Jun 25, 2026 · 45 min · 14 segments
**What makes a job “good”? Is it pay, flexibility, progression, security, purpose, autonomy, or the people you work with?** Policy debates about inequality often focus on wages and getting people…
Naomi ClaytonGuest
Jonathan CribbHostHelen MillerHostBefore we do that, I think we should paint kind of a broad picture of, uh, the labor market.
Uh, if you're at the 90th percentile, so that's kind of only 10% of workers are, are paid more than you, you've got a wage which is about three times higher than someone at the 10th percentile.
The, the big picture is, is not necessarily about how big these are but how they've changed over time.
If we roll back to the early 1990s, uh, and we think, how did, how did pay inequality change from, say, the early '90s through to the Great Recession? Basically, what was happening was that, uh, higher paid people were seeing faster wage growth than lower paid people.
Uh, side note, that didn't necessarily translate into disposable income inequality in terms of what people actually have, have in their pocket to spend because the government, particularly in the early 2000, were doing a lot of redistribution, more benefits, uh, to, to lower paid people, but there was an expansion of pay inequality.
There have been big increases in the minimum wage, and if anything, pay inequalities, uh, have, have fallen, uh, since the Great Recession.
And what, what are the types of jobs behind the scenes here? You said that, that pay inequalities opened up before the Great Recession.
One is more professional technical jobs towards the top of the in, uh, wage distribution.
That's great 'cause it pushes up the average levels of pay, but it also basically pushes up levels of inequality.
One is a kind of hollowing out of middle paid occupations, particularly kind of administrative occupations o- over time, replaced i- in some sense by te- sometimes by technology and, and a growth in low paid occupations in care, retail, hospitality as well, and that kind, those kind of factors again p- uh, uh, are some of those that widen the, the labor market inequalities.
And it's the final thing we should touch on in our sort of whistle stop tour of fun facts is actually not everyone has a job in the first place.
Before we do that, I think we should paint kind of a broad picture of, uh, the labor market.
Uh, if you're at the 90th percentile, so that's kind of only 10% of workers are, are paid more than you, you've got a wage which is about three times higher than someone at the 10th percentile.
The, the big picture is, is not necessarily about how big these are but how they've changed over time.
If we roll back to the early 1990s, uh, and we think, how did, how did pay inequality change from, say, the early '90s through to the Great Recession? Basically, what was happening was that, uh, higher paid people were seeing faster wage growth than lower paid people.
Uh, side note, that didn't necessarily translate into disposable income inequality in terms of what people actually have, have in their pocket to spend because the government, particularly in the early 2000, were doing a lot of redistribution, more benefits, uh, to, to lower paid people, but there was an expansion of pay inequality.
There have been big increases in the minimum wage, and if anything, pay inequalities, uh, have, have fallen, uh, since the Great Recession.
And what, what are the types of jobs behind the scenes here? You said that, that pay inequalities opened up before the Great Recession.
One is more professional technical jobs towards the top of the in, uh, wage distribution.
That's great 'cause it pushes up the average levels of pay, but it also basically pushes up levels of inequality.
One is a kind of hollowing out of middle paid occupations, particularly kind of administrative occupations o- over time, replaced i- in some sense by te- sometimes by technology and, and a growth in low paid occupations in care, retail, hospitality as well, and that kind, those kind of factors again p- uh, uh, are some of those that widen the, the labor market inequalities.
And it's the final thing we should touch on in our sort of whistle stop tour of fun facts is actually not everyone has a job in the first place.
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