Work in Challenging and Uncertain Times

The Changing Employment Relationship

Patricia Leighton, Tui McKeown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000044300
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This book was written as the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic began to have a devastating effect on employment across the globe. The crisis has served to highlight many deepseated, often longstanding challenges to employment relationships. These include uncertainties and fears about the impact of technological advances, concerns about safety and wellbeing and controversies around emerging business and employment models. It is difficult to avoid the fear that the combination of these and other practices will lead to a 'race to the bottom'. The book calls for a radical rethink and reassessment of the core values underlying employment relationships.

In Work in Challenging and Uncertain Times, the authors take a refreshingly realistic view of how contemporary work relationships are managed and look to how they will need to change in the future. Some key questions are posed, such as 'who is the employer in complex skills supply chains?'; 'how do we ensure a skilled workforce in a context of fragmentation and increasing individualization?'; 'in a context of AI, robots etc., what does it mean to be human?' and 'how do we achieve change and improvement'?

Based on extensive research presented in an accessible and engaging style, the book provides insights valuable to students of employment relationships, HRM and employment law as well as to practitioners and policy-makers. It draws on a range of academic disciplines and thoughts from interviews with key practitioners and commentators on workplace as well as students.

1

SETTING THE SCENE

Dark forebodings

Introduction

This book is concerned with how work relationships are changing. The focus is the workplace, or more accurately, the place where work is performed. Traditional ways of working, including that of the traditional linear employment relationship of employer and employee is being radically affected by a series of developments. These are impacting on a diverse range of topics from how work is actually being performed and by whom, how skills are accessed, the relationship between work and personal lives, and how support facilities are provided to both the suppliers of work and those undertaking it.

As an example of change, we have seen many new business models and business practices emerging and expanding in recent years. The new business models have major implications for employment relationships. They are often multinational, are complex and have spearheaded the use of digital technology, including platform and ‘gig working (Mandl, 2019), arguably, the employment equivalent of ‘just in time’ supply chains. More long-established complexities derive from business practices such as outsourcing for skills, including cross border; and the growing importance of intermediaries in skills supply, mainly through employment agencies. In most economies we have also seen increased worker autonomy, not just as a consequence of the growth in self-employment but also through many employees also wanting more control of their lives, such as through various forms of flexible working (see for example Kelliher & de Menezes, 2019; Lake, 2016; Ramsdal, 2016). People as well as businesses/employers are changing.

The development of using new business models and practices are driven not only with the aim of reducing costs but also to off-load risks. In the platform/gig working situation the business generally retains the role of the employer though on a somewhat remote basis with much of the control of work being done digitally. Businesses use contracts to ensure many of the costs and liabilities are borne by the worker. In the outsourcing/intermediation model the organisation benefitting from work is not the workers’ employer. Usually the employer is the outsourced to company or the agency. Here the locus of control and responsibility is often obscure or disputed. But taken together, these developments have led not just to increased complexity, but also to the fragmentation of work and marginalisation of many workers. These dual drivers are producing profound challenges where questions of effective management, especially human resource management is concerned. In addition, there are questions of business accountability and efficient and fair systems of reward and protections which are increasingly difficult to answer. One of the key questions posed by this book is the role and effectiveness of work regulation itself.

What is actually changing?

While there is broad agreement that we are facing major changes in employment relationships, there is much less consensus as to both the pace of change and its extent (see for example Barley, Bechky & Milliken, 2017; OECD, 2019). In part, this is because employment patterns and practices do vary considerably around the globe. It is inevitable, therefore, that not only will change in areas such as technology impact differently but that social, organisational and individual responses to change will also vary considerably. It was to get a real sense of how changes were perceived and responded to that we interviewed experts in the field drawn from different backgrounds and locations. Their insights appear throughout the book.

However, we suggest that there are important commonalities in some of the changes, and the full implications of these will be explored in subsequent chapters. We collapse these commonalities into three key considerations.

The first is the composition of the workforce in most developed economies. This is a dimension of the workforce that almost universally has seen significant increases in the numbers of female workers entering the workforce and concomitant rise in the use of access to flexible working arrangements, such as homeworking, flexi-hours, and job sharing as established norms of a working life (OECD, 2019; Eurofound, 2015; Working Families, 2019, 2019a).

