The first two chapters focus on the social experience of low-wage employment in the liberal countries. In this chapter, the investigation is set out in three parts. The first shows empirically that the liberal countries have smaller middle classes and more low-income households than other clusters of rich democratic nations. Discontinuous and weak wage-earner institutions are not the only cause of small middle classes and large, growing shares of poor people. Tax and welfare institutions are, of course, central. But if the further development of conventional tax and spend measures is ‘blocked’ by liberal, conservative, and increasingly populist right politics, then wage-earner institutions become more critical to distributional struggles in the liberal world. The second part develops a clearer sense of who minimum wage workers are, where they work, and the social and economic pressures they experience. The focus is extended to a wider group of workers – the lowest third of the income distribution – to draw on reliable samples from survey data for four of the six countries. As we shall see, in the 2010s, low-wage earners were under financial pressure, buffeted by less stable working and financial lives. Job insecurity for many was not the overwhelming issue that it will be in the post-COVID-19 recovery of the 2020s. The third part accounts for minimum wage institutions across the six countries. Institutionally dormant in many cases, minimum wage-setting has become subject to activist politics and policy development. The rest of the book seeks to explain why – and to draw out the implications of these developments for the liberal world in the rocky realities of the 2020s.

This chapter deals with income distribution and minimum wagesetting trends. But this is only half the story. Chapter 2 follows up with an exploration of the broader context of low-wage work: threats to the living standards of low-wage workers. Three causes are identified: housing costs, indebtedness, and aggressive welfare reform. Both chapters keep to the path set out in the Introduction – to draw selectively on empirical evidence from across the six countries to develop central arguments and perspectives.