What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Future of Work?

Melanie Simms, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526463463, 9781526463456
• eBook ISBN: 9781526481368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"An excellent summary of why and how we work." People Management magazine

What do we know about the current state of work and employment and what does the future of work look like? Professor Melanie Simms provides a far-reaching overview of paid employment in the UK, examining why we work, how we work, and what the future of work will be like with changing demographics and the introduction of modern technologies.

From zero-hour contracts, the gig economy and universal basic income, to automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Simms analyses the most pressing issues facing traditional employment. Before outlining four priority areas where the UK should look to strengthen regulation of in order to face the coming challenges more effectively, but also, so that they benefit workers, as well as employers and managers.

Written by leading social scientists, the What Do We Know and What Should We Do About...? series offers concise, up-to-date overviews of issues often oversimplified, misrepresented or misunderstood and shows you how to enact change.

"Short, sharp and compelling." - Alex Preston, The Observer

"If you want to learn a lot about what matters most, in as short a time as possible, this is the series for you."- Danny Dorling, 1971 Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

1 introduction

What is work?

Work is a far wider concept than simply paid employment. The focus of this book is mainly on paid employment, but there is a fuzzy line between concepts. Even paid employment is not as easy to define as we might at first think. It involves an exchange of labour for some kind of payment, but both parts of that definition are complex. Technically, what is offered by the worker is the capacity to work, rather than the work itself. Workers will make themselves available to the employer for a particular period of time. The job of the employer – usually through managers and control systems – is to ensure that the labour is directed at the activities required, and to an appropriate quality. Workers are people and, as such, have their own capacity to act. They may not do what the employer requires, or they may not do it to the quality needed. This process of overseeing and controlling what workers do as they work is the complex process of management.

The exchange for payment is also less simple than it may at first seem. Workers may exchange their capacity to work for a range of benefits including money, time off, holiday allowances, a pension (wages that will be returned in the future), discounted food in canteens, and a whole host of other possible perks. Most of these are additional benefits to the basic wage, but there is scope for less obviously beneficial exchanges. Many countries now have rules that require most of the payment to be in the form of currency, but there are certainly plenty of examples around the world and from history where workers have been paid in tokens that, for example, can only be exchanged for goods in the company shop.

Both the capacity to work and the payment it is exchanged for are complex ideas. Things get even more blurred when we think about the boundaries between work and non-work activities. Should we include things like work travel as part of our work time that should be compensated? Even if we can sit back on an aeroplane, drink a gin and tonic and watch Netflix? What about time spent commuting to work? And what if we have to buy a uniform or special clothes to wear to work? Every job has fuzzy boundaries, which always introduces the idea that what we choose to define as ‘work’ or even as ‘paid employment’ is contested and always subject to negotiation and renegotiation both at the level of individuals and as a society.

Paid employment is at the centre of our interest here. Of course, there are many forms of work that are unpaid, and these are important to acknowledge. Slavery is an important example. Modern slavery exists in areas such as domestic labour where workers can be brought to the UK to do the childcare and household tasks for a large family, but the terms of the exchange are not freely chosen. Undoubtedly this is work – hard work. The lack of freedom to choose to enter or leave the employment relationship, plus the lack of clear payment for the work done, mean that it falls into a category beyond our consideration here. Private unpaid domestic labour within a family or household is also really important in keeping the lives of workers going. Someone has to wash the clothes and cook the dinner before workers can leave the house and move into the workplace. Even now, this work is mainly done by women, even in households where the women also undertake paid employment. A recent report by the Office for National Statistics (2016) showed that women do, on average, around 26 hours of unpaid domestic labour a week, compared with 16 hours done by men. It is crucially important work, but it is not usually done for a wage as part of an employment relationship, so it is not the focus here. Again, there are fuzzy boundaries.

