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Economics Essay 62: Minimum Wage

 With the aid of a diagram, evaluate the likely impacts of statutory minimum wages in labour markets.

A statutory minimum wage is a government-mandated wage floor that sets the minimum hourly rate at which employers are legally required to compensate their workers. Evaluating the impacts of statutory minimum wages in labor markets involves assessing the potential consequences, both positive and negative, on various stakeholders. Here are the key impacts to consider:

1. Impact on Workers:

• Positive Effects: A statutory minimum wage can benefit low-wage workers by increasing their earnings and improving their standard of living. It can help reduce income inequality and alleviate poverty among the working population.
• Negative Effects: Some argue that higher minimum wages may lead to reduced employment opportunities, particularly for low-skilled workers. Employers facing increased labor costs may respond by cutting jobs, reducing work hours, or automating tasks to compensate for the higher wage rates.

2. Impact on Businesses:

• Positive Effects: Proponents argue that higher minimum wages can enhance worker productivity, reduce turnover, and improve employee morale and loyalty. It can also stimulate consumer demand as workers have more disposable income to spend, potentially benefiting businesses, especially in industries reliant on domestic consumption.
• Negative Effects: Increased labor costs can pose challenges, particularly for small businesses and industries with tight profit margins. Some businesses may struggle to absorb the higher wages, leading to potential reductions in hiring, cuts in employee benefits, or increased prices for goods and services.

3. Impact on Unemployment:

• The impact on unemployment is a contentious aspect of minimum wage policies. While some studies suggest minimal effects on overall employment levels, others find that higher minimum wages can lead to job losses, particularly for vulnerable workers with limited skills or in industries highly affected by labor costs.

4. Impact on Inflation:

• Higher minimum wages can potentially contribute to inflationary pressures in the economy. When businesses face increased labor costs, they may pass on the costs to consumers through higher prices. However, the overall impact on inflation depends on the size and frequency of minimum wage increases relative to other factors driving inflation.

5. Impact on Income Distribution:

• Minimum wages can help address income inequality by lifting the wages of low-income workers. However, their effectiveness in reducing overall income inequality depends on the magnitude of the wage increase and the distribution of low-wage workers across different income brackets.

It is important to note that the impacts of minimum wage policies can vary across different contexts, such as the level of the minimum wage relative to prevailing wages, the competitiveness of industries, and the broader economic conditions. Robust monitoring, evaluation, and adjustments to minimum wage policies are necessary to strike a balance between supporting workers' well-being and maintaining a favorable business environment that promotes employment opportunities.

Are CEOs with MBAs good for business?

 Daron Acemoglu in The FT

Every year, tens of thousands of aspiring young moguls enrol at business school for an MBA, hoping to climb the corporate hierarchy. They are following predecessors who now run many leading companies, from Alphabet, Amazon and Apple to Microsoft and Walmart. 

And the aim of faculty and administrators remains what Harvard Business School’s first dean, Edwin Gay, expressed in 1908: “To train people to make a decent profit, decently”. 

Better knowledge and training can make leaders more innovative and productive, raising the returns to all stakeholders. Better managed businesses can more effectively achieve whatever objectives they set, including helping to tackle the myriad challenges society faces. 

But has the MBA actually achieved these goals? Our recent research suggests a much less encouraging picture. Using detailed data on companies and workers from the US and Denmark, we looked at the effects when a chief executive with an MBA or undergraduate business degree takes over from one without such qualifications. 

We found no evidence that CEOs with such degrees increase sales, productivity, investment or exports relative to the levels the company achieved before. 

The biggest shift when a chief executive with a business degree takes charge is a decline in wages and the share of revenues going to labour, even in countries with different cultures. In the US, wages under business-degree holding CEOs were 6 per cent lower than they would otherwise have been after five years, and labour’s share of revenues was down five percentage points. In Denmark, the figures were respectively 3 per cent and 3 percentage points. 

We found no evidence that these were companies with declining sales and appointed leaders with business degrees to rescue them. The patterns are similar when new MBA managers are appointed following the death or retirement of a previous CEO. Nor was there any indication that by reducing wage growth, chief executives with business education were creating more retained earnings to fund investment, which is no higher in their companies. 

It may even be that, by ignoring broader stakeholders, such managers damage long-term profitability. For example, we found that higher-skilled employees were more likely to leave after the relative wage declines. 

