A job can be open to everyone and still be beyond someone’s reach. If taking it requires childcare they cannot afford, or a journey they cannot pay for until the first wage arrives, the invitation leaves them with a problem rather than a way forward.
That gap deserves more attention whenever we talk about people taking responsibility for their lives. Responsibility involves choices, but choices have conditions. It is easy to overlook those conditions when they have already been met in our own lives.
8AM Media reports that UNESCO has linked the eradication of poverty with equal opportunities. The report’s central proposition invites a practical test: when we say someone has an opportunity, do we mean they are permitted to try, or that they have a reasonable chance of making use of it?
There is a difference, and much ordinary life happens inside it.
Consider a training place offered to a parent whose working hours change each week. The place may be valuable. The parent may want it very much. Neither resolves the clash between attending and earning enough to keep the household going. Describing the offer as available tells us remarkably little about whether it can be taken up.
Of course, no arrangement can remove every difficulty, and equal opportunities cannot promise equal results. People differ in what they want, what they do and what they are prepared to risk. Those differences matter. But they are a poor reason to stop examining obstacles that have little to do with willingness or ability.
This has consequences closer to home than an international declaration. Anyone recruiting, arranging training or setting working hours makes decisions about who can realistically participate. A little flexibility may involve inconvenience. Refusing it may also involve a cost, borne by somebody who has less room to absorb it.
There is something troubling about praising determination while leaving avoidable obstacles untouched. It allows the person making the offer to feel generous and the person unable to accept it to feel at fault.
Before judging why an opportunity was missed, it is worth looking at what accepting it would actually have required. Sometimes the useful work begins there, with the timetable, the fare, or the wait for that first wage.