.e. earning money to pay the rent.

That’s because the graph above is not accurate.

Reality: work as long as it takes to pay the bills

First, let’s add travel time, shown as a dotted line.

Before the pandemic the average commuting time was 59 minutes. This dropped considerably during the pandemic due to many people working from home. Workers in the service sector don’t have this option and for that reason I have used the pre-pandemic commuting time to give a more realistic view of commuting habits.

A worker on minimum wage (blue line) will typically travel to work by bus. Assuming a similar commuting distance to someone on average salary (green line), who would travel by car, the commuting time is slightly longer for a worker on minimum wage.

Second, we need to show a second job at minimum wage, shown as an additional blue line.

This extra work is necessary because there is a minimum income threshold for merely existing. The minimum wage is below the living wage; it does not cover the bills for most families. People take on a second job to bring their total income above the minimum level.

There is a trade off happening here. Working extra hours eats into a person’s spare time. With the minimum wage being lower than the average hourly rate, the lowest paid people must work longer to earn their way into a financially viable situation and keep their head above water.

The graph now shows the real gap between the lowest paid and those on average pay. The gap is horizontal as well as vertical.

People in poverty are ‘time poor’ as well as ‘money poor’. Suggesting that they spend their evenings learning new skills to have access to better-paid jobs shows a lack of understanding of their situation. They may leave home at 7am, return home at 8pm and then start cooking.

Social mobility is being restricted by having a minimum wage that is below the living wage. A higher minimum wage would give people at the lower end of the pay scale more spare time to improve their skill set and push on to higher things. It would not just be an improvement for the people on low wages, this would be good for society as a whole. We should draw talent from anyone eager to contribute to our society.

It’s fine to construct a society where people with no drive to improve their status slide into dead-end jobs, but don’t put up barriers that force determined people from impoverished communities behind walls over which it is impossible to climb.