A book on in-work poverty could not be timelier, given the critical juncture at which Europe finds itself in relation to employment policy. It is particularly critical for the conservative continental countries whose choices in terms of the place of low-paid jobs in their economies may be narrowing even further than in the economic downturn experienced in the 1990s. Three such countries (Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands), four if Italy is included as a conservative regime (which it is not in this book), are included in the country chapters presented, along with chapters on Sweden and Finland, Ireland and Britain. The countries are chosen to represent regions rather than regime types, which the editors argue, are not found to be particularly useful in explaining cross-national variation amongst the working poor. This conclusion is supported by the evidence presented in the country chapters, which indicates that, despite the broad commonalities associated with regime types, and some fairly constant factors such as the presence of low pay, being in work and still poor results from very different institutional configurations and patterns of gender relations.

The book follows a familiar format in the published reporting of multi-country research network projects, with country chapters sandwiched between editors’ introduction and conclusion. The country chapters give comprehensible quantitative accounts of national patterns and positions of the working poor, with ample methodological detail, and discussions that enmesh key problematics within the relationship between work and poverty, but also capture and highlight the specificities of these relationships in national contexts. In this way, every chapter provides additional elements for readers to incorporate in research and theory. Inevitably there will be those who wish to contest the measurements used (a poverty measure of 60 per cent of equivalised household income), and there are also the usual cross-national non-comparators in definitions of ‘in work’ for example, or the use of the OECD equivalised scale by most and the McClements scale in the UK, that means that the Swedish, Finnish and UK contributions are slightly at odds with the others. In terms of content and approach, the editors have kept a fairly firm rein on comparability across chapters. Erik Snel et al.’s contribution on the Netherlands is particularly notable in its integration of institutional context and statistical picture. Some others are less strong on policy dimensions, while Sara Connolly's chapter on Britain is an outlier with rather too much contextualisation of general patterns of inequality and description of Labour's welfare to work measures and no discussion of the role of work intensity in in-work poverty. This seems odd given Britain's preponderance of part-time jobs, but is perhaps explained by the data source used (the Family Resources Survey), which also allows discussion of divisions of ethnicity and industrial sector not found in other chapters.

The added value in this volume is found in the comparative analyses undertaken in the first two chapters (on cross-national variation in the ‘faces of in-work poverty’ and then a multi-level analysis of workers’ individual/household characteristics combined with macro data such as union density), and the penultimate chapter (a discussion of policy options). In these chapters, the reader is treated to an exacting synthesis of the descriptive data and institutional contextualisation contained in the country chapters that makes perfect sense in its presentation of the realities but is deeply disheartening in terms of labour market prognoses.

Several contributors refer to B.S. Rowntree's 1901 study (1901/2000), and as the pie charts clearly demonstrate, being ‘in regular work but at low wages’ accounted for over half of those in primary poverty according to his measures. Despite this early empirical evidence and even earlier systems of wage supplementation, when it comes to addressing the enduring problem of poverty, national and supranational policy-makers across the west have clung to the view that work is the best route out of it. What the country contributors to this volume demonstrate is that while low pay is largely a prerequisite for in-work poverty, in isolation, it is neither a guarantee of it, nor a necessarily important target for policy, if tackling poverty is the objective (rather than securing fair wages or improving gender equality for example). In brief, this is because people live in households, and many of the low paid in most of the countries studied do not live in poor households. The gender effect is clear in these cases, as the low paid are mostly women (or young adults) who, it is assumed, pool their incomes with other workers in their households and are thus prevented from experiencing poverty. None of the country chapters refer to any literature concerning the unequal distribution of household income and so readers will have to make up their own minds on the question of how far this assumption limits the more general findings. The other side of this coin is the presentation of evidence across all the countries that in-work poverty is disproportionately a problem experienced by single earner households, whether these be the male breadwinner families which characterise the conservative continental countries and more so ‘familialist’ Italy, lone parents (although not in Sweden) and younger age cohorts in northern Europe where independent living comes earlier. Poverty risks are also higher for atypical workers and those with limited educational qualifications, but the greatest risk is experienced by solo earners in consumer and housing markets shaped by the spending power of dual-earner households.

The policy challenges and conflicts of social objective upon which this book sheds light are fundamental but too often sidelined in UK social policy debate. The most pressing of these is the place of ‘Mcjobs’ (Goos and Manning, Reference Goos, Manning, Dickens, Gregg and Wadsworth2003) in advanced economies since their presence has widespread social and economic implications. For example, in the traditional male breadwinner regimes (and households), ‘boosting multi-earnership’ (see chapter 11) may be a logical step in counteracting the demise of the family wage but at the cost of corralling more women into the ‘precariat’?Footnote ¹ The core of the threats to welfare identified by the contributors may well be located in the age old questions of quality and quantity which frame analysis of divisions of labour, but here they are subject to comprehensive and educative updating, complemented with lucid and measured review. At a time when many of the working poor are likely to become the non-working poor this book is a must read.