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25 Critical Soc. Pol'y 5 (2005)

handle is hein.journals/critsplcy25 and id is 1 raw text is: U CHRIS GROVER Lancaster University Living wages and the 'making work pay' strategy Abstract Poverty among workers is a perennial problem. Recently there has been much interest in the idea of living wages. As mechanisms to increase wages above the 'poverty line', living wages present an alternative to New Labour's 'making work pay' strategy; a combination of minimum wage regulation and means-tested, in-work relief. Through a compari- son of living wages and the 'making work pay' strategy this paper critically examines both by focusing upon the aims of the two strategies, their ability to deliver higher incomes to workers and their families, and the assumptions upon which the two strategies are based. The paper demonstrates that while the 'making work pay' strategy is more sensitive to need than living wages, outside of wider changes in the social relations of capital and gender, the two strategies are similar in buttressing capitalism and institutionalizing stereotypes of women as dependants and carers. Key words: capitalism, gender, poverty, relief, work Introduction Poverty among workers is a perennial problem. Macnicol (1980) demonstrates, how in the past, the tackling of in-work poverty has been framed through a dichotomy between minimum wage legisla- tion on the one hand and in-work relief on the other. The origins of this dichotomy can be located in debates in the late 18th century when minimum wage regulation and in-work relief as mechanisms of relieving in-work need were discussed at both a local and central level. The preference at both levels was for in-work relief because of the potential of minimum wages to interfere with market wage levels (see Poynter, 1969). Two centuries later New Labour's 'making work pay' Copyright @ 2005 Critical Social Policy Ltd 0261-0183 82 Vol. 25(1): 5-27; 048965 SAGE PUBLICATIONS (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 10.1177/0261018305048965 5