“The social contract has been broken.” You’ll have heard some version of it this summer. Reform say it. The Conservatives say it. In their telling it means too many people are taking out and not putting in, and the people they point at are benefit claimants.

I agree the contract is broken. I want to argue about who broke it.

What the deal was supposed to be

The social contract, as it was sold to my generation, was simple. You work. Work pays enough to live on. If you get ill, or the work disappears, there’s a floor under you, because you paid in when you could.

Every part of that has been quietly rewritten, and not by the people at the bottom.

Fifty years of taking from one side

Prem Sikka set out the numbers in July. In 1975, workers’ share of what the economy produces was 71.9%. By 2025, after fifty years of growth, it was 59%. The real average wage has barely moved since 2008.

Follow that through. Almost a third of universal credit claimants are in work. More than four million jobs pay below the real living wage. Over a million people are on zero-hours contracts, and pay is increasingly “dynamic”, varying from one job to the next and one hour to the next, so workers can’t say what their own income will be. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reckons a couple with two children needs £74,000 a year between them for a socially acceptable minimum standard of living. Millions of working households can’t get near it.

That’s the working side of the contract. People are keeping it. It just doesn’t pay what it promised.

The door is closing at the same time

The standing advice to anyone on benefits is get a job. Look at the jobs market that advice points at. Hiring has stalled, and economists now describe Britain as a low-hire, low-fire labour market: employers reluctant to take people on, reluctant to let people go, vacancies at their lowest in years. If you’re trying to get your first job, or your first job after illness, that’s the door you’re knocking on.

You cannot destroy jobs and demand that more people work. I wrote about that contradiction in July, and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Policy suppresses the number of jobs while ministers demand that more people find one. The social contract talk is the same contradiction, told from the other end.

And the remedy on offer is more taking

Faced with all this, what’s proposed? Reform’s welfare plan would cut disability payments and require long-term unemployed people to do 20 hours of unpaid community work a week to keep their benefits. Twenty hours a week, unpaid, from people the market will not hire.

Meanwhile zero-hours contracts are still defended as flexibility, and the new Employment Rights Act phases in guaranteed-hours rights over years rather than ending the model.

So the same politics that presided over a falling wage share and contracts whose flexibility all runs one way now proposes unpaid labour as the remedy for the people its labour market has no room for. And calls that restoring the contract.

What I see from the training room

I deliver workplace mental health training. The people in front of me are mostly in work, and more and more of what they carry into the room is not clinical, it’s contractual. Job insecurity. Hours that flex against them. Pay that doesn’t stretch to the month’s end. You can teach someone to notice a colleague struggling and start the conversation, and I do. But no coping strategy touches a rent rise, and no breathing exercise fixes a contract that guarantees nothing.

Sikka calls poverty a form of social violence that exhausts people and removes hope. That’s what sits in front of me in training sessions: people in work, doing everything the contract asked of them.

A contract has two sides

The people being told they broke the social contract are the ones still keeping it. They turn up, they work, they apply for the jobs that exist, they care for each other when the system doesn’t.

The other side of the deal walked away decades ago, a percentage point at a time.

If politicians want the contract honoured, the place to start isn’t twenty unpaid hours from the poorest. It’s a wage that pays, a job you can plan a life around, and a floor that holds when your health gives way. That isn’t radical. It’s just the deal as written.

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