Our key workers are among the lowest paid. What does that say about our skewed modern values?

Can you explain what value your work adds to the greater good of society and the environment? If not, why not? This question will be more uncomfortable for some than it is for others. It is asked against the backdrop of a global health pandemic, which has seen “key” workers such as doctors, nurses, teachers, transport and utility workers treated as heroes, held in high regard and valued by all. They look after us in times of medical need, have taught us and inspire our children’s interests and passions. They enable us to travel to see friends and loved ones, and deliver our cherished packages and post from afar. They have a profound impact on how well we live our lives.

So why then, if they provide us with the most valued services and add to the greater good of society, do they tend to be the lowest paid? What signal does this send to younger generations who are passionate about careers within these important fields, but who are rightly concerned about the low economic value these jobs are given?

In a recent article for The Times, John Kampfner stated that there was “something tempting” about determining the social value of work. Even before the pandemic, millennials and younger generations were already placing more value on the social purpose of a job, weighing up a company’s social and environmental record when making employment decisions. A recent PWC Workforce of the future survey found that prioritising the purpose, meaning and relevance of work—and seeing a world where “the human comes first”—will be the norm by 2030. Companies that do not will become both socially and economically irrelevant. Over the past 40 years, private organisations have slowly started integrating this concept by teaming up with charities, undertaking philanthropic work and promoting corporate social responsibility programmes. Covid-19 may accelerate this trend and make demonstrating social responsibility a mandatory rule for companies, rather than an optional one.

Companies that have put in the effort to assist in the Covid-19 crisis—such as Pret a Manger, which has donated food items to charities and hospitals—will be better placed to bounce back and reap financial rewards once the crisis calms down. It pays, both reputationally and financially, to contribute towards the greater good of society. Offering advice to employers weathering Covid-19, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban bluntly said: "If you get branded as a company that acted in bad faith, laid off all your employees, or really cut back and you took a bonus or whatever, you're going to get crushed and your brand is going to go straight into the toilet."

Coronavirus has placed us in an uncertain world. We do not know when things will “return to normal,” and if they ever will. But if this is the new way of living, surely now is the time for us to think more profoundly about the correlation between social good and economic reward in the 21^st century—and then act upon it.

In the interim, statistics used to assess the economic damage caused by the lockdown in the UK have factored in changes in manufacturing activity, non-food retail sales and the temporary closure of one quarter of companies. Yet these figures exclude reference to the socially vital work undertaken by the millions of volunteers who signed up to the NHS and local community volunteer schemes.

Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, recently acknowledged that while people highly value social capital—which refers to the "network of relationships across communities that support and strengthen societies"—it is rarely assigned a monetary value. He also claims that "NHS volunteers alone are likely to be creating enough social value—at zero cost—to fill charities’ financing gap," which faces a potential £4.3 billion decline within a 3 month period. Despite this huge increase in volunteer work, which has real tangible benefits to society in both the short and long-term, such work remains, Haldane says, “statistically invisible.” Considering the UK currently has historically low productivity growth, would a new way of measuring economic growth, such as replacing GDP with a modern index of prosperity as advocated by researchers at Cambridge University, be more appropriate for the 21^st century world of work?

Covid-19 has shown us what, and crucially who, is important to us during a period of great human and economic uncertainty. We must not overlook the work of key workers, and neither should we take them for granted as people who prop up the valuable infrastructure that holds societies together and helps them to thrive. If we cannot collectively question the value of this nature of work now, when can we?