What is viewed as legitimate labour can also change over time. There has recently been growing public concern about unpaid interns. These recruits are not paid, but they usually work in a workplace alongside paid staff and do similar tasks. In exchange for giving their labour, they gain experience about the industry and/or about work in general. For a young person trying to break into a particular sector, this experience can be really important. But increasingly as a society, we have come to understand that this approach to work experience risks deepening social divides because often the only people who can afford to give up their time for free in this way already have a lot of resources, usually within their family. Those family resources help provide accommodation, food, travel, work clothes and all the other costs that are required to be able to go to work. So, in areas such as the creative industries, fashion, magazine writing and similar where unpaid internships are common, there have been growing voices warning that this risks perpetuating systems that mean only people with the privilege of family support can gain the kinds of work experience necessary to make it in these industries. While this raises important social questions to understand how unpaid internships help explain why particular professions and sectors struggle to recruit a more diverse workforce, it is not the main focus of this book because it takes us beyond the boundaries of paid employment.

This brings into focus another key concept: the employment relationship. This can be understood as the relationship between a paid worker or employee and the person or organisation that employs them. In exchange for the payment, the employer’s role is to try to make sure that the worker uses their skills and capacity for whatever objectives and quality are required. Central to understanding the employment relationship is the fact that it is constantly in a state of flux; the ‘give and take’ is always under negotiation from both sides. This idea that work is about social as well as economic relationships and exchanges is really important because it helps to remind us that it is always about people and not simply about the legal contract someone signs when they start work, or the economics of the decision to apply for a particular job. People have different understandings of the situations they find themselves in and they have different interests. As we shall see, generally speaking, individual workers usually have less power in the employment relationship than their employers. These features make the employment relationship between workers and their employers messy and requiring ongoing negotiation. So, negotiation – sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit – about what a worker is able and/or willing to do in exchange for the payment they receive is at the heart of the employment relationship.

Who works?

The focus of this book is paid employment in the UK. The Labour Force Survey tells us that just over 32.5 million people work in the UK from a total population of around 65.6 million. (Unless otherwise mentioned, all of the statistics in this section come from the UK Labour Force Survey which is explained in more detail in the further reading section at the end of the book). Of course, like all statistics about complex social issues, this hides a number of judgements about what is measured and how. The first point about measuring employment statistics is the idea of a working age population. In the UK, we tend to measure the proportion of people who work in the age group between 16 (when compulsory education ends) and 64. Around 75% of that population work. That figure is quite high when you consider the number of people who stay in education beyond the age of 16; the fact that a lot of people take time out of the labour market to provide care for children and other relatives; the number of people who are unable to work because of illness and other situations; and that many people reduce their engagement with the labour market before the age of 64. All of these can create complex patterns of employment and unemployment across someone’s life course.

Politicians are usually most worried about the unemployment level, which in 2018 in the UK was around 1.38 million. Unemployment is defined as being available for work, but not being in work. Most observers are not particularly worried about small levels of unemployment because it is normal for some people to have short periods of unemployment as they decide to move between jobs, or as they look for a different job if they lose their job. What is particularly concerning to policy makers are people who have extended periods of unemployment, which is usually taken as meaning six months or more. This is because people who are unemployed for a relatively long time can struggle to re-enter the labour market for a number of reasons, including the fact that their skills become out of date, and they lose confidence and experience. Around 573,000 people in the UK fall within this definition. This puts the unemployment rate for people aged 16 and over around 4.1%.

Academic commentators also point out that the definition of unemployment is not always helpful in understanding in detail what is happening in the labour market. Many people find themselves without work but are not formally defined as unemployed. A good example here that has gained a lot of attention in recent debates is someone who is employed on a zero-hours contract (ZHC) but who is not allocated any work for a period of time. Zero-hours contracts are formally a contract of employment, but do not guarantee any particular hours being allocated in a particular week or month. So a worker may go for some time without being allocated any paid work. These workers are therefore formally employed but not given work. Another example is self-employed workers, which we will return to later.

Unemployment is also a very different measure from the number of people claiming various social security payments for unemployment. The latter is measured by a figure called the claimant count. Any government can put in place rules that people must adhere to in order to claim social security, and this inevitably means that there will be a gap between the number of people who are unemployed and the number who can claim unemployment payments. In recent years, the rules about claiming unemployment payments in the UK have become gradually stricter, so there is now a large gap between the number of people claiming out-of-work benefits (around 924,600) and the much higher figure of around 1.38 million who are counted as being unemployed.