However, shareholders gain from the appointment of a CEO with a business degree — at least in the short term. Share prices increase, and we see more share repurchases in the US and higher dividends in the US and Denmark. Business-educated managers are also paid more. 

The reason for the relative decline in workers’ wages and shareholders’ gain is clear. Companies run by CEOs without a business degree share increases in revenues or profits with their workforce — typically one-fifth of higher value-added. This ceases when a business-educated leader takes over. The wage impact is greater in concentrated industries. 

It is impossible to know for sure why business-educated leaders have these effects, but our work provides clues. One reason could be the legacy of the economist Milton Friedman’s doctrine from 1970, which stated that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”. 

The idea that good managers raise profits is common in business schools and economics departments. Many courses advocate “lean corporations” or “re-engineering businesses” using digital tools to cut costs. It is possible that these ideas encourage leaders to take a tougher stance and ensure higher corporate profits are not shared with employees. 

Another factor may be that the majority of business degree students interact closely with each other and often have little contact with blue-collar and clerical workers. As CEOs, they may not see the viewpoint of the rank-and-file or consider workers as stakeholders. 

So is the current business school system broken? Not necessarily. First, only a small fraction of students become chief executives. Many work in other managerial positions, where their training may have very different implications. 

Second, the majority of the chief executives in our sample received their degree before 2000. Business schools today may have evolved, but there are not enough CEOs with more recent degrees to judge the effects. Indeed, schools do appear to have changed rapidly this century. Many now have ethics courses and prepare their students for diverse careers, including in government service and non-profit organisations. Many students learn about corporate environmental and governance responsibilities. 

Being aware of what managers with business degrees used to do is an important step in reflecting on how we can build better programmes. 

Third, and most importantly, there is nothing hard-wired about business degrees. What MBAs mean and achieve will change, often prompted by students themselves. If they demand an experience that is richer than the Friedman doctrine and that prepares them for today’s societal challenges, most schools will adapt. 

The change will have to start with what is taught in business schools, but it cannot stop there. The whole business school experience may need to be rethought, including how students socialise, form networks and gain experience. It will also have to involve a broader discussion of the social responsibilities of corporations and their business leaders.

Hypocrisy's Penalty Corner

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


THERE’S been severe criticism, primarily in the Western media, of the gross exploitation of migrant workers in Qatar’s bid to host football’s World Cup that began in Doha last week. There’s more than a grain of truth in the accusation, and there’s dollops of hypocrisy about it.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino brought it out nicely by calling out the Western media’s double standards in what is tantamount to shedding crocodile tears for the exploited workers.

The CNN, unsurprisingly, slammed Infantino’s anger, and quoted human rights groups as describing his comments as “crass” and an “insult” to migrant workers. Why is Infantino convinced that the Western media wallows in its own arrogance?

It is nobody’s secret that migrant workers in the Gulf are paid a pittance, which becomes more deplorable when compared to the enormous riches they help produce. As is evident, the workers’ exploitation is not specific to Qatar’s hosting of a football tournament, but a deeper malaise in which Western greed mocks its moral sermons.

As their earnings with hard labour abroad fetch them more than what they would get at home, the workers become unwitting partners in their own abuse. This has been the unwritten law around the generation of wealth in oil-rich Gulf countries, though their rulers are not alone in the exploitative venture.

Western colluders, nearly all of them champions of human rights, have used the oil extracted with cheap labour that plies Gulf economies, to control the world order. The West and the Gulf states have both benefited directly from dirt cheap workforce sourced from countries like India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the far away Philippines.

Making it considerably worse is the sullen cutthroat competition that has prevailed for decades between workers of different countries, thereby undercutting each other’s bargaining power. The bruising competition is not unknown to their respective governments that benefit enormously from the remittances from an exploited workforce. The disregard for work conditions is not only related to the Gulf workers, of course, but also migrant labour at home. In the case of India, we witnessed the criminal apathy they experienced in the Covid-19 emergency.

Asian women workers in the Gulf face quantifiably worse conditions. An added challenge they face is of sexual exploitation. Cheap labour imported from South Asia, therefore, answers to the overused though still germane term — Western imperialism. Infantino was spot on. Pity the self-absorbed Western press booed him down.

Sham outrage over a Gulf country hosting the World Cup is just one aspect of hypocrisy. A larger problem remains rooted in an undiscussed bias.

