The British Social Attitudes survey, the nation’s long-running annual pulse-taker, finds growing job dissatisfaction in its report, published today. People complain of a lack of flexibility in working hours, a lack of career advancement – and, of course, a lack of pay rises. Pay stagnation over the last decade is unprecedented since Napoleonic times, the economist Paul Johnson told me, but then corrected himself: “You might as well say ever.” Worse, over the last year pay inequality has jumped up for the first time in a decade, says the Resolution Foundation’s Mike Brewer.
Pay for the top 10% rose by 7.3% but only by 1.1% for the bottom 10%. The national living wage has stopped rising faster than median pay, and top pay has taken off again. This gap in pay rises is the highest ever recorded.
As ever, the wealth gap is even wider, the top 1% owning more than the whole bottom half. When incomes are rising, people may forget Britain’s extreme inequality, the highest in western Europe, which has never fallen after taking off stratospherically in the 1980s. But in these moribund times, most see no upturn on the horizon.
In high-growth 2006, only 25% of people told the BSA survey the government should shrink the gap between rich and poor; now it’s 53%. Let’s have no more politicians’ pieties about working hard and playing by the rules when “hard-working” people feel under-rewarded, with their expectation of career advancement having fallen from 35% to 26%. Rags to riches, tea boy to boardroom stories belong to grandparents’ folk memories of the 1950s and 60s, when steep upward mobility, even for early school leavers, came from an escalation in white-collar, admin, skilled and managerial jobs.
For the statistics and personal stories of opportunities for the bright but unqualified, see social historian David Kynaston’s phenomenal book Deep into the Sixties. Alan Sugar, the poster boy for that lost world, was a Hackney market trader who became a billionaire. But look how he sees young people now, accusing them of “a lack of hunger, wanting a quick fix, not wanting to put the graft in and get there through hard work”.
His TV series The Apprentice may influence his generation to despise young people, ignorant as they may be of what has changed since their day. Yet the work ethic is as strong as ever, says Prof John Curtice, editor of this week’s BSA findings. People feel that work matters beyond money: only 4% would choose not to work if they could, and just 2% of young people – they are not feckless and idle.
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