Working Lives Research Institute
"You don’t eat, your children eat. They get their dinner every night. You make sacrifices, you don’t mind, you have to, but sacrifices are where you make their dinners and you put them down and you watch them eat it. And that’s very sad to do."
A new report: The Impact of Low Pay on Unison Families will be launched over the next couple of weeks by Unison. This short study set out to hear from Unison members, in their own words, how their pay and working conditions impacts on their family life. We hear about the struggle for childcare and decent work and the impact on people’s health and family relationships. The findings in the study challenge the government’s assumption that work is necessarily always the route out of child poverty. Nearly 6 in 10 poor children live in families that are in ‘working’ poverty and the voices of parents and grandparents in this study are of those who work hard but who live well below the poverty line.
Low paid Unison members worked alongside Working Lives Researchers and, following training, interviewed their colleagues one-to-one to discuss the effects of low pay, long and unsocial hours and/or multiple jobs on their own lives and those of their children. For the newly trained Unison researchers this could be challenging:
Interviewing the parents and grandparents was a very raw experience especially when talking about time spent with work as compared to children or grandchildren. Often the most poignant time of the interview was predictably when the recorder was switched off. …
Update (August 2010) Read UNISON’s press release: Report reveals the devastating impact of low pay on families and download The Impact of Low Pay on UNISON's families (pdf).