Moscow and Beijing in particular have been the Western media’s leading quarries from time immemorial. The boycott of the Moscow Olympics over the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan was dressed up as a moral proposition, which it might have been but for the forked tongue at play. That numerous Olympic contests went ahead undeterred in Western cities despite their illegal wars or support for dictators everywhere was never called out. What the West did with China, however, bordered on distilled criminality.

I was visiting Beijing in September 1993 with prime minister Narasimha Rao’s media team. The streets were lined with colourful buntings and slogans, which one mistook for a grand welcome for the visiting Indian leader. As it turned out the enthusiasm was all about Beijing’s bid to host the 2000 Olympics. It was fortunate Rao arrived on Sept 6 and could sign with Li Peng a landmark agreement for “peace and tranquility” on the Sino-Indian borders. Barely two week later, China would collapse into collective depression after Sydney snatched the 2000 Olympics from Beijing’s clasp. Western perfidy was at work again.

As it happened, other than Sydney and Beijing three other cities were also in the running — Manchester, Berlin and Istanbul — but, as The New York Times noted: “No country placed its prestige more on the line than China.” When the count began, China led the field with a clear margin over Sydney. Then the familiar mischief came into play.

Beijing led after each of the first three rounds, but was unable to win the required majority of the 89 voting members. One voter did not cast a ballot in the final two rounds. After the third round, in which Manchester won 11 votes, Beijing still led Sydney by 40 to 37 ballots. “But, confirming predictions that many Western delegates were eager to block Beijing’s bid, eight of Manchester’s votes went to Sydney and only three to the Chinese capital,” NYT reported. Human rights was cited as the cause. Hypocritically, that concern disappeared out of sight and Beijing hosted a grand Summer Olympics in 2008.

Football is a mesmerising game to watch. Its movements are comparable to musical notes of a riveting symphony. Above all, it’s a sport that cannot be easily fudged with. But its backstage in our era of the lucre stinks of pervasive corruption.

Anger in Beijing burst into the open when it was revealed in January 1999 that Australia’s Olympic Committee president John Coates promised two International Olympic Committee members $35,000 each for their national Olympic committees the night before the vote, which gave the games to Sydney by 45 votes to 43.

The Daily Mail described the “usual equanimity” with which Juan Antonio Samaranch, the then Spanish IOC president, tried to diminish the scam. The allegations against nine of the 10 IOC members accused of graft “have scant foundation and the remaining one has hardly done anything wrong”.

“In a speech to his countrymen,” recalled the Mail, “he blamed the press for ‘overreacting’ to the underhand tactics, including the hire of prostitutes, employed by Salt Lake City to host the next Winter Olympics.” Samaranch sidestepped any reference to the tactics employed by Sydney to stage the Millennium Summer Games.

This reality should never be obscured by other outrages, including the abominable working conditions of Asian workers in Qatar.

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Striking workers are providing the opposition that Britain desperately needs

Andy Beckett in The Guardian

In Britain, more than in most democratic countries, going on strike is a risk. Your employer, the government, most of the media, much of the public and often the opposition parties are likely to be against you – or, at best, unsupportive. Your loss of income is unlikely to be made up by strike pay. Your behaviour on the picket line will be subject to what Tony Blair described approvingly in 1997 as “the most restrictive” trade union laws “in the western world”.

In very public ways, you will be breaking the rules of the modern economy: refusing to work, inconveniencing consumers, acting collectively rather than individually, and making demands for more money openly – rather than in private, as more powerful people do. If you are on the left, you are likely to be told again and again that your strike is politically counterproductive.

Such are the written and unwritten laws that have constricted British strikes for approaching half a century, ever since the walkouts of the 1978-79 winter of discontent inadvertently did so much to bring Margaret Thatcher to power and to provoke the counter-revolution against workers that still continues today. Many voters have long got used to the idea that strikes are a minority pursuit associated with a bygone age to which the country must not return. Boris Johnson’s government, with its especially strong intolerance of dissent, aims to demonise and marginalise strikes even further.

Yet this summer, more and more Britons are striking or considering striking regardless. From railway workers to barristers, firefighters to doctors, Post Office workers to teachers, nurses to civil servants, council workers to British Telecom engineers, an unusually large potential strike wave is building. Its social breadth, the range of occupations affected and the atmosphere on some picket lines all suggest that something politically significant may be happening.

