Hard Work in New Jobs

The Quality of Work and Life in European Growth Sectors

U. Holtgrewe, M. Ramioul, V. Kirov, U. Holtgrewe, M. Ramioul, V. Kirov

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349689972, 9781137461063
• eBook ISBN: 9781137461087
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This book investigates hard work and new and expanding jobs in Europe. The interrelationship between the labour market and welfare regimes, and quality of work and life is played out at many levels: the institutional; the organizational level of the company and its customers or clients; and the level of everyday life at the workplace and beyond it.

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Introduction: New and Growing but Not Necessarily Better – Expanding Jobs in Europe

Ursula Holtgrewe, Vassil Kirov and Monique Ramioul

The rediscovery of hard work

Having been overshadowed for several decades first by skilled industrial labour, then by knowledge and creative work, the lower end of the labour market has once again, from the 2000s onwards, begun to receive some academic and public attention. It became abundantly clear that economic growth, technological innovation, the development of a service society and European policy strategies would not automatically upgrade working conditions and job quality of the majority of workers, and turn work into a professionalised and reflexive ‘game between persons’ (Bell, 1973). Instead, the supposed ‘knowledge society’ has consistently failed to get rid of ‘hard work’ – indeed, it has in fact been shown to generate its own low-skilled, menial and tightly regimented jobs, for example, in call centres or logistics. Jobs with low wages, low autonomy, physical and psychological strains, limited perspectives and insecure employment do not simply persist, but are newly created. In this book’s terminology, these aspects and their various accumulations are not covered by low-wage or low-skilled work or by precariousness. As Bolton and Houlihan put it somewhat resignedly, ‘the jobs flowing from shifts towards services and “new” forms of work are proving just as gruelling, monotonous, tightly controlled and poorly rewarded’ (2009, p. 4) as the previous types of job at the bottom of the hierarchy. Indeed, researchers in recent years have discovered considerable polarisation in labour markets, first in the United States (Appelbaum, Bernhardt, Murnane, 2003), then in Europe as well, during both the period of employment expansion since 1995 (Gautié and Schmitt, 2009) and more markedly during the crises that started in 2008 (Hurley, Fernández-Macías, Storrie, 2013). Both highly paid and skilled jobs and elementary jobs with low wages and presumably low skills have apparently expanded, whereas the medium range of jobs has been ‘hollowed out’.

This volume explores the configurations and factors that shape ‘hard work’ on the European level, the levels of European and national sectors, the levels of companies and occupational groups. While the existing studies mostly look into Anglo-Saxon countries and the wealthier part of Europe, or explore particular aspects of low-quality work, we include low-quality work in Southern and Eastern European countries.

The book also investigates sectors and occupations that have not received much attention before; it thus adds both width of sectors and occupations investigated and depth of analysis to our knowledge of hard and poor-quality work. As quality of work is centrally shaped in the interplay of institutions, markets and company strategies, company case studies are the best way of exploring this dynamic. Beyond this, the book explores the links between the structural and the ‘objective’ conditions of hard work, and the subjective meaning of these experiences, and their impact on workers’ aspirations and sense of belonging.

The first contributions draw on the data of the large European surveys to identify the areas in which growing jobs and expanding areas of employment (‘growing jobs’) have problematic work quality. Vandekerckhove and Ramioul, drawing on the European Labour Force Survey, identify ‘new and growing’ jobs by combining the analysis of employment growth and the composition of employment within selected sectors in the EU. This analysis allows conclusions to be drawn on the structural change within sectors, and identifies patterns of change such as specialisation, professionalisation or bureaucratisation that have varied impacts on job quality. This issue is picked up by McClelland and Holman’s analysis of the European Working Conditions Survey. They distinguish between growing and shrinking sectors, based on Vandekerckhove and Ramioul’s work, and find that the sectors that are expanding, particularly in the services, often have poorer job quality and a higher proportion of both temporary and part-time work. Indeed, the employment expansion of the 2000s has created 8.19 million high-quality jobs and 8.48 million low-quality jobs (Holman, McClelland, 2011, p. 102). Poggi and Villosio explore the impact of working conditions and job characteristics on workers’ subjective wellbeing, life satisfaction and happiness, using the European Quality of Life Survey. They find, unsurprisingly, that demanding jobs with low control, imbalances between high effort and poor rewards, and flexibility unmitigated by security render workers significantly less satisfied and happy. Service and unskilled manual workers, women and older workers (especially older women) are most vulnerable to these conditions. Problems in material wellbeing are explored by Poggi, Villosio and Bizzotto. Using the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, they find that workers with problematic working conditions, temporary contracts, low wages and disjoined careers also report higher deprivation in terms of income, commodities and living conditions. Here, it is mostly blue collar workers, the low-educated, migrants and younger workers and those living in the Southern or Eastern EU countries that are affected. These findings are neither new nor surprising – however, they do add further evidence to Bolton and Houlihan’s observation of a problematic continuity in job creation that relies on liberalised market forces and is frequently indifferent to job quality.

