Temping forever: meet Greater Manchester’s precarious workers

Young, scared and fireable

Dear members — “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” It’s both a perfect first line to a novel (L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between) and a decent way of thinking about employment. Whereas young people might have once reasonably expected a job for years, if not decades, precarious work has risen steadily in recent years. The ONS reported that at the end of 2021 over one million people were on zero hour contracts, up from less than 200,000 two decades earlier, while a new study by the Living Wage Foundation reports that half of low-paid workers are given less than a week’s notice of their shifts.

Dani has been speaking to people who work precarious jobs. It’s a topic that you probably either think about constantly (if you’re in such a role) or very rarely (if nobody you know works such a job). Either way, it feels like a topic that should be on our minds more. It’s hard to forecast what the workplace holds for Gen Z given how heavily 2020 and 2021’s data was impact…