At the first barristers’ protest, outside the Old Bailey in London this week, an already excited crowd of advocates in courtroom wigs and gowns burst into prolonged applause when they were joined by a few activists in shorts and jeans from the RMT. It’s not every day that you see such camaraderie between self-employed professionals who rely heavily on trains and striking transport workers carrying a banner that calls for “the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.

The cost of living crisis, and the refusal of the government and other employers to raise wages accordingly, is the immediate reason for this summer’s “wave of resistance”, as Mick Lynch of the RMT union calls it. Yet the causes go deeper: more than a decade of stagnant or falling wages; the long Conservative squeeze on the public sector; and the whole transformation of the British economy since the 1970s, which has effectively taken money from workers and given it to employers, shareholders and the wealthy.


Public dissatisfaction with this model has been growing for years. In the latest British Social Attitudes survey, 64% agree that “‘ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth” – up from 57% in 2019, and far greater than the support for any party. As Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn tapped into this discontent. But the end of his tenure, and Keir Starmer’s apparent lack of interest in its redistributive ideas, has created a vacuum where a movement with a radical economic agenda ought to be.

It’s possible that the strike wave could become one such movement. While support for the strikes has been stronger than expected - the pollster Savanta ComRes found that even 38% of Tory voters considered the highly disruptive rail strikes “justified”; among younger people this attitude was particularly prevalent. In the same survey, 72% of under-35s backed the strikers. Since few of them have ever been on strike themselves – less than a quarter of trade unionists are under 35 – then the likely explanation is not shared experience but shared disenchantment. Young people, like many of the strikers, have been particularly badly served by the status quo.

Many young people supported Corbyn for the same reason. And there are other similarities between the two movements. Former Corbyn advisers such as James Schneider, Corbyn himself, and the parliamentary Labour left all support the strikers. Green activists, once an important part of Corbyn’s coalition, have joined RMT picket lines. Like Labour’s 2017 election manifesto, Lynch uses clear, populist language – “every worker in Britain” should get a much better pay deal, he told Question Time – and its effectiveness has taken the media by surprise. Support for the RMT strike rose after his TV appearances.

Could the strikers succeed, not just in getting fairer pay deals but in beginning to change how the economy works? It’s an immense task, which Labour under Corbyn sometimes talked about compellingly but never came close to carrying out. And as the strikes widen and lengthen, public opinion may turn against them. Walking to work because of a train strike will seem less of a novelty and more of an imposition if that dispute drags on into the autumn. One of the obvious but often forgotten lessons of the winter of discontent is that voters often hate strikes in cold weather.

Excited union talk about building new mass movements has proved over-optimistic in the past, for example during David Cameron’s government. The proportion of British employees who are union members has stabilised in recent years, after decades of decline, but by historic standards it is still low: less than one in four. And the fact that Starmer is not prepared to support the strikers removes one of the main means by which their campaigns could be amplified.

Yet for almost a decade now, British politics has not followed the expected paths. It may be that an economy built on poor wages was politically and socially sustainable only while inflation stayed low. That relatively stable and docile era may be over. Recently, the leftwing website Left Foot Forward listed some of the pay rises already won this summer by the increasingly assertive trade union Unite: “300 workers at Gatwick get 21 per cent”, “300 HGV drivers win 20 per cent”. In post-Thatcher Britain, such transfers of wealth to the workers – not just matching but far exceeding the rate of inflation – aren’t supposed to happen. But they are.

Unlike in the 1980s, when the iron lady beat Britain’s last big wave of strikes, unemployment is low and the supply of labour is short. If strikers don’t like a pay offer, sometimes they can threaten to go and work for someone who pays more. You could call it an example of something the Tories talk less about these days: market forces.

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Making GDP the focus of a post-coronavirus economy would be a mistake

Growth often doesn’t benefit the people who need it – a green economy could create 1 million jobs writes Carys Roberts in The Guardian

 

‘A green recovery does not mean adding on a few green job programmes to a larger, fossil-fuelled stimulus.’ Low Bentham Solar Park, North Yorkshire. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA


The UK lockdown might be easing, but the path ahead for the economy will be long and difficult. Unemployment this quarter is likely to rise twice as fast as it did following the global financial crisis. Almost half of businesses that have taken up one of the government’s bounce-back loans do not expect to be able to pay it back.

