What is life like on the minimum wage? The investigative journalist Fran Abrams decided to find out by taking jobs as a cleaner at the Savoy, as a factory worker in Yorkshire and as a care assistant in Scotland. What she first discovered about the reality of life on £4.10 an hour was that it was often a lot less than that: employers would deduct the cost of "training days", safety equipment, uniforms and bank administration charges from her wages. They were also adept at "losing" overtime hours along the way.
Fortunately, Abrams had only herself to support, unlike her colleagues Dave and Shirley at the Towers Nursing Home near Aberdeen, who provided for their five children by working alternate shifts, with only a car ride alone together between passing the childcare baton. Juggling family life, planning for birthdays, Christmas, illness and holidays did not enter into Abrams's remit. She still could not break even.
But this is not a book about anger. Militant workers full of anti-government bile do not populate its pages. "On £4 an hour, or thereabouts, you can't afford working-class solidarity," Abrams writes. This is a book, rather, about people trying not to drown, about those who simply keep going while struggling to find enough energy (if not money) for the things that dignify and thus give meaning to their lives.
The minimum wage was supposed to be a living wage that, according to the Low Pay Commission, would "encourage feelings of belonging not to the margins, but to the mainstream of society". The evidence here shows that gruelling hours, mundane tasks and a lack of respect still leave many feeling alienated from the mainstream and believing that the margins are where they belong.
Abrams argues that there should be an official champion of the low-paid within government, and that the Low Pay Commission was from the beginning a political stitch-up. She would like to see the introduction of minimum-wage enforcement teams, accountable to the commission. But such teams would be effective only if they were implementing a living wage in the first place. For many workers, as Abrams discovered at the Savoy, "living" constitutes those few minutes snatched between shifts or between two or more jobs - one worker described how his friend only ever had time to sleep on the Tube between workplaces. In the words of Amos, a Savoy colleague, working on the minimum wage isn't living, it's about "just keeping body and soul together".
The principle of the national minimum wage was to establish a threshold of decency. It is right, I think, that we have redistributive benefits such as the working families tax credit, but these should not be a permanent subsidy for unfair wages and unscrupulous employers. Without further intervention, many thousands of workers will continue to inhabit the sad twilight zone depicted in this book, a world without pity or much in the way of hope.
