While Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have attempted to spin the cost of living crisis as a short-term product of the war in Ukraine and rising inflation, a new report from think tanks CLASS and Autonomy reveals how economic insecurity has been steadily rising since New Labour won its final election in 2005.

Although shortly before the pandemic, 76.3 percent of the UK’s working age population were in a job—the highest amount since 1974—this simple statistic obscures the reality of zero-hours contracts, the rise of the gig economy, and spiralling housing costs.

By developing a new data-driven measure of economic insecurity, we at Autonomy and CLASS have revealed how a narrow focus on the employment rate ignores the deterioration in the quality of UK jobs. Capturing crucial factors such as precarious contracts, underemployment, family circumstances, and housing, our report generates an ‘insecurity score’ to measure the precarity of different workers. In stark contrast to the government’s assessment, this paints a very different picture of our economic system.

Under neoliberalism, insecurity has become a defining characteristic of the UK economy, a break from previous eras which saw settlements between businesses and some workers, capital, and certain segments of the labour force—largely citizened, white, and male. While neither universal nor equitable for everyone, for those who could access them, these settlements were functioning and sustainable.

The financial crash of 2008 exacerbated the polarisation of jobs, with the resulting mass unemployment morphing into various modes of quasi-employment: jobs that only ever provide temporary contracts; jobs in which the number of hours can be changed on a whim; and jobs where the last-minute offer of a shift can never be turned down, because there is no guarantee of the next. These employment models have served to profit from workers’ labour while withholding security, and are largely a return to the piece-work associated with the beginnings of the industrial revolution. This heightened level of competition has worked to individualise the task of building a secure life, driving down wages and conditions.

Worryingly, our research has found that insecurity is no longer confined to the so-called ‘gig economy’—rather, it charts an increasing trend of ‘Uberisation’ across childcare, the hospitality sector, and even hair and beauty. Meanwhile, the proliferation of temporary and zero-hours contracts has also spread from fast-food chains and fulfilment centres into the health and social care sector, and even to previously ‘protected’ middle-class jobs in academia.

Yet while the worsening of living conditions is implicitly recognised by the UK government’s rhetoric of ‘levelling up’, they continue to peddle unemployment as the best metric for the labour market. Never has the old adage—that the best route out of poverty is through work—been less true. New employment models, reduced state support, the continued reduction of public housing stock, and the ongoing concentration of property ownership all feed into the fact that employment no longer equates to security.

Indeed, our data analysis shows that while unemployment may have fallen to historic lows, insecurity has increased by fifty percent since 2005. What’s more, this is compounded by a host of inequalities. Average insecurity among women, for instance, has been significantly greater than that of men, while ethnic minorities have seen a 105 percent increase in insecurity since 2005, compared to 32 percent of white Britons.

Meanwhile, through interviews with workers in affected sectors, we’ve seen the human impact of an insecure livelihood. A sense of constant anxiety is often the direct result of exploitative employment models and, in the most extreme cases, may lead to the very real threat of physical harm.

The era of endemic insecurity is not only unjust and cruel, but also dysfunctional, failing everyone except those at the very top of the ladder. Rather than being plunged into unemployment, an ever-growing portion of society permanently treads water in a pool of insecurity. They are driven to work harder not by the fear of losing a job but by the ongoing precarity of the job they have.

There is a clear relationship between insecurity and trade union power—sectors with higher unionisation, we found, are often those with the lowest insecurity scores. Although there’s evidence of both implicit and explicit anti-union behaviour from employers, there’s also increasing trends of workers beginning to organise themselves around the new shape of our economy.

We need to draw upon a combination of worker organising, legislative change, and strategic litigation (such as the recent challenges to Uber) to help lift the veil of ‘progress’ represented by ‘high employment’, and remember that the only reliable protection against the power of capital is the collective power of workers.