It’s tempting in a crisis to want to do whatever it takes to get economic activity – measured by GDP – back to where it was before. But an overwhelming and singular focus on increasing GDP would be a mistake. GDP figures do not tell us who is benefitting from growth. GDP does not tell us whether environmental resources – and nature – are being dangerously depleted, and does not reflect the value of caring, much of which is performed by women.

Boris Johnson has called for the UK to “build back better”, but to use government resources and capacity most effectively and – more fundamentally – to take the opportunity to build a better kind of economy and society, we need to know what it is we want to rebuild. This is precisely the moment to think beyond a blind pursuit of GDP, about what kind of economic activity to bring back and prioritise, and what we could do without. Any stimulus package must be tailored to create not just any economic activity, but that which will serve society best. As a result, any recovery or spending plan should be scrutinised not just on its size, but what it is spent on.
This must be a green recovery. That does not mean adding on a few green job programmes to a larger, fossil-fuelled stimulus: the whole recovery package must accelerate the UK’s path to net-zero carbon and restore our natural environment, which is in crisis. Anything else risks emerging from one disaster only to accelerate headlong into another. As the government turns on the taps to boost the economy, there is a huge opportunity to fill the £30bn per year funding gap for green investment. 

The recovery must target well-paid, high-quality jobs, spread around the country. These must provide good work for those who have lost it as a result of Covid-19, as well as people previously locked out of the jobs market or at risk of being left behind on the journey to net zero. This is a more profound shift than it appears. Currently, stimulus packages aim to boost GDP, and jobs are a way to get there. But what matters is that ordinary people have access to secure incomes – both for themselves, and because this will ensure spending in the economy (people who need money are more likely to spend it) and a sustainable tax base. An alternative approach, for example, of loosening lending restrictions for mortgages, might boost GDP but would do so by increasing debt and raising house prices, benefitting the already wealthy while hurting people without wealth.

The recovery must involve a reconsideration of what is valuable in society. The pandemic has put into stark relief the extraordinary contribution of health and care workers, many of whom are women and migrants, and the essential support of key workers across the economy. The recovery must recognise that contribution in higher pay and better working conditions. So, too, the pandemic has caused conversations up and down the country about unpaid care work and who performs it. But the easing of lockdown has prioritised marketised activity over human relationships, which don’t require cash. You can visit your parents at home, but only if you want to purchase their house or clean it. The recovery should recognise and reflect what is important to people and valuable – not just economic activity.

Britons want quality of life indicators to take priority over economy

 These goals are not in conflict but instead are inextricably linked. Achieving them requires and provides an opportunity to rethink an economy that doesn’t work for so many across the country or for future generations. We estimate that close to a million good jobs could be created in this new, green economy, with many more if we choose to invest in our social care system.

Talking about and targeting the “economy” as an abstraction masks the underlying shape and nature of the activity taking place underneath. It means we miss people: who loses out, and who benefits from the status quo being restored. Lockdown has found us in a collective moment of reimagining, but this will not last for ever: we should use it to ask what economic activity we want to rebuild, and what we could do without.

Returning to work in the coronavirus crisis: what are your rights?

Hilary Osborne in The Guardian 

 

Some people may be concerned about returning to work during the coronavirus crisis. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images


As the lockdown restrictions begin to be eased across the UK, more workers are being asked to return to the workplace.

The government has said that employees should only be asked to go back if they cannot do their job from home, so if you can, your employer should not be asking you to travel in to work.

If you do need to go to your workplace, your employer is obliged to make sure you will be safe there. Employment lawyer Matt Gingell says: “Employers have a general duty to ensure, as far as reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of all of their employees.”

Here’s a guide to your rights if your employer wants you back in the workplace.

How much notice should I be given that I have to return?

“If employees are unable to work from home, employers can ask employees to return to work and, technically, no notice is required,” says Gingell.

Solicitor and consumer law expert Gary Rycroft says there is no notice period written into law “but giving at least 48 hours’ notice should allow either side to have discussions and air any concerns or even official ‘grievances’”.

The advisory group Acas says employers need to check if there are any arrangements in place with unions or similar about notice. It advises: “Employees and workers should be ready to return to work at short notice, but employers should be flexible where possible.”

So while your employer could ask you to return straight away, a good employer would understand if there were things you needed to put in place first, and give you chance to do so.

What if I was furloughed?

