During the covid-19 pandemic, much has been made of the contributions of so called “key workers”, including nurses in both hospitals and care homes, but also food operatives, transport staff, refuge workers, delivery workers, and grocery store staff.

While this overdue appreciation has been welcomed, new research from City University London reminds us that these workers are often underpaid and experience lower job quality than the average worker.

Trawling through data from the UK government funded Labour Force Survey, the researchers assessed 25,000 people working across a range of “key worker” jobs from 2016 to 2019.  This assessment included their salary and job quality, which itself was assessed via things such as the number permanent staff versus zero hours contracts, whether weekends and anti-social hours were worked, and whether the workers were part of a trade union or not.

Key work

The workers, who would often operate in face-to-face roles during the pandemic, were then compared with typical job quality indicators across the entire workforce.

“Our research shows that the jobs which have been identified as having the highest value during the pandemic are often the lowest paid with higher negative job quality indicators,” the researchers say.  “Check-out operators, care workers, food operatives, security guards, and bus drivers are just some of the occupations that earn below the average employee, some well below, and also experience a number of negative working conditions, particularly regarding anti-social work hours.”

What’s more, the analysis found that women and BAME people were heavily over-represented in these roles, with 84% of care workers being women, the majority of whom had to work unsociable hours as part of their work.  Similarly, 85% of primary school assistants, 71% of retail cashiers, and 98% of nursery assistants, were also women.

“This research highlights that pay is only one part of the discussion on how we improve key worker jobs. There are many factors revealed by the negative job quality indicators that could change too, or play a role in discussions of how key workers are rewarded for the work they do,” the researchers explain.  “A lot of the key worker jobs have elements that make them worse than average, however some of them are far worse, and those roles tend to be the more female dominated spaces of work with higher numbers of people from ethnic minority backgrounds.”

With any job, there are often trade offs, as even the highest paid jobs often come with high stress levels.  The data suggests, however, that many of the jobs identified as key, have an unwelcome combination of poor pay and negative characteristics.

“These findings add to the current focus on the work and health conditions of key workers, and contribute to a broader policy debate about revaluing the role of key workers in society moving forward from the pandemic,” the researchers conclude.