There is also the common pattern of workers remaining economically active far longer, with some countries seeing working lives extended to individual participation well into their 70s or later. This may be in part due to economic necessity, from pressure on retirement pensions, but also as part of ‘active ageing programmes’ (Earl et al., 2017; OECD, 2019). One of our interviewees saw the increased employment of older people as a key trend. She said:

It is vital that we make the best use of age-wisdom, experience and value. It is the ‘human dimension’ of the circular economy. It will be the result of combining re-training and the experience/wisdom of a mature worker. But how will these senior citizens be re-integrated into the workforce and under what employment regime-I hope it is not yet more precarious work!

(Dr Joanna Drake, Deputy Director, DG Environment, European Commission)

The extension of workforce group participation has also seen other populations – such as people with disabilities, while still generally under-represented, better able to access and sustain work in many countries (WHO, 2015). Yet another dimension is added with the fact that, internationally, most workforces increasingly contain migrants and a range of ethnic groups, adding considerably to the diversity of the working population (OECD, 2019b).

These changes provide the backdrop to an issue we will explore in detail in this book, the apparently limited effect of measures, both legal and practice orientated, to improve the generally disadvantaged position of these groups. Why, with all the resources, campaigns, legislation and case law has change generally been so slow? (GEO, 2019; IES, 2017; Leighton, 2004; Sargeant, 2017).

It is a question further compounded by the distinct changes in the bases from which people work – with recent growth in a wide variety of autonomous forms of working such as freelancing and independent professional (IPro) working (Brinkley, 2016; ILO, 2019, 2019a; McKeown, 2015; Nye, 2016; OECD, 2019a) and some evidence of new forms of collaborative working (Mandell, Keast & Chamberlain, 2017). These groups have different and distinctive motivations and expectations of work. As one of our interviewees said:

Self-employment will continue to grow, especially now with technological advances and it is very attractive to various traditionally disadvantaged groups such as those with disabilities, older people and others who find working autonomously better than being an employee. If people want to be self-employed, they will be.

(Simon McVicker, Policy Director, IPSE, UK)

However, we need to note that many of those making up this increasingly diverse workforce also suffer inequalities, including relatively low pay and insecurities. There sometimes appears to be a trade-off demanded between working more autonomously and sacrificing financial and other benefits? This is a matter we shall return to later in this chapter as well as in detail in Chapters 4 and 8.

The second basic issue is the notion of support structures. Here, we have seen decline, though by no means extinction, of the organisations and structures that have traditionally provided direction, policy development and support for those at work. Globally, it is suspected that around two thirds of states still ban trade unions and an even higher number violate the right to strike. The decline is evidenced in a variety of ways. For instance, there has been a general decline in the membership of trade unions and in collective bargaining, especially outside the public sector – arguably caused by increasing work fragmentation and the rise of autonomous forms of working (Eurofound, 2016; Kaufman & Bennet, 2017; Risak & Dullinger, 2018). As one of our interviewees said:

The rise of ‘individualism’ is a huge cultural shift in many countries, maybe replaced by tribalism in, say, sport, politics and campaigning, coupled with a rejection of traditional notions of ‘society’. And yet we still need support structures, including for the self-employed, to avoid isolation, and we need to find new ways to do this.

(Sarah Veale, Head of Equality and Employment Rights, Department at the Trades Union Congress)

At the same time, the organisations and structures providing support and influencing the providers of work (employers etc.), rather than the suppliers of it (workers) appear to also have become more powerful (de Stefano, 2016). One result is that international organisations, largely representing the business community, such as the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank are also more powerful. This has to be set into the wider context of the effects of globalisation (Stilglitz, 2017) and the dominance of multi-national companies. Some lay the blame at the door of capitalism (Huws, 2019) and raise questions about whether reform is possible.

