Brain drain is often mentioned when talking about young graduates because working conditions may seem to be better abroad. So we may wonder how it is to work in Britain in the twenty-first century. First of all we will speak about the Thatcher era (from 1981 to 1990) which made some changes to welfare and to the nature of jobs in Britain through privatisation and economic liberalisation and she had to battle against the unions to achieve this. The consequences of Thatcherism were the death of the mining industry and a sudden growth of British unemployment together with the decrease of union membership which is still true today, it fell from 13.2 million in 1979 to less than 7.4 million in the 2010’s. In the same decade, whether thanks to diminished union power or improved industrial relations, fewer than 400,000 working days were lost to industrial action, that’s is to say: strikes !
As far as women in the workforce are concerned the Thatcher period was not so bad, there was an increase of hourly wages from 72% of those of men to 82% in the 2010’s. Yet what has become obvious in the 2020’s is the rise in the category of the low-paid workers. They may be hard-working families struggling to earn a living with two jobs (including a night shift), they are kindergarten assistants, workers in a factory, employees in a nursing home, and they work long hours trying to make ends meet. The minimum wage is set at a ridiculously low hourly rate (£5.35) by the British government not even allowing those workers to have leisure activities. Another group is added to this category, they are "the forgotten working poor" which consists of single childless people working long hours to pay for basics such as food, rent and clothing and who are not eligible for welfare funds.
Precariousness has inevitable social consequences ; it leads to social inequalities which are shown through the gap between wages. Low-paid workers suffer from bad working conditions, they are not paid sick leave, they get few paid holidays; they get no gratitude from their employers and they fear the repression of union activities. Finally welfare policies widen the gap between poverty wages and the well-off’s.