A further group of people we need to think about are those people who are economically inactive. In other words, they could potentially work but are currently either not seeking work or not available to start work in the next two weeks. There are currently 8.66 million economically inactive people in the age range 16–64 in the UK. They include students, people whose main responsibility is household work or unpaid care, and people who have some other income not from employment (perhaps from having sold a company, from investments, or similar).

These measures about who ‘counts’ as employed, unemployed or economically inactive are really important in public debates about work and employment. Most governments are particularly concerned about measures of unemployment as the headline indicator of the state of the labour market. But we can see even from the brief discussion above that there are big societal changes that can easily influence those headline figures. One example is that it is now far more common than it was 50 years ago for young people to extend their time in education beyond the age of 16. This has changed the labour market in lots of complex ways. Even when students are working, most of them are classified as students – and therefore economically inactive – for the purposes of official statistics. This has the effect of changing the data about the flows of young people into the labour market.

Similarly, it is now far more common for women to re-enter the labour market after they have had children. Even 50 years ago, this was quite difficult in many occupations, yet today is seen as perfectly normal, although we need to remember that those women often face challenges in progressing in their careers, especially if they work part-time. Again, this changes who is available for work, and how they want to work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, alongside this huge change in social norms a demand has arisen for work that better suits people who are caring for young families, namely part-time work, flexible work and similar. So, while employers now have a far larger pool of people in their 30s and 40s to recruit from, there have been gradual pressures to change some of the kinds of work offered.

This highlights a central point of this book: when we talk about work, employment and the labour market, we must never assume that it is fixed or static in any way. Employers, (potential) workers and governments make choices and respond to each other’s choices. The example above is a good one. As more women have entered the labour market, employers and governments have responded. Sometimes they have freely chosen to respond, at other times they have been forced to respond by changes to the law on equal pay or other laws giving women access to equal treatment at work. The three main actors in employment – the government, employers and workers – therefore interact in a constantly moving situation. As a result, the exchange between workers and employers is negotiated and renegotiated as the situation changes. Sometimes the negotiation is explicit (e.g. at the start of a job when a worker agrees to a set of terms and conditions of employment) and sometimes it is not actively noticed (e.g. an employer might decide to provide a training programme to help and encourage managers to make jobs more flexible). It is the negotiation and renegotiation of the future of employment relationships that is at the heart of this book.

We noted previously that there is another big group of workers we need to consider. In addition to the approximately 27 million people in the UK who are employees, there are a further 4.7 million who are classified as self-employed. This is a category that is surprisingly difficult to define. It includes some of the people we might typically think about when we think about self-employment: perhaps a plumber who runs a small business; or an IT specialist who works on a range of different projects for different companies. But there has also been a growth in the number of self-employed workers who are more difficult to categorise as definitively self-employed. They may work for only one company and may even wear the company uniform, but for tax purposes they are considered to be self-employed. For example, a lot of delivery drivers fall into this group. They may own the vehicle that they use for deliveries, but it may often be branded with the company logo and the driver may well wear a uniform of that company. If they work for the company full-time and the company tells them whether or not they can have breaks, annual leave and similar, it is difficult to argue that the person is genuinely self-employed, although they may well fall into that category for statistical purposes. Because this is a small but growing group, we will pay attention to them in this book.

There is a clear benefit to a company in using bogus self-employed workers because it does not have to pay for costs such as the employers’ contributions to tax and National Insurance. These workers also do not have the same rights as standard employees. They have to arrange their own holiday and sick pay and are not usually covered by laws about maximum working time or minimum wages. There have been a number of high-profile legal cases recently where workers have argued – often successfully – that they should be covered by various employment rights that regular employees benefit from, such as paid sick leave. This kind of complexity arises because there are different measures used for employment data for the application of employment law and for tax purposes.

In general, then, we can see that there are always incentives to try to blur the boundaries between different groups of workers. In these cases, employers have tried to push the boundaries of what can be defined as self-employment, often in an effort to keep down costs and ensure that labour is as inexpensive and flexible as possible. This has generated a ‘pushback’ from individual workers and representative organisations such as trade unions who have presented legal cases to try to define these categories more clearly. This s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• titles in the series
• about the series
• about the author
• 1 introduction
• 2 what do we know about work?
• 3 what do we know about the future of work?
• 4 what should we do about the future of work?
• 5 conclusion
• further reading
• references
• index