If you think of a person who is being paid less than the minimum wage, who comes to mind? Someone washing cars under a railway arch? Someone sewing clothes in a small factory for cash in hand? How about someone tapping away in an office for an annual salary?
In Britain, the fast-rising minimum wage is catching up with the bottom rungs of white-collar work. Indeed, it appears that a growing number of workers outside the traditional low-paid sectors are not even getting the legal minimum rate of pay.
How did we get here? In 2016, Britain’s Conservative government began to push up the minimum wage sharply relative to the pay of the median worker. In a stagnant era in which median pay was barely rising in real terms, successive governments continued to increase the wage floor in order to make sure that workers at the very bottom, at least, received pay rises. As a result, the UK minimum wage is now about two-thirds of median pay. By this measure, the UK government says the country has the second-highest minimum wage rate in the G7.