The third area of commonality is found in consideration of the drivers of changes at work where most agree that this will be and already is the result of dramatic technological advances (Gratton, 2011). World Economic Forum Chair Edgar Schwab (2017) refers to these changes as the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. While there is general agreement as to the depth and breadth of technological change, the writers and researchers in this area generally tend to fall along a future characterised as a utopian to dystopian continuum. It is a continuum which attempts to capture the potential outcomes for the millions whose work will be influenced by artificial intelligence (AI) or robots (see for example Manyika et al., 2016).The mixed nature of these outcomes is reflected in predictions of major work losses for low skilled workers, along with many self-employed, coupled with increasing opportunities for the high skilled – but all agree that one common feature is that there are also many uncertainties (Degryse, 2016; Eichorst, 2017). The positive side of these sentiments were expressed by one of our Australian interviewees in terms of:

As a result of flexible working, there is a strong demand for ensuring that people are provided with the right workplace technology that enables them to work effectively while away from the office. This includes appropriate communication tools such as Skype for Business, cisco videoconferencing, appropriate computers that allow for immediate secure Wi-Fi connection and connection to all workplace systems, technology mobility – allowing employees to bring and work from their own devices and telecommunication solutions that allow employees to be contactable without using their personal mobile phone or having a deskphone. This in turn will allow employees to work effectively and mirror their working environment outside the workplace and work as productively as they would in the office, while remaining contactable.

(Mr Darren Peiris, Head of Talent, Australia for KraftHeinz)

These sentiments are counterbalanced in the views of one of the Australian postgraduate students we interviewed who suggested that:

The modern workplace has considerably less well-defined boundaries between ‘at work’ and ‘at home’, requiring employees in many positions to treat their mobile phone as a conduit to the office. I have, amongst family and friends, noticed that it is commonplace for casual workers to have their hours adjusted, or be required to ‘log on’ or to be called into work at short notice.

(Masters Student, Monash University, Australia)

Some controversies

The issue of technological change has probably generated the most controversy, not least about the practical impact of change. Sceptics argue that technological advances are often untested or will fail or at least will inevitably meet considerable resistance and that they have been exaggerated (Gould-Davies, 2017). However, some see work, as we know it dramatically changed. Utopian proponents highlight the opportunities that will open up while dystopian views see major dangers, such as mass unemployment, ever-growing inequalities, and the collapse of social structures (Jayakumar & Goh, 2017). Other commentators express scepticism about both responses, and doubt even the supposed efficiencies it will produce (Artificial Intelligence Index, 2018). Yet others highlight the controversies, including an outpouring of litigation recently generated by the relatively limited use of digital platforms in order the access and direct work, typically but by no means exclusively for low skilled work, such as taxi driving and delivery work (Hill, 2015; Leighton, 2016).

The rise of the digital platform as the basis for mediating the relationships of work is a specific feature of this book. There are a number of reasons for this. Businesses that use digital platforms not only provide work on a new basis, but also take pride in being ‘disruptive’ in aiming to undermine established, say, taxi services and have characterised the drivers as ‘small businesses’ simply using the platform as an agency for ‘riders’ (passengers) until challenged through litigation. They tend to resist any form of regulation, even where it is designed to provide safety for both ‘riders’ and other road users (Leighton, 2016; Lobel, 2017). Other platforms aim to connect work seekers with work providers (TaskRabbit and Upwork for example). However, the use of platforms is not confined to less skilled work. Platforms are extensively used in professional work settings – such as to provide online medical advice and prescriptions, such as PushDoctor, Teladoc, Clinniq, etc.

It is, arguably, not so much the use of the technology as such but the way it impacts on the very core of our traditional employment relationships and practices that we suggest will likely have most effect on what has been seen as ‘typical’ or ‘standard’ work relationships.

We will ask a number of questions to investigate a range of issues such as:

• Where people are employed and deployed through intermediation, especially digital platforms and perhaps then subject to a ‘chain’ of digital organisations to undertake work, how are these relationships analysed and responded to?

• What is the nature and role of the ‘employer’ anyway – who are they today and how does this affect the expectations we have of all at work? (Prassl, 2016).

• How do we then define and regulate employment relationships, already, as we shall see, subject to considerable ambiguity and controversy in a ‘non-digital world’ (Drahokoupil & Fabo, 2019; Lobel, 2017)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1 Setting the scene: dark forebodings
• 2 Voices from the past
• 3 Gameplayers and stakeholders
• 4 Fragmentation, inequalities and tensions: how are organisations responding?
• 5 Skills, training and development: opportunities or crisis?
• 6 Working well? The importance of health and wellbeing at work
• 7 Regulating employment relationships
• 8 ‘So what to do?’
• Index