Why are we poor?  Is it because we don’t work hard enough?

 

We all know that hard work equals success, don’t we?  On the TV, in the papers, on the internet, the message is everywhere.  If you work hard you will get rich.  If someone is poor, surely then it is because they didn’t work hard enough, they didn’t want enough to be rich.  Therefore anyone poor obviously doesn’t care about being rich, they don’t want to work hard, they’d rather not put in the hours necessary to get rich.  

 

Isn’t it easy to believe this?  Certainly, rich people believe this to be true.  Self-made rich people definitely believe this to be true – and for them, it IS true.  They worked hard, they got rich.  Therefore everyone can do it.  But can they?

 

First of all, we need to define “hard work”.  What does “hard work” mean?

 

Does it mean the same as heavy physical labour – work that is physically hard to do?  If you do hard work, will you get rich?  Looking at some of the hardest work possible, that of labouring, we see that it definitely won’t get you rich.  Up and down the country, outside DIY stores and similar places, we see groups of men waiting, hoping to be hired for a day’s work.  The rates are below minimum wage, often as low as £20 for a day of lifting and carrying, clearing building rubbish.  This hard work won’t get you rich.  But this is illegal, of course.  Both worker and boss are breaking the law, and that might be why the pay is so bad.  Surely legal hard work will get you rich?  

 

Work doesn’t come much harder than being a hod carrier.  Bricks are heavy!  Searching today (I wrote this in 2016) on indeed.co.uk, we can see that there are 130 hod carrier jobs being advertised. Just over two thirds of them (67%) have wages of less than £20,000 per year, and only 6% have wages of over £35,000 per year.  Only 1 of these 130 jobs are advertised as permanent.  So you can see, it’s possible to do OK as a hod carrier, but you won’t get rich.

 

There are plenty of other hard working jobs though.  Warehouse Operative is a very common job these days, and is widely accepted to be heavy labour.  Searching for the word “warehouse” on indeed.co.uk we can find 10,749 jobs available, of which 80% offer less than £20,000 per year.  It seems like you won’t get rich this way either.

 

Perhaps “hard work” means using your body to develop physical skills – footballers are paid a lot.  Perhaps you can get rich that way.  

 

Well, if you’re out of school and not already a footballer, it’s too late, and even if you are, the Professional Footballers Association state “Of those entering the game aged 16, two years down the line, 50% will be outside professional football. If we look at the same cohort at 21, the attrition rate is 75% or above.”*  You need to have made that decision as a child and worked towards it from there and even then you’re almost certain not to be a professional.  The same applies for all other sports.  Hard work might get the best of the best very well off, but for most sportspeople it’s done for the love.  

 

Perhaps “hard work” refers to jobs that you need to be clever and put in long hours to do.  Nursing is a job for clever people, and they work long hours.  Yet of the 35,000 or more jobs advertised using the tag ‘nursing’ on indeed.co.uk, more than a third (35%) of them pay under £20,000 per year.  You can do better nursing than you can as a hod carrier though, as senior workers in the private medical sector can do better than £45k per year (according to indeed.co.uk).  Teaching perhaps?  You could earn up to 50k per year as a senior teacher, perhaps even more in management.  Even though £50,000 is rich to us, it’s certainly not rich by the standards of wealth.  We can see that if you were lucky enough to grow up with a home life that meant you could concentrate on your studies, and a good education, and then made the right career choices, worked hard and didn’t get ill or unlucky, you could earn a decent living.  That’s a lot to ask, isn’t it?

 

So when people say that hard work gets you rich, they don’t mean all hard work.  They certainly don’t mean hard work on its own.  They mean hard work combined with the right conditions.  And those conditions are not available to everyone.  If some of these conditions aren’t in place, no amount of hard work will make you rich.  And, as we’ll see, the important factor in getting rich is not actually hard work, but the other conditions.  Hard work is actually a meaningless factor for most of the rich, but one which they usually say is the reason for their wealth.  They claim to have worked hard, whilst ignoring the other factors.  It means they can make themselves seem deserving, rather than lucky.  It means they can blame people’s poverty on laziness and poor life choices, rather than to bad luck or systemic** factors.  

 

It is clearly a lie that hard work is why the rich are rich.  We are poor not because we don’t work hard, or because we are lazy.  We are poor because the system is not designed for us to get rich.  We are poor because only the luckiest individuals can get rich, individuals with the right connections.  We are poor because we were born into a society which is set up so that most people always get a raw deal, where the possibility of getting rich gets smaller every year, and where the myth of hard work keeps us working hard for wages that are not enough to live on, or shames us when we want to work hard but there are no jobs for us.

 

* http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/28950665

 

**systemic when I talk about “systemic factors”, i mean factors relating to the different systems that make up the society we live in.  For example, business and trade, education, the economy, health, and the law are all systems, as is the government.