We hope you’re staying hydrated through these record-breaking temperatures May has brought us!

This month, we’re shining a light on some uncomfortable truths about power and pay in the UK’s lowest-paid sectors. Our colleagues in the Resolution Foundation have worked with portfolio company Organise to publish new research on what it really feels like to have no power over your pay and conditions. We dig into the findings and look at what they mean for founders and investors building in this space.

We’re also delighted to announce our investment in Blend, a microlearning platform bringing genuinely useful training to young workers in hospitality and beyond.

This month has also brought headlines on the state of the labour market for young people, a topic we hope to revisit later this summer.

Until next month,
Aish

Spotlight: Worker Power

This month, the Foundation published Take it or leave it, the third in a series of briefing notes on precarious work supported by Unbound Philanthropy. The research focuses on the balance of power between workers and employers in cleaning, hospitality and warehousing; three sectors that, between them, employ around 2.1 million people in the UK.

Collective bargaining has collapsed in parts of the UK’s labour markets where it may be needed most. Over the past two decades, the share of workers covered by a collective agreement has fallen from 50% down to 40% nationally, but in hospitality, that figure is just 9%, and in cleaning and maintenance, 14%.

This research sheds light on why individual power is so hard to exercise in these sectors. Researchers found:

• Workers don’t push back because they don’t think it’s possible. Interviews revealed a pervasive belief that challenging pay or conditions simply isn’t an option. The research describes workers who have internalised low power as ‘just how it is’, and who feel replaceable in ways that suppress both their voice (raising concerns) and their exit (looking elsewhere).
• The line manager matters as much as the pay packet. While pay tends to be set centrally, non-pay conditions, such as shift allocation, flexible working, and day-to-day accommodation of personal circumstances, sit almost entirely with individual line managers. For workers in these sectors, what makes a job good or bad is often their experience with their immediate manager.
• Training rarely opens doors. Low-paid workers receive very little training in the first place – between 2020 and 2023, only 6% of hospitality workers and 4% of those in warehousing and cleaning received training to prepare them for a future role or promotion. But even where training does happen, workers told researchers it was so specific to their current role that it didn’t translate elsewhere. As a result, many have stopped seeing training as a route to something better.

A new dataset on worker power and Resolution Ventures portfolio company, Organise.

To dig into how workers actually experience this power deficit day-to-day, our researchers partnered with Organise to survey 2,000 of their members working in cleaning, hospitality and warehousing.

Organise is a worker-led campaigning platform with over 1M members, giving people across all sectors and roles the tools, network and confidence to improve their working lives. Members can start campaigns and share information with other workers to improve conditions at work. We’ve backed and invested in Organise because it lowers the barriers to collective action and gives a voice to workers who are often the hardest to reach through traditional organising routes. The platform is also, as this collaboration has shown, a valuable source of insight into the lived experience of precarious work.

The survey findings are sobering.

Around half of hospitality and warehousing workers (47% and 50% respectively) have their pay set unilaterally by their employer, with no negotiation whatsoever. The vast majority (86%) say they want more say over how their pay is set. And yet only 38% say they would push back against unfair pay, either individually or alongside colleagues. A roughly equal share (34%) say they would do nothing at all, or don’t know what they would do. The picture on exit options is just as constrained. Around 62% of respondents said they would find it difficult or impossible to find another job at similar pay in their local area.

This matters beyond the individuals involved. When workers can’t credibly threaten to leave, it weakens the competitive pressure on employers to improve conditions. The research concluded that this is bad for market dynamism (the normal process by which workers moving between employers pushes wages up and conditions forward), and it’s bad for the overall balance of power in these sectors and the labour market at large.

What this means for WorkerTech.

The research discusses technology as an important part of the solution to this imbalance of power – platforms (like Organise) that help workers gain visibility over pay and conditions, find better-matched jobs, and access training beyond what their employer offers. We have backed several companies doing exactly this.

