This International Workers’ Day, we’re reminded that work should provide the foundations for a decent life, not leave people struggling to get by.

A job that pays for enough food on the table, a warm and safe home, and ensures the essentials are covered – whether that’s children’s school shoes or a fun activity with friends – seems a reasonable expectation in the world’s fifth largest economy.

However, despite the UK Government’s pledge to ‘Make Work Pay’, all too often the maths doesn’t add up. For many people across the UK paid work does not translate into an adequate – let alone decent – standard of living. This includes:

• 72 per cent of children living in poverty across the UK are from working households with at least one parent/carer in paid work
• Six out of ten food workers and members of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union responding to a union survey reported their wages weren’t enough to meet their basic needs – such as food and energy – and that they fear running out of food due to a lack of money
• Multiple jobholding to secure enough income and hours is a necessity for many young women, and is driven by precarious employment
• Migrant social care workers who delivered frontline care throughout the Covid-19 pandemic at great personal risk, now face an extension of the qualifying period for settlement from 5 years to 15 years, effectively punishing them for the structural undervaluing of care work and associated low pay
• A declining healthy life expectancy across Great Britain means that the number of years that the average number of years a person would expect to live in good health has now fallen below the state pension age of 66 years in more than 90 per cent of areas

At the heart of this is a lack of joined-up thinking, along with policy making developed in the absence of prioritising people’s rights and dignity.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Economic, social and cultural rights are the foundations people should be able to rely on to live well. This includes the rights to decent work and just and favourable conditions of work, the right to join and participate in the activities of a trade union, as well as rights to social security, food, housing, health, and education.

On International Workers’ Day, the message is clear: decent work and a decent life are intertwined. That requires rights that are protected in practice, not just promised on paper.

Read more:

• Rights at work are human rights | Just Fair
• ICESCR and trade unions: opportunities to defend and strengthen rights | Just Fair
• Book review: The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Employment Relation edited by Klaus Lörcher, Niklas Bruun and Ana Teresa Ribeiro

Get involved – join the UK ESCR Network

Background image by Trevor Messersmith