Do the Poor Wake Up Quickly? A Study of Low Pay and Muted Horizons

The paper paints a portrait of service industry workers who are outside the institutional parameters of industrial relations. It considers the effects of hard work on the personal horizons of the working poor. By asking workers to describe target earnings and what a ‘better job’ means against a background of long hours, the study shows what distress selling of labour actually looks like. The results indicate that subjects correctly perceive their lack of opportunity and have horizons circumscribed by industrial norms.