The analysis of European data identifies critical sectors and particular functions within these sectors for further investigation that go beyond those investigated in previous research: commercial cleaning, construction, catering, care of the elderly and waste management (for more detail on sector selection and overall research design see Holtgrewe, Markova and Ravn, Chapter 2). These sectors expanded rapidly in Europe between 2000 and 2008, and are found to have problematic quality of work resulting in problematic quality of life of workers. Many expanding sectors and functions with poor quality of work have certain features in common in that they address fairly basic needs of humans: clean shelter, food, care, waste disposal. For this reason, they are shaped by issues of sustainability and quality of life, and shape them for society. With the exception of construction, they are labour-intensive services ‘on the ground’, that is, spatially distributed and difficult to relocate.

Explaining the expansion of hard work

There is considerable agreement in the literature about the reasons for the expansion of poor-quality work in general, and these reasons are of course interrelated. The diffusion of new technologies and skill-biased technological change (Autor, Levy, Murnane, 2003) renders processes and tasks more complex across the economy, automates some jobs, and standardises or complicates others. Globalisation and the restructuring of work along the lines of ‘international supply chains, inter-firm subcontracting, and externalisation of some workforces’ (Carré et al., 2012, p. 10) intensify competition, and move work either abroad or across different sectors or segments of the labour market (Rubery, 2006), increasing strategic options for employers both nationally and internationally. The expansion of the service sector in developed economies is partly due to relocation and/or automation of industrial work, and partly due to societal changes and new societal needs. The care of people and the maintenance of the physical and natural environment, health, education and information and so on are not just outsourced from companies or the public sector but also from private households into the formal economy. There, emerging services create further work of support, administration, marketing and management – but may partly move back into the private sphere again (e.g. household waste separation) or into the limbo of (semi-)informal activities. Declining union influence in general, and in these sectors in particular, shifts power from labour towards management. As a result, company and management strategies move in the direction of cost-cutting and short-term flexibility, and transfer various risks onto workers. Policy in many countries has lost ‘interest in a redistributive agenda and a social agenda’ (Carré et al., 2012, p. 12); instead, it relies on – or indeed creates – the mechanisms of globally extended and societally disembedded markets that exert these pressures on companies and workers. In the sectors investigated, contributions in the present volume pursue some of these insights more specifically. Due to the outsourcing of so-called ancillary services from other sectors to specialised, small or large companies, client demands centrally shape working conditions, and companies pass on these pressures to workers. A considerable part of this outsourcing stems from the public sector that used to perform these functions and partly still does so. Indeed, public procurement thus has been discovered in recent years as one of the ‘new’ levers of institutions and the state that shape work in either favourable or adverse ways (Brandt et al., 2008; Greer, Schulten, Böhlke, 2013).

This volume pays particular attention to the dynamics of the service and public sector in shaping the quality of hard work. Companies and sectors offering services depend on their clients, who may be public institutions, businesses or private end customers (cf. Kirov, Chapter 8; Recio, Moreno-Colom and Godino, Chapter 12). In some sectors that are partly publicly funded or subsidised, the ‘service triangle’ (Leidner, 1996) turns into a quadrangle as municipalities or social services pay for services that are delivered to citizens or end customers. Clients and customers contribute to the shaping of working conditions by negotiating contracts, making ad hoc demands on flexibility, and controlling and monitoring the production and labour process. Thus, cost pressure and quality considerations by both clients and employers have a fundamental impact on working conditions. The public sector thus has a unique dual responsibility in setting the conditions for outsourced work through cost and quality considerations in procurement (Jaehrling et al. in Chapter 9).

Institutions and regulation

However, all these factors do not drive the quality of ‘hard work’ down in a linear way. Their impact on the quality of particular jobs is contingent upon the actual configurations of markets and inter-firm relationships, on the respective positions and strategies of social partners and companies, and centrally, on the institutional environment. This volume’s findings are generally in line with the findings of the international and comparative literature on low-wage work and ‘bad jobs’ – to which many of the present authors have contributed before. This literature investigates the impact of institutions, in particular employment regimes (Gallie, 2007c; 2013), industrial relations (Bosch, Mayhew, Gautié, 2010; Doellgast, Holtgrewe, Deery, 2009), welfare state provisions (Gautié et al., 2009) and gender regimes (Walby et al., 2006) on the actual quality of work. It emphasises the power these institutions have of limiting the impact of the respective markets and the associated company strategies and technological pressures on work. Low-wage and poor quality work is regarded as a critical case for the investigation of institutional shaping power, as for these workers other sources of power and protection, such as skill and voice, are limited. This literature consistently finds that inclusive and strong social partnerships that manage to extend their influence beyond their core constituencies are essential for moderating these impacts. Findings in this volume support this view. In the Nordic and in some of the continental countries, autonomy (Sørensen, Ramioul and Naujanienė, Chapter 14), wages (Markova et al., Chapter 10), and working time quality and skill levels (Recio, Moreno and Godino, Chapter 12; Kirov, Chapter 8) are generally found to be higher, and predictably so. Workers’ voice and interest representation are shown to play a central part both formally and informally (cf. Holtgrewe and Hohnen, Chapter 15) even – and especially – in those sectors that generally suffer from low unionisation. However, Lehndorff (Chapter 7) argues that the institutions of industrial relations may need to be complemented by state regulations where social partnership is weak or patchy, as is the case in the sectors we investigated. For example, collective agreements may require statutory extension in order to be effective in weakly organised sectors, and minimal statutory wages may provide ‘a valuable backing for collective bargaining on pay in risk-prone industries’ (Lehndorff).

