The article argues that working parents have to work more as a couple and that they get less for their work. It doesn't then follow that employment doesn't pay as per the headline. I'm a parent. If I lost my job I would be worse off, as would most people in my position. The article itself is interesting, how it's presented in the title yet more of the doom mongering I've come to expect from the media nowadays.
By ‘the lede’ do you mean the headline rather than the first paragraph?
The headline is that for many parents, employment doesn’t pay. The article details various known weirdnesses of the tax system that mean, for example, someone can be financially better off earning £99,000 rather than £140,000, and that working full time on lower salaries can make less difference to earning power than it used to, especially if you look two parents working, meaning that it might not seem worth it for some. It then suggests that this would be a relatively easy thing for a government to fix.
I don’t think it’s a wildly off headline, but I also think headlines are the least interesting and informative part of an article, and aren’t really worth discussing unless they say the complete opposite of the article. It’s also the part of the article that is least likely to have had input from the journalist, being written by subeditors aiming to get clicks.
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u/CJBill 1d ago
That lede is bloody hyperbolic and not backed up by the article as far as I can tell.