The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

Author:Michael Marmot [Marmot, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4088-5798-4
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

By focusing on the problem in a strategic way, working with young people, giving them access to information, and perhaps above all, caring, authorities in these towns lowered the toll of young people not in employment, education or training.

There was an unexpected benefit. Youth offending in Swansea fell from over 1,000 incidents a year to fewer than 400.33 Correlation is not causation. One cannot say that the reduction in NEETs was responsible for the reduction in youth offending, but it is certainly possible.

Unemployment harms health and work is vital. When work is of ‘good’ quality it is empowering. It provides power, money and resources – all essential for a healthy life. The ‘good’ characteristics of work tend to follow the social gradient: greater empowerment and better conditions go with higher status. Not always, but the highly paid lawyers and hedge-fund managers have considerable compensation for the ridiculous hours that they work. Bond traders, who Tom Wolfe called ‘Masters of the Universe’, may feel stressed, but they are in control.34

In low-income countries, the nature of working life too often resembles the Dickensian conditions that high-income countries have put behind them. Further, with the export of undesirable jobs from high-income countries to low, the problem is not so much solved as transferred. Solutions to improving working conditions should be applied globally, but examples of local action show how working life can be transformed – witness the scavengers of India or the young unemployed of Wales.

A worrying trend is that work will increasingly be stratified into well-paid empowering work for people with education and skills and the reverse for those without. Global competition can lead to a race to the bottom. Worse working conditions and cheaper labour costs make a country more attractive for transnational corporations. Highlighting the problem is a step towards addressing it.

I said in Chapter 5 that education was central because it provided the key connection between early life and the grown-up world of work. I could say the same here. Work is central because it provides the crucial link between earlier life and those older years, beyond working age, that are stretching ever further. It is those years of later life that claim our attention next.

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