Social Divisions

Lydia Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317973126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1995. Social Divisions uses a case-study approach to explore the implications of economic decline for social relations, and uncovers the mechanisms by which individuals become vulnerable to job loss and unemployment. It examines the impact of economic change on gender roles and relations, on the structure of work and on the employment prospects for both men and women. This revealing study will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of social change and inequality, gender relations and social policy. It will also be of interest to policy makers and practitioners in related fields.

Chapter One

Introduction¹

The issues

Social class, a concept at the heart of the British sociological tradition, has come under increasing criticism in recent years. Much of this criticism has focused on Marxist approaches, which see class as the motor of world history, and as a basis for collective awareness and emancipation, but disenchantment has now been extended to non-Marxist conceptualizations of class, based on occupational groupings derived from male employment patterns (Holton & Turner 1994). The validity of such groupings arguably has been undermined by changes in the structure of the British economy, the terms and conditions of employment, and the gender composition of the workforce, alongside high levels of male unemployment, all of which constitute a challenge to conventional understanding and representation of social structure. Indications of this challenge may be found in the clusters of literature surrounding debates on employment flexibility, gender and social class, household strategies, and the underclass. Each of these issues points, in a different way, to the inadequacy of full time male employment as the key to understanding and depicting the major social divisions in society.

Changes in the structure and terms of employment – through redundancy, early retirement, fixed-term contracts, self-employment and part-time employment, have eroded the normative status of stable, full-time employment, while high levels and increasing duration of unemployment have led to speculation and debate about a growing underclass. None of these changes is easily incorporated into conventional models of the social structure based on a sole or principal male earner for each household. Nor are the circumstances of a principal earner any longer held to be a valid indicator of the material circumstances of the house-hold, given the growing participation of women in the workforce, as well as evidence of inequity in the distribution of resources within the home.

One analytical response to changing patterns of employment has been to argue for a household-based approach to the examination and representation of social structure, which could incorporate different combinations and types of both male and female employment. It is therefore no surprise that throughout the 1980s there was a growth of research interest in the effects of social and economic change, focusing variously on male unemployment, married women's employment, self-provisioning, informal activity, etc., and taking the household as the unit of investigation. This approach is exemplified by Ray Pahl (1984), and features prominently in the work of Harris et al. (1987), as well as in the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (e.g. Gallie et al. 1993)

The fruits of much research of this kind have been reviewed elsewhere (Morris 1990). One undisputed finding to emerge from the British work to date is that women are not taking over from unemployed husbands as principal earners, and instead of role reversal we have seen a process of social polarization (Pahl 1984:277). Pahl's findings on the Isle of Sheppey show a concentration of opportunities for work in some households, and the total absence of such opportunities from others, confirmed at national level by statistics from the General Household Survey (GHS). It is this polarization of household circumstances which has in part been the stimulus for debate about an emergent underclass, and supplies further support for the view that the household rather than the individual is the appropriate unit of consideration in attempts to trace social structural divisions.

There is a major problem involved in treating the household as a unit, and an alternative approach is implicit in the work of Jan Pahl (1980, 1983). This approach emphasizes inequality within the home, and has more recently been incorporated into a concern with labour market activity (e.g. Morris with Ruane 1989; Vogler and Pahl 1993). This problem aside, the evidence of polarization has been used as one basis for the assertion that social class is no longer the best vehicle for analyzing social structure. Whether a household has any employed members at all is thus argued to be more important than the particular occupational ranking of any one of them (Pahl 1988). Yet the notion of polarization gives us no means of understanding or analyzing the changing terms and conditions of employment, increasing casualization, insecurity and what in Third World economies would be termed “underemployment”. Nor are social class categories particularly helpful in elucidating the incidence and significance of this change. One of the objectives of the research reported here will be to investigate the nature and extent of broken employment. Another focus is the consideration of aspects of the polarization thesis as yet undeveloped.

The pattern of "work-rich" and “work-poor” households (Pahl, 1988) has long been established, but a much less fully explored aspect of the household approach is the question of the permeability of household boundaries; i.e. the extent to which there is dependence upon a movement of goods, services, money and information between households. Research into survival strategies in the Third World or the ghetto has been concerned centrally to document the routinized flow of information and aid across household boundaries (e.g. Lomnitz 1977; Stack 1974). Extra-household linkages have, however, remained an unelabo-rated aspect of the household approach in UK research, although there is sufficient evidence available to suggest that this may represent a worthwhile topic for investigation.

