Lots More People Are Working, But In Jobs That Keep Them In Poverty

10th May 2023

"As well as a continuing focus on making sure people can get into work, we also need to look at the quality of work." Paul Johnson in the Times.

There has, for good reason, been much recent concern over the "great retirement" — the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of older workers from the labour market. That does, though, need to be set in the context of one of the great longer-term successes of welfare and labour market policy over the past quarter-century: getting people into jobs.

Employment rates have been at or near record highs, the number of workless households has halved since the mid-1990s, and the fraction of lone parents in work has pretty much doubled. Worklessness and associated poverty have by no means gone away, but they are a smaller problem than they once were. Today's big problems are different — not so much the number of jobs, but the quality of those jobs, and the rates of poverty now faced by people in work.

Back in the 1990s just over a third of those living in poverty (or to put it another way, towards the very bottom of the income distribution) were living in a household in which someone was in work. That fraction has now reached something like 60 per cent. The majority of the poor are in work or live in a household where someone is working.

Note
Paul Johnson has been the Director of the IFS since 2011. He is also currently visiting professor in the Department of Economics at University College London.

Read the full article HERE

Paul Johnson published a new book in February 2023
Follow the Money
A highly informative book - I am half way through it and so many details presented in an enjoyable and very revealing way of how our money is spent by government - Bill Fernie