Segmentation and vulnerability

Debates about low-wage and low-skilled work – ‘bad jobs’ – and about the quality of work intersect. Workers at all levels of the occupational hierarchy report work intensification and increasing pressures, atypical employment expands in varying ways, and as European workforces age the health risks of work become a public policy issue. Still, at the bottom the disadvantages accumulate. All of this makes the definition of ‘hard work’ both necessary and difficult. Low-wage/low-skilled work generally means something specific and measurable, and provides an adequate starting point or proxy for low job quality. However, poor working conditions go beyond these aspects. Precarious and discontinuous employment plays an increasing part, and its impact is exacerbated when incomes and autonomy are low. In work organisation, tight regimentation and standardisation in more or less neo-Taylorist ways is also a continuing issue – and so are the pressures that result from workers having to meet the targets and fill the gaps in standardised and semi-automated processes, such as the notorious need for documentation in the care sector. Frequently psycho-social strain has not replaced physical hardship but actually exacerbates it, and vice versa. A lack of interest representation and a lack of worker voice, formal or informal, in the workplace contributes to these disadvantages, but can also be regarded in itself as a distinct dimension of poor quality of work and life.

Institutions thus do not only provide resources for improving the quality of ‘hard work’. Prevailing divisions of labour in households and unequal gender relations, supported by welfare state arrangements that amount to varying ‘gender regimes’ (Walby et al., 2006) and immigration policies (Gautié et al., 2010; Crouch, 2012), leave women and migrants or ethnic minorities with limited labour market options, and thus provide employers with workforces that accept various forms of atypical and poor-quality employment. In the feminised sectors, part-time work with increasing intensity and increasingly shorter hours provides flexibility (Recio, Moreno and Godino, Chapter 12, and Sardadvar, Kümmerling and Peycheva, Chapter 13). The male-dominated sectors sometimes have more favourable and secure arrangements (as in public-sector waste collection, Sørensen, Ramioul and Naujanienė, Chapter 14, and Holtgrewe and Hohnen, Chapter 15), but may also face increased segmentation of employment as in construction (ibid.). Hohnen et al. (Chapter 11) and Markova et al. (Chapter 10) show how institutional patterns and organisational strategies both shape patterns of segmentation and vulnerability, and are enacted by workers’ own perceptions of their situation in which they modify their own ‘capacities to aspire’ (Appadurai, 2004) and their claims to material and symbolic recognition (Holtgrewe, Voswinkel, Wagner, 2000; Fraser, 1998).

Indeed, the authors of this volume were somewhat surprised at workers’ capacities for coping with the hardships of their jobs, looking on the bright side and appreciating incremental improvements. However, workers’ comparative satisfaction should not be overstated and certainly not romanticised, especially in relation to the findings of Poggi and Villosio (Chapter 5). Clearly, workers in poor-quality jobs are less satisfied and less healthy than those in other positions. But we are observing the limitations of the new economy mantras of ‘love it, change it or leave it’; feasible career options and viable alternatives are often simply not there for vulnerable workers (Hohnen et al., Chapter 11). Many of the workers had made incremental improvements and chosen lesser evils under tight constraints, moving sideways towards securer or more suitable jobs in tight and tightening low-skill or precarious labour markets. Criteria such as reliable payment or working hours, the proximity or otherwise of work to home, more or less security of employment can make large differences in the absence of space for loftier aspirations. On the other hand, ‘capacities to aspire’ can only build on these basics.

Autonomy and social ties

This brings us to social and subjective aspects of hard work. Hard work disadvantages parts of the working population in material ways, and renders workers vulnerable to poverty, health risks and disproportionate impacts of adverse life events (Ranci, 2009; Poggi, Villosio and Bizzotto, Chapter 6). On top of that, hard work disenfranchises workers with regard to voice and autonomy; devalues their contributions, skills and efforts both materially and symbolically; and often limits their perspectives and possible aspirations in work and life through resignation in the face of limited options or through sheer exhaustion.

In this volume, we explore both the structural and sense-making dimensions of poor-quality working conditions. Autonomy in hard work sectors is limited, but is becoming more differentiated; for example, service jobs require some responsibility that may be divided between companies and workers in different, and more or less favourable, ways (Sørensen, Ramioul and Naujanienė, Chapter 14). While some organisations genuinely empower workers, in the less institutionalised work environments of elderly care or clean...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: New and Growing but Not Necessarily Better Expanding Jobs in Europe
• 2  A Hard Job Is Good to Find: Comparability, Contextuality and Stakeholder Involvement in European Job Quality Research
• Part I  Employment Growth, Job Quality and Well-Being
• Part II  Regulating Quality of Work
• Part III  Segmentation and Vulnerability
• Part IV  Autonomy and Social Ties
• References
• Index