Such linkages introduce yet another dimension to discussions of the representation of social structure. Informal networks of association have been rather more the terrain of anthropologists than of sociologists, and where they do feature in sociology it is usually with reference to some specific aspect of social interaction, rather than in connection with social structural divisions. An exception here is the Cambridge approach to stratification which incorporates patterns of social interaction (see Prandy 1990). Arguably, social networks make manifest a dimension of social structure that is not accessible through either a snapshot analysis of individuals' employment status, or a narrowly defined household perspective. Yet it remains to explore how informal patterns of association interact with other social divisions, and whether they themselves constitute a significant component of structured differentiation.

Several points of enquiry emerge from this discussion; the experience of employment and unemployment, and how they combine in the histories of individuals; the way in which employment and unemployment combine among members of the same household; their interaction with aspects of informal association, notably in job search and mutual aid; and their relationship with the distribution of resources and responsibilities within the home. The present book explores all these issues, and offers an account of the empirical investigation of social divisions based on gender, employment change and informal support. It addresses specific issues related to unemployment and the class structure, flexible working and employment trajectories, gender divisions in the home and the labour market, and the role of informal networks in all of these.

The place

Although addressing a number of issues of general significance, this book is based on an empirical investigation specifically designed to explore the various questions raised above. Hartlepool, with its population of 95,000, represents an extreme case of the social and economic changes that characterized Britain in the 1980s; a town once dominated by male employment in heavy industry has passed through a series of transitional stages to emerge with a local economy weakened in every sphere. There have been shifts in emphasis from manufacturing to services, from male employment to female employment, and from full-time to part-time work, while alongside these changes the town has, since 1975, known unremitting increases in unemployment.

The development of Hartlepool from the early 1800s is to be understood partly through its strategic location on the north-east coast of England. From about 1830 it became established as a port for the export of coal, and soon developed a thriving shipyard. Metal manufacture grew up as a natural adjunct of these activities and thus the town and its workforce acquired their distinctive characteristics; skills built around male employment in construction, engineering and the steel industry, supported by women's domestic services and associated with a rigid sexual division of labour.

The decline of the town began in the late 1950s with the run-down of shipbuilding, an industry that disappeared completely from Hartlepool with the closure of the last shipyard in the early 1960s. Unemployment in 1962 reached 15%, although there was some respite before the onset of the recession of the late 1970s. Higher levels of public spending, a growth in service sector jobs, and the attraction of some new manufacturing industries all contributed to a rise in employment opportunities for women, previously low by national standards, while also helping to maintain male employment levels. Opportunities for men were buoyed up additionally by construction work on the town centre redevelopment, the completion of a nuclear power plant, and a nascent oil and gas industry.

By the late 1970s all such employment had dwindled, added to which the restructuring of the British Steel Corporation meant the elimination of production from Hartlepool. Between 1976 and 1981 the total number of jobs in the town was reduced by 19%, with the loss falling most heavily on male workers. One obvious result was the very high level of male unemployment in the town, which at the time of writing stood at about 20%, but there have been related changes in the nature and duration of such employment as is available, in employers' methods of recruitment, and in differential access to work opportunities.

Insight into the nature and experience of this change was gained in the early stages of research for this book, via life histories collected from local workers at different stages of their careers. The town has long been characterized by a male workforce in possession of a complex of complementary skills, variously acquired through work for the Merchant Navy, the steelworks and the shipyards. There were “jobs for life” in heavy industry but it was also possible to craft a career by way of an uninterrupted series of contracts farmed out informally through the pubs, clubs and union offices of Hartlepool. Now, previously secure jobs are increasingly likely to end in redundancy, while the constant flow of contract work has long since ceased as opportunities in construction, maintenance, haulage and transport have fallen off with the general industrial decline of the town. There have also been changes in the terms of employment related not only to decline, but also to the restructuring of such opportunities as remain.

