I’D like to introduce you to the incredibly frustrating, dystopian concept of in-work poverty. This is what happens when you have a job, yet are still unable to financially support yourself, or your family.

The NHS reports that one in eight UK workers are unable to cover essential household costs; people who, despite their employment, are still living below the poverty line. As of April 1st of this year, the official Scottish living wage is £9.50 per hour. Scaled up to the average number of hours worked per week in Scotland, 36, according to Statista, this equates to a yearly average of £17,784. This wage is only the recommended amount for people over the age of 23 (which would exclude me) and does not reflect the minimum hourly rate which can be paid to workers under 18, £4.81.

Figures provided by The Resolution Foundation, a UK wide independent think-tank, calculate what is known as the Real Living Wage. This figure is based on the money necessary to afford items which are essential for a good quality of life, such as ‘housing, childcare, transport and heating costs’.

In a cost of living crisis, when household bills see an almost daily increase, more and more people are finding that their hard-earned wages are no longer enough to prevent them sinking into poverty. Those who advocate against an increased living wage are rarely those who receive an hourly rate upon which they cannot survive. Instead they continually advise those in poverty to simply ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’.

It might come as a surprise to people that the etymology of this phrase originally described an impossible task. Rudolf Erich Raspe, a German author, is credited with the coining of this phrase, writing about a man who pulled his own hair hard enough to extricate himself from a swamp.

There is a notable difference between the living wage calculated by the government, £9.50, and the real living wage, currently calculated at £10.90 as of 22nd September 2022. Receiving £1.40 less per hour totals up to an average loss of £2,620.80 per year. The problem of in-work poverty is neither new, nor negligible, as can be seen through the family resources survey done by the Scottish Government stating, "In 2017-20, 68% of children and 61% of adults in poverty in Scotland lived in working households".

From a young age I’ve heard the same rhetoric I think we all have: study hard, get a good job. This message is regurgitated whenever the subject of in-work poverty is raised. Instead of the burden of responsibility being placed upon businesses to ensure they pay a fair wage, the onus falls on the worker to find an employer who will.

Since it is extremely hard in some sectors to find an employer who will provide a living wage, there are some employment paths which are inaccessible to those who do not already have external means to support themselves. LWS states at the time of publication, there are 2800 accredited real living wage employers in Scotland. To put this number into perspective, according to the HitHorizons database there are 465,826 businesses active in Scotland. If you’re reading this and you’d like to find a Real Living Wage employer, there is a searchable database on the LWS website.

Among the many lessons we should have learned from the pandemic, we saw the clear overlap between workers who were "unskilled", and "essential". I was working in a restaurant during that time and while a lot of “skilled” jobs transferred to remote working, many workers including myself had to simply mask up and clock in.

Indeed.com gives the definition of unskilled labour as, "work that doesn't require a certain set of skills or formal education.” Examples provided include, “cashiers, grocery clerks and cleaners." Despite the physically and mentally demanding nature of jobs which require skills acquired outwith formal education, they are often undervalued.

Trust me when I say that between my university lectures and handling the Saturday lunch rush, neither of those tasks could’ve been completed without skill. When workers do speak out about unfair wages or working conditions, there is often a response that people in these professions simply need to find a ‘better’ job.

I firmly believe a person who stacks shelves deserves to live off their wage, as does the person who cleans, serves you in a restaurant, collects your train ticket, teaches your children, looks after you when you are sick, and represents you in court. If a job is worth doing, it’s worth getting paid fairly for it.

If you're reading this thinking it's unfair for someone working an "unskilled" job to be making anywhere close to someone whose job required a university degree, ask yourself why you don’t believe all human labour to be valuable. Time is money, and the disparity between the values we as a society place upon the time spent by workers in different professions is staggering. Regardless of the type of work, if you need a position filled then it stands to reason the person filling the position should be paid enough not only to survive, but to live.

If you are paying your employees so little that they're living in poverty, then your business is exploiting rather than rewarding your loyal employees. If you could not comfortably live off the wage you pay your workers, you are an unethical employer. It seems many employers take the view that it is extremely inconvenient to pay people enough to live on, and as a result it is becoming increasingly apparent there is a vast difference between what employers want to pay, and what workers need to live comfortably on.

If moral justifications for the living wage to reflect the needs of workers isn’t enough to sway you, perhaps a financial one will: paying people enough to live on supports the economy. Those who have more, have more to spend. If workers are barely making enough to eat, they're certainly not making enough to eat out. When wages crawl and inflation sprints, it becomes less about who wins the race and more about who will survive to cross the finish line. It seems more and more that the way to address in-work poverty is not that impoverished people should get a better job, but that we as a society should do a better job.