A couple of months ago Kate Maxwell, 22, had a morning commute from hell – in the truest sense of the world. She left for work at 6am as normal (early, sure – but the sad consequence of only being able to afford to rent far out) but when she got to the Tube station her Oyster card said it was out of credit.
‘I put my bank card into the ticket machine to top up my card like normal and it was declined,’ Kate tells The Debrief. ‘At first I didn’t quite believe what I was seeing so I tried the card again, but no joy – then I remembered that I’d made an unplanned visit to the supermarket the night before because I’d run out of food. In doing just that I'd basically wiped out the miniscule amount that was keeping me from my overdraft limit.’
Kate knew she couldn't call in sick, or not turn up to work – there was a better paid, permanent job going in her office and she desperately needed to get it. And she had no credit card, nothing left in her bank account and no cash. She would have to walk. 'I managed about an hour and half before having to take a rest and sit down. I checked the maps on my phone assuming that I must be nearly there, but I was barely even a quarter through the journey. I just broke down in tears. I was broke, lost and about eight miles away from a job where I was only earning £6.31 an hour,' Kate remembers. 'Eventually I managed to walk 12 miles in total to my office, crying pretty much all the way. In total it took four hours. It was miserable and humiliating, but sadly just the sort of thing that's a daily reality when you’re earning the minimum wage.’
'Eventually I managed to walk 12 miles in total to my office, crying pretty much all the way. In total it took four hours'
There are now over 1.2 million people earning the minimum wage in the UK – a 'salary' that's £6.31 an hour for those aged 22 and above, with £5.03 an hour offered to 18 to 20-year-olds and just £3.72 an hour for those under 18. That's a figure that's shocked even the guy who came up with the concept itself, Professor Sir George Bain, who came out last week to say that the system was no longer fit for purposeand needed to be changed in order to tackle Britain’s low-pay problem. 'The minimum wage has been a clear success but the world has changed,' he said after chairing a Resolution Foundation think-tank on the subject. 'But with more than one in five workers in Britain suffering from low pay, it’s time to talk about how we strengthen the minimum wage for the years ahead.’
Kate agrees. Because, having experienced the grim daily realities of it for seven months, she's convinced it's not a sustainable model. ‘For months and months and months, my daily routine was work, home, eat, sleep, repeat. It was all I could afford to do.’ Whereas her friends were able to go out after work and have a few drinks, Kate would have to go home to meticulously plan and then cook her meals for the week if she didn’t want to wind up broke and walking to work again. ‘I had £80 to buy about five weeks' worth of food and cleaning products,’ Kate explains. ‘Mostly I would eat vegetables because I couldn’t afford meat and my lunches were mainly a bag of salad, some roasted vegetables and a block of feta cheese that would have to last me a week. I'd have to make a 20p bag of carrots last for a week. I had to compare supermarket prices online to make sure I stayed in budget and would pretty much only go shopping after 5.45pm when I knew discounted food would be put out. I’d also shop around different markets to get the best deals. The whole thing was exhausting and took hours.’
'For months and months and months, my daily routine was work, home, eat, sleep, repeat. It was all I could afford to do’
If food was a bit of a struggle, making sure Kate had a roof over her head was even worse. ‘When I moved to London from Sheffield after I got my internship, I tried to find a flat for £550 a month – already at the top of what I could afford. Every single house I saw was horrible,’ says Kate. ‘I went to a flat in Kilburn and it was £550 a month and the bedroom barely had room for a single bed and one of the walls was absolutely covered in mould.'
Unsurprisingly, it had a serious impact on her social life. ‘My mates would never purposefully make me feel excluded, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel excluded anyway. They’d never say anything to me, but I still felt like I couldn’t join in their fun because I couldn’t afford anything,' Kate says. 'I could ask my mum for cash for food at a push, but never just so I could go get wasted. And it made me really paranoid. When I was at home, I’d picture them all out having the best night ever and talking about me – when actually they were probably just in a grotty pub eating crisps.'
‘I went to a flat in Kilburn and it was £550 a month and the bedroom barely had room for a single bed and one of the walls was absolutely covered in mould'
As for dating? That didn't happen. 'On the couple of occasions I did go out with guys it was just cringey because I couldn’t really afford to be there. They’d always offer to pay and, it’s horrible to say, I jumped at the offer because it was a free meal. But I didn’t have the energy for guy hunting – all I could think about was work and money. It consumed me.’
Kate looked for cost-saving tricks everywhere she could – including asking her parents for a gym membership for her birthday so she could have a hot shower without adding to her bills. ‘I would never have been able to afford it on my own, but having the gym membership meant I could use their facilities without spending any extra money – including using their warm showers. Another bonus was I could use their towels without having to waste my own money cleaning them,’ she remembers. Other little things helped: picking up lost Oyster cards and getting the £5 deposit back from Tube officials.
With no apparent solution – the only jobs she could get were unpaid internships – Kate got pretty depressed. 'You just feel totally useless. I got told all my life that I was really good and I was going to be able to do anything I wanted to do, but then I left university it felt like no one wanted me. My confidence was destroyed, too. I went to uni hoping it was going to get me somewhere, but what it got me was a minimum wage job.’
'I went to uni hoping it was going to get me somewhere, but what it got me was a minimum wage job'
Eventually, Kate’s internship did turn into a paid job, and six months on she now earns £26K – but her time on the minimum wage came at a price. ‘Even though I now get paid a good wage I’m still dealing with the repercussions of my time on the minimum wage. I was forced to supplement my wage with savings I made while I was still living at home, so even now I can't afford anything like a holiday or new clothes,’ says Kate. 'Still - at least I know how to turn a 12p bag of carrots into a week of meals, right? FML.'
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.