Employment in the oil and gas industry in the 1970s gave a short-term boost to construction. The men recruited commanded high wages and were able to move from site to site during the construction of the large-scale petrochemical complex on the north bank of the Tees. This work sustained them in continuous employment, as they ran one contract on from another without a break. Indeed, many men were leaving secure employment, attracted by the high levels of pay, and swept along on a tide of local euphoria. As this source of employment became exhausted, construction workers turned increasingly to contracts from abroad and off the Scottish coast, but even this source of employment has dwindled.

Not only have opportunities in construction fallen off but changes in the internal organization of large local enterprise has affected the use of contractors for maintenance work. Flexibility in working practice among a core of permanent employees has been negotiated with local unions to keep staff levels to a minimum. “First line” maintenance by this core workforce has increased and the use of outside contractors has been cut. This, of course, heightens competition between contracting firms, as one man explained:

The work's getting harder to come by now for the decent firms because no-one can afford them. They'll get in these cowboy outfits, you know, the six-week wonders, in and out in no time. The big companies and the little ones are cutting each other's throats for the work, and of course it all comes back on the men – half of them are on the fiddle anyway.

This last comment is a reference to employers' practice of offering spasmodic employment at poor pay to those prepared to use such work to supplement their benefit claims.

A similar story was told of changes in transport. One man had worked as a driver with a private bus company contracted to carry workers to the construction complex on the Tees:

In the end the numbers had dropped off and the companies didn't want to pay the prices the big firms were asking, so they went to the smaller companies who were prepared to undercut. They could do this because they'd use mostly part-time workers, or self-employed (i.e. off the books) and just call them in when they wanted them… If you want the work you have to be prepared to take what's on offer, and if you won't accept then you don't get the work.

Large employers have increased their use of owner-drivers as a cheap alternative to running their own transport section, while haulage companies are themselves reorganizing, increasing their use of contractors as a means of trimming the core workforce to a minimum and hoping to maintain profitability and viability. One driver explained a new system of recruitment and style of employment which was also the practice of others in the town:

Our firm have just brought in a new idea. They ask round their workers when they want someone in to cover a holiday period, take them on, then as long as they're laid off one day in ten weeks they can keep it up indefinitely but still drop them without notice or compensation … The other thing they'll do the same way is to get to know men on the dole, bring them in cash in hand for a job, then drop them when it's done.

The former pattern of employment has also been reported for large retail stores in the town.

A slightly different example of casual employment is the use by some companies of direct, informal contact with former employees who will be called in on a temporary basis to complete sporadic orders. The British Steel Corporation (BSC) pipe mill provides an instance of this, all that was left of the Hartlepool steel industry:

They kept about 50 men as core workers, to keep the place ticking over when there were no orders in. When an order came in they'd bring the old pipe men in under a short-term contract. The mugs then have to go back with no protection, no holiday pay, no sick scheme and no pension fund. They work for so many weeks then they're laid off again. The unions hands are tied now – they've no muscle, there are so many on the dole.

This practice by BSC seems to parallel employment patterns established by other companies in the town, and not only employers of male labour. The General Electric Company (GEC) once had a significant workforce in Hartlepool and introduced a twilight shift employing women part-time in the evening. At the time this was a common, now well-documented means of tapping an otherwise unavailable labour source, and expanding capacity without increasing space and equipment. In periods of economic decline this strategy serves a slightly different purpose; in the wind-down of production at GEC a system of temporary employment was maintained, drawing in former employees for short periods of time to meet specific orders:

It was sort of a specialized job; I'd trained with them to do it. I finished to have our first baby, then they'd call me back when they needed me. Four times I went back like that. The last time was just for eight weeks for a special order, and that was made clear at the start… At first it was they didn't have enough space for all the workers they wanted, but at the end it was there wasn't the work to keep you on all the time.

Although part-time factory employment has, with closures, become increasingly scarce, there has been a growth of part-time service work -bar maids, shop assistants, cleaners, etc. Part of this growth is probably attributable to the wish to reduce employee security and keep employment and dismissal costs low. In fact a number of women reported a reduction in their working hours to below the level at which workers' rights are eroded and employers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Cambridge Studies in Work and Social Inequality
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The social segregation of the long-term unemployed
• 3 Unemployment and informal support
• 4 Employment histories and the concept of the underclass
• 5 Women's employment histories (Sarah Irwin and Lydia Morris)
• 6 Domestic labour and employment status
• 7 Household finance management and labour market change
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Appendix III
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index