When you were furloughed your employer should have outlined what would happen when it wanted you to go back to work, and this may have a clause saying that you have to return as soon as you are asked.

“The termination of the furlough agreement and when an employee will be expected to return to work will depend on the provisions of the agreement,” says Gingell. Again, though, even if there is no notice period, a good employer should realise that you may need some time to prepare.

If you have been furloughed under the government’s job retention scheme, your employer can’t ask you to go in and do ad hoc days, or work part-time. They would need to take you off furlough and renegotiate your contract with you.

Can they ask me to go back in part-time?

Not, currently, if you have been furloughed and they are using the government scheme to pay you. It only allows companies to furlough people for all of their normal hours, and bans them from asking you to do any work while you are off.

But if your company has not claimed government money to cover your wages, it can ask you to resume work part-time. Make sure you understand the terms of the request – your employer cannot adjust your contract without your permission, so if it is asking you to change your hours you should get advice.

Can they ask me to take a pay cut?

“The law here is the same as it would be if an employer made the same request in the normal course of an employee’s employment. Reducing hours and/or pay are deemed to be such fundamental changes to an employee’s terms and conditions that the employee concerned should be consulted and then agree in writing,” says Rycroft.

He points out that for some employers “this may be the only economically viable option”, and the alternative, if people refuse, could be redundancies. To make more than 20 people redundant there will need to be collective consultation.

What if I am in a vulnerable group or live with someone who is?

No special rules have been put in place to protect people in these groups who are asked to go into work but some already exist – if you are disabled or pregnant, for example, your employer has extra obligations.

Rycroft says some employees may be able to argue that it will be discriminatory to force them to attend work outside the home. “It is all a question of degrees, in terms of how the employer can show that they have listened to legitimate concerns and made reasonable adjustments,” he says.

If you are pregnant your employer is obliged to make sure you can do your job safely. This can mean allowing you to do your job from home, or giving you a new role which can be done remotely. If your employer refuses either of these options, and you do not feel safe going into work you should take advice. Employmentsolicitor.com says that you could be able to argue for a medical suspension on full pay, which will allow you to stay at home.

Living with someone who is vulnerable or especially at risk is not necessarily a reason an employee can refuse to return to work, says Rycroft. “However, you can, as an employee raise a grievance and ask to be listened to and hopefully a compromise may be agreed, such as unpaid leave or using up annual holiday. But if an employer can show that a workplace is safe, the employer may insist on an employee attending.”
What if I have childcare to worry about?

Legally, you can take time off to look after any dependants – these could be children, or older relatives. This time is typically unpaid. If you are currently furloughed and your employer does not have enough work for everyone to go back full-time, they may agree to leave you on furlough so you can continue to earn 80% of your normal pay.

What information should they give me in advance?

Rycroft says there is no law saying that employers should provide information before you return, but the government guidance to employers recommends that they do. He says this information – written or verbal – should cover how they are making your workplace safe in light of the pandemic. So you should be told what is happening to ensure social distancing and hygiene. “This will allow employees to understand how their health and safety at work is being addressed.

Can I refuse to go back?

Yes, if you believe there is a real danger to going to work. “If an employee refuses to return to the workplace due to the employee reasonably believing imminent and serious danger and is then dismissed for that reason the employee could, depending on the circumstances, have a claim for unfair dismissal,” Gingell says.

“The requirement that the employee has to believe that there is imminent and serious danger, does limit the right.”

Otherwise, you cannot refuse. “If someone refuses to attend work without a valid reason, it could result in disciplinary action,” says Acas. But you may be able to make other arrangements with your employer – perhaps you can use holiday or take unpaid leave, or if you have concerns about something like travelling at peak time, they may be willing to accommodate different shifts. Your employer does not have to agree to this, but it is worth asking.

What if I am worried when I see my workplace?

Rycroft says that under section 100 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 employees may leave a place of work where there is an imminent health and safety danger. So if, for example, you return to find social distancing is impossible, you could argue that this is a reason to leave your workplace.

But in the first instance you should try to resolve the issue with your boss. Gingell says: “Employers ought to to listen to the concerns of individuals and be sympathetic and understanding.”

If you do not get anywhere with this, you should take advice. If you are in a union, it should have a helpline you can call if there is no rep to speak to on site. Acas is another port of call, as is Citizens Advice.

