In Europe, social exclusion has also been used to refer to a lack of wage-earning employment. In this case, its opposite would not be social participation, but participation in the labour market (although having a job might serve as a proxy indicator for participation in other spheres of life). The third distinction stems from the idea that social exclusion is an extreme form of poverty; those who are excluded would be in the worst situation, the poorest of the poor (Gordon, 1998).