Contemporary Issues in Work and Organisations

Actors and Institutions

Russell Lansbury, Anya Johnson, Diane van den Broek, Russell Lansbury, Anya Johnson, Diane van den Broek, Russell D. Lansbury, Russell D. Lansbury, Anya Johnson, Diane van den Broek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138341937
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429801440
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In a complex and interconnected world, work and organisations are rapidly changing. This book addresses key emerging issues by adopting an imaginative and innovative approach. Its comprehensive coverage on work and organisations aim to:

• provide understanding of the external forces and institutions that are changing workplaces and organisations;
• examine how organisations are being managed from within and how this reshapes the way individuals and groups relate to each other, whether they be employers, employees, independent professionals or contingent workers; and
• integrate these two perspectives to show how both internal and external forces are interconnected and influence each other.

By combining theory and case studies, the book illuminates how ideas and concepts can be applied to work and organisations in a variety of contexts.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Part I

Identifying the Changing Contours of Work

Introduction

Diane van den Broek

This opening section of the book aims to outline and identify broad trends occurring within and around work and organisations. As such, the chapters in this section move us upwards around the dynamism surrounding industrial relations, gig work, gendered labour, migrant work and climate change. While each chapter tackles different aspects of work and organisation in these broad areas, taken together these chapters weave a strong and critical narrative about the changing context of contemporary work. They not only identify the broad shifts occurring in contemporary work, but they also suggest useful directions for positive reform in each of the areas analysed.

In the opening chapter, Wright and Lansbury develop a framework to explain continuity and change at work, focusing particularly on the institutions, policies and norms that govern employment relations. Their proposal for a ‘dynamic work systems’ approach helps us to analyse workplace changes in an international and comparative context. The chapter opens by identifying five key changes in the nature of work and employment relations in Australia and other similar economies. First, there has been a shift from a pluralist to a unitarist form of employment relations in which employers have maintained dominance over trade unions. Second, greater market competition has opened opportunities for organisations to pursue cost efficiency and flexibility resulting in more short-term and precarious employment relationships with a substantial increase in ‘non-standard’ employment contracts such as temporary and fixed-term arrangements. The decline of employment in more traditional industries, such as manufacturing, has also stimulated the growth of more unstable employment relations as workers in the ‘new economy’ are more likely to be independent contractors rather than regular employees.

The chapter highlights that while employers drive flexibilities around non-standard arrangements, some initiatives can enable workers to achieve greater balance in their work and non-work commitments. The burden of family-care responsibilities however does not fall equally but continues to lie with women who seek employment contracts that accommodate familial responsibilities. Therefore, potential gains are not distributed equally throughout the labour force. The chapter argues that static theories are no longer able to help us understand the curious mix of convergence, divergence and converging divergence of ‘rules’ that govern employment relations. The influence of national, industry or transnational context in which employment relationships are situated is built into the dynamic framework presented here and this provides a strong basis to account for the possibility of both change and continuity.

In the following chapter, Veen, Oliver, Goods and Barratt outline the disruptive impact of technology on the world of work. Setting the historical context from early stages of capitalism and factory systems the authors highlight the continuities of ‘disruption’. However, the impact of new digital technologies in the twenty-first century continues to attract considerable disagreement about the nature and benefits of change for work and workers. The digitally enabled ‘gig’ economy described around ‘platform’, ‘sharing’, ‘crowd-based’, ‘on-demand’ or ‘gig’ work has underscored the exponential growth of digital platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit, Uptasker, Uber and many others. These ‘digital infrastructures’ act as important intermediaries which intervene to disrupt the status-quo of existing industries (in this case the taxi industry).

Building on some of the concepts presented in the opening chapter, the discussion turns to the fate of ‘traditional’ employment relationships. What are the implications of these fundamental shifts in the way technology reshapes the nature of the work; what might be the regulatory treatment of these forms of work; the ethical dilemmas that present themselves; and the implications of digitally enabled ‘gig’ work for individuals, and society more broadly.

As the chapter shows, the realities are that gig work does not easily fit within existing employment law with regulatory frameworks failing to keep pace with the nature and implications of these new forms of work. This also raises ethical challenges about the potential to develop a regulatory framework that will integrate the benefits of innovation without eschewing equity and fairness. Including two vignettes illustrating work at Uber Eats and Deliveroo which provide some interesting insights about the costs and benefits of gig work, the chapter helps us to grapple with the deep complexities and lived experience of gig work. As the chapter concludes: there is no doubt that ‘behind Uber is an army of other tech companies seeking to apply the same methodology to other services and products’. Given these opportunities, the regulation of gig work requires an understanding of the nature of the work itself, as well as a clear picture of who the important stakeholders are in the employment relationship and what ethical judgements can be utilised to ensure that such work is both sustainable and equitable to those undertaking the work.

The next chapter, which reviews the life cycle of women’s employment in Australia, tackles some equally complex global developments relating to women’s attachment to the labour force over the past four decades. Just as technologies can serve to divide and distribute work inequitably, so too is gender an important factor which intensifies inequities in the labour market. This chapter by Baird and Heron identify three interconnected aspects of these inequalities including working hours, pay and superannuation.

While global policies and targets for women’s labour force participation sets the scene for the chapter, the discussion highlights that women’s work life cycles are important caveats to any analysis. The chapter drills down into four specific phases in women’s working lives including: education and early career; work and motherhood, work and child caring, and mature age work and care. As the authors note, each of these phases are associated with ‘inequality markers’ which produce and perpetuate employment and income gaps between men and women.

