Key workers tend to earn less and suffer poorer job quality than others: why do we accept this as the norm for so many roles that play such an important part in our society?
Melanie Green poses this and others questions in a new post here:
https://www.cipd.co.uk/Community/blogs/b/research-blog/posts/does-low-pay-and-poor-job-quality-really-need-to-be-an-inevitable-fact-of-key-worker-life
I'd be particularly keen to hear from those community members who work in care settings.
This question has a two-part answer; the second leading from the first. Most of what we today call "key workers" are involved in caring and supply roles. Historically, the former were commonly local services carried out by volunteers: Go back even less than 100 years or so and midwifery, home nursing, terminal care, and similar services, today part of the NHS, were essentially unavailable except to the very wealthy or within charitable hospital (or workhouse) settings. These local volunteers could afford their practical largess because they would receive gifts of payment in kind, rather than pay, from the family and friends of those they helped. (Even as late as 1974, when I joined the Ambulance service, some areas of the country still had services organised and provided by Red-Cross and St John, with volunteers supporting a limited number of local-authority paid staff).
Early hospital nursing and care, through to the end of WW1, was also often carried out by those to whom pay was secondary to the personal satisfactions and empowerment the role had to offer. Mainly women from middle- or upper-class families they had the necessary education to undertake the roles, but little need of independent income. "Lower class" women were still disenfranchised and their education considered an unnecessary luxury, so rarely gained real qualification, but nevertheless carried out the lower-status but essential "local" roles; based on knowledge "passed down" from their predecessors.
For these caring staff the satisfaction of their work (and the respect or empowerment it gained) made up for any lack of "cash in hand".
The same was true of those involved in food and fuel supply and logistics. Farmers and farm-labourers were paid low wages but had many "tied" payments in kind, such as housing, food and other necessities. Similarly miners and the "Coalmen" local distributors had access to free fuel, and for some miners also housing, although wages were paltry.
As all these facilities were nationalised, centralised or internationalised (particularly as petrol and oil replaced coal for heating, sea and rail-transport and the NHS took over (most) care facilities) the "traditions" of low pay and these roles being carried out as a low-paid "vocation" or family tradition (in the case of farming etc.) transferred also. Although in some cases (e.g. mining and rail-transport) the new strengths of unionisation demanded better pay and conditions and had the means to obtain them, the "carried forward" effect was of the roles having lower-than average payment, "bought off" by the commitment of those who carried out the roles and/or the satisfactions of the roles themselves.
Today, the reasons for payments remaining low are very different and largely political. To increase pay across, say, the NHS or food-production and distribution industries would require, in the former case potentially massive tax-rises (or unpopular reallocation of funds from other Government commitments), in the latter large price-increases in the shops and hikes in the cost of living. Which Government (of any party) could expect to survive the former, or be seen to sit aside to let the latter happen?
History therefore provided the platform for labour-intensive facilities like care and distribution to be low-paid, and politics (small "p") and now-international competition keep the associated roles' pay-rates low. The pay-offs of job-satisfaction, commitment, working flexibility and other "work life balance" issues keep people in care and distribution roles and seem likely to do so for some time to come, although the cracks are beginning to show: For example Brexit's exposure of the lack of "home grown" Nurses etc. in the NHS. People who can now obtain better paid, less demanding roles to offer better lives to family and children (setting aside themselves) now often make that choice.
Of course there are many other factors involved and contributing, but most of these are secondary to those two primary drivers.
P
This question has a two-part answer; the second leading from the first. Most of what we today call "key workers" are involved in caring and supply roles. Historically, the former were commonly local services carried out by volunteers: Go back even less than 100 years or so and midwifery, home nursing, terminal care, and similar services, today part of the NHS, were essentially unavailable except to the very wealthy or within charitable hospital (or workhouse) settings. These local volunteers could afford their practical largess because they would receive gifts of payment in kind, rather than pay, from the family and friends of those they helped. (Even as late as 1974, when I joined the Ambulance service, some areas of the country still had services organised and provided by Red-Cross and St John, with volunteers supporting a limited number of local-authority paid staff).
Early hospital nursing and care, through to the end of WW1, was also often carried out by those to whom pay was secondary to the personal satisfactions and empowerment the role had to offer. Mainly women from middle- or upper-class families they had the necessary education to undertake the roles, but little need of independent income. "Lower class" women were still disenfranchised and their education considered an unnecessary luxury, so rarely gained real qualification, but nevertheless carried out the lower-status but essential "local" roles; based on knowledge "passed down" from their predecessors.
For these caring staff the satisfaction of their work (and the respect or empowerment it gained) made up for any lack of "cash in hand".
The same was true of those involved in food and fuel supply and logistics. Farmers and farm-labourers were paid low wages but had many "tied" payments in kind, such as housing, food and other necessities. Similarly miners and the "Coalmen" local distributors had access to free fuel, and for some miners also housing, although wages were paltry.
As all these facilities were nationalised, centralised or internationalised (particularly as petrol and oil replaced coal for heating, sea and rail-transport and the NHS took over (most) care facilities) the "traditions" of low pay and these roles being carried out as a low-paid "vocation" or family tradition (in the case of farming etc.) transferred also. Although in some cases (e.g. mining and rail-transport) the new strengths of unionisation demanded better pay and conditions and had the means to obtain them, the "carried forward" effect was of the roles having lower-than average payment, "bought off" by the commitment of those who carried out the roles and/or the satisfactions of the roles themselves.
Today, the reasons for payments remaining low are very different and largely political. To increase pay across, say, the NHS or food-production and distribution industries would require, in the former case potentially massive tax-rises (or unpopular reallocation of funds from other Government commitments), in the latter large price-increases in the shops and hikes in the cost of living. Which Government (of any party) could expect to survive the former, or be seen to sit aside to let the latter happen?
History therefore provided the platform for labour-intensive facilities like care and distribution to be low-paid, and politics (small "p") and now-international competition keep the associated roles' pay-rates low. The pay-offs of job-satisfaction, commitment, working flexibility and other "work life balance" issues keep people in care and distribution roles and seem likely to do so for some time to come, although the cracks are beginning to show: For example Brexit's exposure of the lack of "home grown" Nurses etc. in the NHS. People who can now obtain better paid, less demanding roles to offer better lives to family and children (setting aside themselves) now often make that choice.
Of course there are many other factors involved and contributing, but most of these are secondary to those two primary drivers.
P