“If the employer has breached the implied obligation to provide a safe working environment and/or trust and confidence an employee could, again, depending on the circumstances, resign swiftly as a result and claim constructive unfair dismissal,” says Gingell. But he says you should get advice before taking this action.

“Another option for employees to consider is contactIng the Health and Safety Executive, which enforces health and safety legislation,” he says.

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We say we value key workers, but their low pay is systematic, not accidental

If those who care for us are to be first, not last, we have to look at the conditions that drive wage stagnation and insecurity writes Zoe Williams in The Guardian  

 

Military personnel help administer Covid-19 tests for NHS workers at Edgbaston cricket ground in Birmingham. Photograph: Jacob King/PA


This weekend brought the news that two workers at London’s Pentonville prison, Bovil Peter and Patrick Beckford, had died with symptoms of Covid-19. “Symptoms” is nowadays a euphemism for “they weren’t tested”, and a grim reminder of the hundreds of thousands of key workers we are asking the world of, but whose selflessness is not being reciprocated.

These are tragedies laced with guilt for all of us: plainly, the most dangerous place to be during this epidemic is in a densely populated care environment, whether a hospital, school or prison. People work in them because they have a passion, but also because there is no alternative, and they do so on all our behalves.

Prison officers have always been the unsung heroes of public duty: never quite macho enough for the people who glorify the armed forces; always a bit too authoritarian for those who valorise nurses. They are some of the most inventive and diligent people working anywhere in the business of caring for others, but they have generally done so without much credit. 

This crisis is forcing an urgent re-evaluation of that, along with all those other jobs that were previously classed as low-value yet now turn out to be the most important in the country. Words are not enough, and nor is clapping; you can praise care workers to the skies, but if you’re paying them the minimum amount in 15-minute segments, without security of hours or of employment, without sick or holiday pay, then the praise is hollow.

You can wax sentimental about the holy vocation of nursing, but you cannot then bring second-year students on to the frontline to fight coronavirus and still expect them to pay their tuition fees. You cannot claim, as the health secretary, Matt Hancock, told Andrew Marr on Sunday, that this isn’t the right time to talk about pay rises; it is the best and only time to talk about pay rises, when we have finally realised, with a jolt, just how much we rely on people who put their jobs ahead of their own safety.

Yet this is about more than money: Keir Starmer accepted the Labour leadership on Saturday with the rousing Old Testament statement about all key workers, cleaners, paramedics, carers, porters: “For too long they’ve been taken for granted and poorly paid. They were last and now they should be first.” But what would it actually mean to put these jobs first? Money is some of the answer, but we also have to look at the conditions and assumptions that drive wage stagnation and the steady erosion of security.

There is nothing radical in the observation that jobs are often described as low-skill, when actually they are just poorly paid. More radical, yet still accurate, is the assertion that they are characterised as “low-skill” deliberately. Caring is a job of tremendous skill, hard as well as soft. And while there is a huge amount of bolt-on expertise that employers require, from administering medicines to dealing with dementia, this is not reflected in any career progression. It is not unusual for a carer in her 40s to be on the same hourly rate, adjusted for inflation, that she was on at 18.

This has been systematic, not accidental. Without progression, the wage bill can remain reliably static, which is the only way the financial architecture of the sector makes sense.

There is often better progression in public sector work, but the combination of the austerity-years pay freeze and a new normal (extending even to the police) of people at the start of their career being expected to work voluntarily, which itself erodes starting salaries, has had a striking effect on these jobs.

Ironically, Theresa May was right when she famously said that a nurse might use a food bank for “complicated reasons”. Of course there’s a very simple reason – that nurse is not being paid enough. But the feedback loop between the private and public sectors – low pay, insecurity and poor conditions legitimised in one sector and migrating to another – is actually quite complicated.

And there’s an overarching fallacy, that a job many people could do must be inherently low in value. By these lights, huge numbers of people – cleaners, drivers, shop assistants – are without prospects, being so replaceable. The times are testing this assumption to destruction – when you’re looking for the people whose courage we need in order for civilisation to survive, you don’t have to look much further than the postal worker or the hospital porter.
In the immediate term, putting key workers first means personal protective equipment; it means collective and determined effort to strip as much risk as possible out of essential jobs that simply wouldn’t get done if everyone looked out for themselves. But there will be an era after coronavirus; and one thing to carry into it will be a determination never again to think, talk about or treat people as though logic demands they should be screwed down to their lowest possible price.