You’re reading Life-Work Balance, a series aiming to redirect our total devotion to work into prioritising our personal lives.
Self-care! Treat yo’ self! Down time! Digital detox! Yoga retreat! Therapy!
These buzzwords have become part and parcel of the everyday vernacular. With more focus than ever on personal wellbeing, it’s easy to get sucked into the individualistic approach to holistic health.
But what’s often missed in these conversations is the material conditions of each individual – how can people on low pay, from marginalised backgrounds, perhaps with precarious citizenship, enjoy these same luxuries?
The activities that are touted as propelling people out of burn out, mental lows, and the drudgery of every day life, are inaccessible to large swathes of people – particularly women and people of colour.
Without money, these things are seldom possible. With so much wealth inequality, the pay gap then becomes a problem of wellness.
The pandemic revealed in the most immutable way how poverty affects health outcomes – the first to succumb to coronavirus were mostly racialised people living in disadvantaged areas – but poor people were susceptible to ill health long before.
Consider how those living in areas of high pollution have worse asthma attacks – a young Black girl with asthma even became the first to have pollution listed as a cause of death.
Children’s lungs in the most polluted parts of Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest London boroughs, were found to be 10% smaller than expected for their age. And as a double blow, rich people are more likely to drive through and cause pollution in the areas most occupied by poorer groups.
These people can’t simply move out and into areas of better air quality. These individuals – while on some of the lowest wages in the country – can’t mitigate the circumstances they find themselves in.
So when reports of the pay gap widening between bosses and workers come through (with CEOs and executives pocketing £2.69m, 86 times more than the average worker), it’s difficult not to be infuriated.
When you consider the squeeze of the cost of living crisis, it’s especially difficult to not be aggravated by these obscene numbers.
For Remi*, 31, who works in admin at a largely successful company, the discrepancy between what she earns and her colleagues feels particularly egregious. She can’t relate to their lifestyles.
“I’m a Black woman and I definitely do not earn as much as some of my colleagues,” she tells HuffPost UK. “I work just as hard and the only difference is that I’m a different gender and race.
“To hear others speak about getting a house or holidays when I’m trying to save as much as possible is very disheartening. I will have to work twice as hard, which is already difficult during this pandemic and mental health being so low.”
These disadvantages are causing a mental health crises in those who aren’t white or male.
Which is why Mendü, a social enterprise aiming to change mental healthcare and include womxn of colour, was launched.
Creators Regina Zheng and Demi Fortson realised that women of colour like them were being left out of the wellness industry, so they launched Mendü.
“We know that the gender wage gap, coupled with intersecting racial bias in the workplace, means that many womxn of colour are underpaid, and these losses accumulate and grow over time,” Zheng tells HuffPost UK.
“As a result, WoC are less able to accumulate savings, withstand economic downturns, and achieve economic stability.”
All this means that women of colour are one of the most at-risk groups when it comes to poor mental health.
“With increasing cost of living, this puts WoC’s mental health at risk, after a pandemic that relied on them as essential workers in both the UK and US. For us at Mendü, it’s meant that finances has been a topic that is frequently brought up by the audience,” Zheng says.
So, how can people navigate these challenges? After all, they can’t will themselves into being healthier individuals.
Zheng says the onus is on powerful systems to dismantle these inequalities, and we need to amp up the pressure on them.
“Going forward, we need governments and companies to find solutions to the gender wage gap and racial bias in the workplace, otherwise, coupled with the cost of living crisis, we worry that there will be a mental health crisis among the population that was an important pillar in keeping the economy moving forward during the pandemic.”
So lobby your bosses, set up unions, pressure higher-ups to publish pay figures and push for salary transparency. It’s not just your pay packet, but your wellbeing that’s currently taking the hit.
Life-Work Balance questions the status quo of work culture, its mental and physical impacts, and radically reimagines how we can change it to work for us.
