Caroline Lloyd SKOPE/CGLS School of Social Sciences Cardiff University lloydc4@cardiff.ac.uk

1. Colloquium on Vulnerable Workers, Centre for Global Labour Research, Cardiff 29 October 2008Low Pay Caroline Lloyd SKOPE/CGLS School of Social Sciences Cardiff University lloydc4@cardiff.ac.uk

2. Low pay, skills and vulnerable workers • Trends in low paid work • UK policy: skills as the ‘route out of poverty’ • Case study research on low wage jobs and the potential for progression • Implications for ‘vulnerable’ workers

3. Russell Sage Foundation funded research on low wage work in Europe and the US • UK team: SKOPE – Susan James, Caroline Lloyd, Ken Mayhew, Jonathan Payne + SKOPE associates: Eli Dutton, Chris Warhurst (Strathclyde) NIESR – Geoff Mason, Matt Osborne, + Marilyn Carroll, Damian Grimshaw (Manchester) Low-waged work in the United Kingdom (2008) eds Caroline Lloyd, Geoff Mason and Ken Mayhew

4. Evolution of rate of low-wage employment, %, 1973-2005Low pay threshold = 2/3 median hourly earnings Source: Mason & Salverda 2008

5. Proportion of UK workforce falling below LPT, 1975-2006 Source: Mason et al (2008)

6. UK policy • ‘work is the best way out of poverty’, but • Almost half of the 3 million children in poverty live in households that have a working member (Kenway 2006) • working poor account for 57% of all poor households (DWP 2006) • skills ‘route out of poverty’ ‘We also know that gaining skills is the best route out of poverty and the best way to provide economic security for your family’. (LSC 2007) • Level 2 = minimum platform of employability (Train to Gain free level 2 in England £500m 2007/08 to over £1b in 2011) • skills are the best protection in the labour market

7. Characteristics of selected jobs 2006, UK

8. Case studies: job quality

9. Recruitment criteria & qualifications held (case studies)

10. Progression opportunities • Reduced upward mobility • Flat organisational structures • Supervisor positions/ team leaders little additional pay • Managers – with degrees • Qualifications largely irrelevant • Rare opportunities for part-timers

11. Flat organisations ‘I don’t know I think you’d need to be here a couple of years, you would need to know everything and do everything perfect and all that to get a supervisor’s job, you won’t just come in and the girls have been here for years and they’ve not got it and you just step in I don’t think it works that way.’ (room attendant, 4* hotel) ‘There are opportunities but because then there are so many people who are desperate to get out of the call centre, the volume of people that are going for this [promotion] is absolutely huge so your odds on getting it obviously diminish.’ (call centre agent, A levels, 1 year tenure)

12. Working time ‘If I chose to better myself, it would have to be on a full-time basis because they don’t do that part-time in which case I couldn’t do it. I mean, I have done. I have been, I have been all sorts, I have been a trainer, I have been a knife sharpener… I have even been a front line manager.’ (Female lowest graded operative, CSEs/O levels, food processing factory) ‘Sections of thirty people can’t run with a part-time manager’… ‘what we would require of anyone who wants to be a section manager is that they must be mobile to at least five stores’ (Retail managers, Mason & Osborne 2008:157)

13. Positive example of progression NHS Agenda for Change and the Skills Escalator • Job ladders improved • NVQ2 & 3 • New intermediary posts, eg. junior doctors’ assistant, assistant practitioner • Secondment to nurse training Source: Grimshaw & Carroll 2008

14. Conclusion • Vulnerable worker narrows the definition of the problem • Qualifications in themselves not a lever require labour market power, eg. unions, shortages • How to shift from meeting minimum standards to raising the bar? • Constraints on low cost routes to competitiveness…