As the chapter highlights, despite the benefits to the national economy, Government policies in Australia have often had ‘counteractive effects’ by both encouraging and discouraging ‘secondary’ earners, mostly mothers in paid work. While childcare and paid parental leave policies may encourage women into paid work, Australia’s ‘quasi-joint family tax system’ results in high marginal tax rates on family benefits with a negative impact on women’s paid work engagement. Therefore, while far more women are participating in the workforce after having children, strong gender norms governing the division of paid and unpaid labour, entrench inequities.

Similarly, 46% of employed women work part-time compared to 17.6% of men. While such flexibility may be welcome after maternity leave, ‘flexism’ (the negative repercussions of accessing flexible working options) do have a negative impact on career: ‘32% of mothers who had returned to work said that their prospects were worse when they returned to work than they had been before the birth of their baby’ and only 33% had returned to their previous employer and position with their previous job conditions intact.

The picture for mature age women is equally complex. Indeed, as the authors show, the inequality markers of reduced working hours and pay cumulatively result in women’s reduced access to superannuation which becomes crucial they move towards retirement age. As such, while women enter the labour market with higher levels of educational attainment, over time these advantages are diluted by inequality markers which entrench inequality. As the chapter identifies, without greater focus on the widening care gap and the systematic undervaluation of women’s work, these inequality markers will continue.

While the previous chapter addressed inequality based on gender profile, van den Broek and Groutsis’s chapter focuses on inequalities as they relate to migrant work. Analysing the role of skilled migration in Australia, this chapter mounts a critique of concepts such as the boundaryless and protean career widely popularised within management and career discourse, by highlighting the considerable organisational dependencies that skilled migrants face when employed on temporary and/or sponsored visa arrangements.

As the chapter details, while global migration has remained relatively constant over the decades, the type of migration flows has changed fundamentally. Within Australia for example, the take-up of permanent employer-sponsored visas grew exponentially (1853% between 1995/6 and 2011/2) and temporary employer-sponsored visas grew by 548% during this period. Taking a multi-level analysis, the chapter details significant national, institutional and organisational boundaries that erode career autonomy and opportunity for skilled migrants. The authors point to meso-level career boundaries in the example of sponsored migrant nurses directed into less desirable industrial and geographic locations, such as rural and remote locations and in the aged-care and mental-health sectors where career progression is limited. Such downward mobility can be reinforced by lack of information and representation, as is their dependence on maintaining their employment relationship to retain employment and gain residency rights. The second, macro-level, career boundary comes in the form of professional bodies that restrict migrant’s access to positions representative of their skills and qualifications. In spite of Australia’s continued reliance on skilled migrants to address chronic skills gaps, under-employment within this group remains a significant issue. For example, the chapter notes that figures estimate that anywhere from over 20% to over 40% of skilled migrants moving to Australia fail to gain entry to a position representative of skills and qualifications within their first six months of arrival. The chapter mounts a strong theoretical critique of both the boundaryless and protean career concepts thereby questioning the idea that workers (like capital) can wander the globe agentic and empowered to engage their skills without dependencies. It also re-establishes the primacy of organisations and institutions in shaping migrant worker experiences.

The final chapter in this section on climate change by Wright tackles an impending crisis that will affect all types of workers, organisations and economies. As this chapter shows, there are different future scenarios of climate response and implications for industries, communities and workers. These include: adopting a ‘business as usual’ approach, adopting a ‘green’ economy approach; or finally a ‘climate mobilisation’ strategy to manage entrenched fossil-fuel based economic expansion. This chapter interrogates the organisational and work implications of these different scenarios. The first scenario is pumped up by political coalitions of convenience including global resource companies, industry associations, workers and trade unions from key extractive industries. These groups’ response to climate change is to campaign against proposals for carbon regulation.

The second response supports technological and entrepreneurial innovation to create a carbon market. Encapsulated by Richard Branson’s view that ‘our only option to stop climate change is for industry to make money from it’ puts climate change as both a risk and an opportunity to be exploited. For companies such as Virgin, Walmart, GE, Nestlé and Unilever, such corporate environmentalism presents corporate self-regulation, innovation and technology as the answer to the climate crisis.

Finally, and in contrast to a ‘business as usual’ and ‘green economy’ approach to the climate crisis, the chapter presents ‘climate mobilisation’ as a third climate response that represents a more critical approach to business and economics. Examples of this response include Greenpeace’s occupation of oil rigs in the Arctic; UK group Plane Stupid’s protests at London’s Heathrow Airport over the climate impact of global aviation and indigenous communities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) opposing the US government’s construction of new oil pipelines. As the chapter concludes, much change needs to take place to overturn established understandings of organisations and work to avoid ‘system-wide breakdowns’. Future scenarios, which present the collapse of work and organisations as we currently understand them, make this chapter an important metaphor of the canary in a coal mine warning of impending danger. The ultimate challenge is then to heed the warnings before it is too late.

Taken together the chapters in this section provide an important roadmap which identifies the broad changes taking place within and around work. It presents a context by which to further analyse the continuities and change that are shaping contemporary work. While broad in focus, these chapters open to the next section which details how organisations and workers navigate and respond to the changing contours of work analysed here.

References

Neubacher, A. (2012) Interview with Richard Branson: “Climate Change Is a Huge Opportunity”, Spiegel International. 21 June . Available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/richard-branson-discusses-climate-change-business-opportunities-a-839985.html

1 A dynamic work systems approach for analysing employment relations

Chris F Wright and Russell D Lansbur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: Identifying the Changing Contours of Work
• PART II: Navigating the changing contours of work: The role of collective actors
• PART III: Integrating the changing contours of work within organisations
• PART IV: Reflections on work and organisation
• Index