Breakroom, an investment that we recently exited, is a platform that lets workers rate and share information about their employers. When workers know what their peers are paid and how they’re treated at other employers, their sense of what’s possible and what’s fair changes. Blend is tackling the training side of the equation. More on this investment below…

The research is a reminder of the important role companies like Organise, Breakroom and Blend play in our labour market, the impact of visible and invisible power imbalances in low-paid work, and of the scale of what remains to be done. Regulation (through the Employment Rights Act) can set a floor, but it can’t substitute for the informal power that workers in these sectors so often lack. Technology can help fill that gap.

You can read the full briefing note here.

Announcing our investment in Blend 

This month, we are delighted to announce our investment in Blend, a microlearning platform that helps hospitality employers train staff through bespoke, engaging short-form video courses.

Built for the next generation of deskless workers, Blend has already helped brands including SushiDog, Brother Marcus, and Jenki Matcha engage their teams, build confidence and scale successfully. The team has also recently secured a contract to deliver staff training across Wembley and Twickenham stadiums.

The workers who use Blend power large parts of the UK economy. And yet, training in hospitality and events tends to be designed for a different kind of workplace entirely – largely computer-based, text-heavy, and poorly adapted to the rhythms and realities of floor-based, shift-driven work. The consequences are well documented: productivity suffers, and employers face the high turnover rates that have become a defining feature of the sector. For workers, the longer-term cost is just as high. Without training that genuinely builds transferable skills, many remain in low-paid entry-level roles not because they lack motivation to progress, but because they never get the tools to do so. This is seen in many of the examples cited in the Foundation’s research on worker power.

While pay and management quality are clearly central to working lives in these sectors, training matters too – both as a driver of worker confidence and progression, and as a lever employers can actually pull. Blend’s bet is that training delivered in the right format, at the right moment, and genuinely tailored to the job at hand can shift pay trajectories over time, while delivering a clear return to employers through faster onboarding and reduced churn.

In recent months, Blend has brought on six new clients in the last quarter alone and has expanded its course library to include certified compliance and soft skills content.

We are so pleased to be joining a group of aligned investors as Blend enters its next phase of growth, which includes expanding into sectors such as social care, retail and early education, deepening partnerships with major industry players, and launching its Seed raise.

If you would like to find out more, visit Blend’s website.

Other insights from the Resolution Foundation

Housing Outlook for Q2 of 2026 

The private rented sector now houses 12.9 million people (more than double the number in 2000) and has become increasingly a tenure of young families rather than transient twenty-somethings. For lower-paid workers, the picture is particularly bleak: private renters spend on average 35% of their income on housing, well above the 30% affordability threshold, and get less space and poorer quality in return. The freeze on Local Housing Allowance since April 2024 means the gap between housing benefit support and actual rents is approaching record levels; a direct squeeze on the disposable incomes of the lowest-paid.

Social Security across the UK

This is a comprehensive four-country study of how social security has been devolved and localised across the UK. It finds that the picture is more uneven than most people realise, but also less transformative than its advocates might hope. Where differences do exist, however, they can be significant: annual benefit income for otherwise identical low-income families varied by as much as £15,000 between England and Scotland, and by £1,400 within different parts of England alone. For workers in precarious jobs (who can often turn to the welfare system for extra support in times of crisis) where you happen to live can make a very material difference to the safety net available to you.

Latest news

BGV opens applications for their Autumn 2026 programme
Our friends at Bethnal Green Ventures have announced that applications for their Autumn 2026 Tech for Good programme will open this month. BGV is Europe’s leading early-stage tech for good investor – if you’re building something that uses technology to address a significant social or environmental challenge, this is the programme to know about. £60k investment and six weeks of intensive support, with no warm introduction required. https://www.bethnalgreenventures.com/apply

Unrest Impact Investor Office Hours #4
Unrest’s Impact & Investor Office Hours are back for a fourth edition, offering impact founders a direct route into conversations with investors who are actively looking to back purpose-led businesses. Previous participants have raised over £500k through the programme. Apply before the deadline on 5 June 2026. https://www.unrest.world/impact-investor-office-hours

Apply for direct investment from Resolution Ventures 
We accept applications from WorkerTech ventures on a rolling basis. You can book a slot in our office hours for an initial conversation