Thursday 28 May 2009

The real Middle Britain

My former colleagues at the TUC have published an ace-a-tronic new pamphlet - exec summary here - this morning taking a look at the mythical 'Middle Britain'. Rather usefully, they take a look at who actually resides there, as determined by their typical earnings, rather than the image created by rather well-paid journos and (generally) right-of-centre politicians.

The real Middle Britain is -

*Much less likely to have had a university education
*More likely to have experienced unemployment
*Much less likely to enjoy a final salary pension scheme
*Much less likely to hold shares and have significant levels of savings

There's a lot more to the report so go and have a read yourself.

The TUC has also created a whizzy little gadget to see where you fit in the income scale.

UPDATE: Ian pointed out the link to the MiddleBritainometer wasn't working - should be ok now.

2 comments:

Ian Manborde said...

Hi Tom,

Just to let you know that the link from your blog to the 'TUC gadget' is broken.

Also, I added to my blog a post on work I am engaged in around trade unions and employee ownership/ cooperatives/social enterprise.

Very interested in your views as this work will progress following an event on 21st May.

Thanks

Ian

Tom Powdrill said...

Hi Ian

Thanks for the comment - link should be fixed now.

Interesting post too. I think there's an opportunity to get these sorts of ideas more into the mainstream now, given that one of the predominant private sector ownership models (public company with dispersed shareholders) seems to have serious problems.

There's some academic evidence that businesses with large employee share-ownership are more productive, though I'm a bit dubious.