It is five years since I set out to investigate Britain’s low-wage economy by working undercover. In early 2016, as I set off on my travels around the country, the media was awash with positive economic news. There were a “record number” of people in work and Britain was said to be on the road to recovery after a long recession.
This was welcome news. Yet behind the headlines something else was going on. Wages had failed to keep pace with inflation, and even more than that, work for many had become precarious. Innovations such as zero-hours contracts, which had grown precipitously in the years following the 2008 financial crash, left many without regular hours and gave a distorted picture of how many were truly in work. Zero-hours contracts might have removed people from the unemployment roll, but they did not always provide a stable and secure means of earning a living.