Making work more equal

A new labour market segmentation approach

Damian Grimshaw, Colette Fagan, Gail Hebson

• Editorial: Manchester University Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526117076
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Law
• Categoría: Labour & Employment Law

This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employment conditions. The book proposes a 'new labour market segmentation approach' for the investigation of issues of job quality, employment inequalities, and precarious work. This approach is distinctive in seeking to place the changing international patterns and experiences of labour market inequalities in the wider context of shifting gender relations, regulatory regimes and production structures.

1

A new labour market segmentation approach for analysing inequalities: introduction and overview

Damian Grimshaw, Colette Fagan, Gail Hebson and Isabel Tavora

There is a real need for a new multi-dimensional approach to understanding inequalities in work and employment. Faced with the pressures of globalisation, liberalisation of markets and periodic economic crises, many societies around the world have forged fragile compromises that are fundamentally incompatible with the goals of making the distribution of employment and quality of work more equal. Various fiscal, labour market and social policy reforms risk creating or increasing inequalities, expanding precarious forms of employment and exacerbating the social exclusion of vulnerable workforce groups. Such reforms include the marginalisation of organised labour through changes to industrial relations, the marketisation and outsourcing of public services, the weakening of employment rights, cuts to welfare entitlements, and the privatisation of responsibilities for family and care provision. Moreover, employers may also play a role in constructing and sustaining inequalities, whether by lobbying for deregulatory reforms, unbundling production structures in ways that fragment work, or evading rules designed to secure fair and equal treatment and to enhance job quality.

Political and economic actions are thus continuously shaping the trajectory and country specificity of work and employment inequalities in the context of shifting international patterns of production organisation, industrial relations, gender relations and demographic changes such as population ageing or migration flows. While processes of competitive market allocation and technological change matter, as do long-term trends in economic growth, these cannot fully explain divergent inequality outcomes (Lee and Gerecke, 2015). Instead, international research points to labour market institutions (e.g. minimum wage rules, collective bargaining, vocational training, immigration rules); organisations and collective movements that can exercise countervailing power (especially trade unions and feminist and civil society organisations); the recurring conflict over what constitutes a job (the bundle of tasks and the overall quality, value and status); a raft of institutions that interact with labour markets (especially social and welfare policy rules and corporate governance systems); and changes in the national and global organisation of production (e.g. Berg, 2015; Bettio et al., 2013; Gallie, 2007; Gautié and Schmitt, 2010; Karamessini and Rubery, 2014; Marino et al., 2017; Muñoz de Bustillo et al., 2011; Vaughan-Whitehead, 2011, 2016).

This book contributes to this international evidence by proposing a ‘new labour market segmentation’ approach for the investigation of work and employment inequalities. Our hope is that this meets an intellectual need for a multi-dimensional perspective and also confronts the challenge of a resurgent neoliberalism that is undermining the models of social citizenship and principles of labour market inclusion which have been forged through collective bargaining, protective and participative rights, and welfare state regimes. The first section identifies the intellectual basis for this approach in contributions from three theoretical traditions that inform its distinctive focus on the segmentation, gender and comparative institutional effects on inequalities. We describe a set of propositions, designed to illuminate the main threads of a new labour market segmentation approach, and review each in the subsequent sections against the rich evidence and arguments presented in Chapters 2 through 17 of this volume.

Theoretical elements of a new labour market segmentation approach

The proposed new labour market segmentation approach brings together key insights from three theoretical traditions that have proven valuable in articulating the causes, characteristics and consequences of inequalities in work and employment. Table 1.1 presents a summary with a focus on key forms of inequalities, namely low pay, gender pay inequality and patterns of segmentation between standard and non-standard forms of employment.

The first theoretical tradition is the labour market segmentation approach as conceived in the 1970s and early 1980s (Craig et al., 1982; Doeringer and Piore, 1971; Edwards et al., 1975; Gordon et al., 1982; Rubery, 1978; Sengenberger, 1981; Wilkinson, 1981).¹ In a radical break from the economics orthodoxy at the time (which still prevails today), segmentation theory rejected the assumption that labour market divisions could be attributed mainly to inadequate levels of human capital or differences in productivity. Instead, it placed the demand side of the labour market centre stage in its analysis of divisions, inequalities and dualisms in capitalist employment structures. As Jill Rubery has argued:

The attraction of segmentation theory is that it focuses on employing organisations, the architects of the employment system, in the shaping of labour market inequalities. … The obscuring of the active role of employers in shaping employment outcomes is perhaps one of the main legacies of mainstream economics. (2007: 955, 960)

Its long-standing significance lies in its opposition to neoclassical economics, which assumes employers automatically adjust to supply-side shifts in education and skill so that they utilise all potential productivity in the labour market, albeit constrained by institutional ‘imperfections’ (so-called) in the labour market. Instead, drawing on empirical case studies of employer practices and worker experiences, labour market segmentation theorists argued that employers and the wider economic conditions play a key role in shaping inequalities in the labour market via selective access to career and training opportunities (as in Doeringer and Piore’s (1971) model of primary and secondary labour market segments); changing responses to economic conditions that affect workers’ job queue prospects (Rubery, 1988; Sengenberger, 1981); under-investment in productive structures leading to low-wage, low-skill vicious cycles (Wilkinson, 1983); and the undermining of worker resistance through divide-and-rule tactics (Edwards et al., 1975; see further discussion in the section ‘Employers as architects of inequalities’). The argument is that these practices contribute to a continuous regeneration of inequalities through the construction of ‘noncompeting groups’ (Cairnes, 1874), variously based on personal attributes such as social class, race, gender, migrant status, age and disability, among others. In other words, inequalities are not fostered only on the supply side through exogenous societal or cultural rules and conventions but also, and perhaps predominantly, through formal and informal institutionalised policies and practices in labour markets and workplaces.

The approach thus decidedly breaks with the neat wage-productivity theorising of neoclassical economics, as well as with most econometric models of wage formation, since it injects the possibility that many employers who are able to pay high wages commensurate with investments in technology and productivity performance may nevertheless be unwilling to do so (Craypo, 2003). A further important contribution is the critique of simplistic, abstract notions of the representative firm and the emphasis instead on the real-world context of the uneven development of sectors, supply chains and organisations. Such uneven development arises from the unequal distribution of power among capital and which fuels differential opportunities for workers’ pay and employment prospects that are not determined by their potential productivity characteristics (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2005). Workers may be at the right or wrong end of a supply chain, for example, and therefore more or less able to press for a decent share of the employer’s rent (Guy, 1999; Perraudin et al., 2013).

The second theoretical tradition summarised in Table 1.1 is feminist socio-economics. This approach brings an explicit analytic focus on gender inequalities, which both advances beyond some of the inadequacies of the early labour market segmentation approach and enriches our understanding of wider societal processes of inequality generation. It emphasises the ways that women’s labour market opportunities are limited and moulded by sex discrimination, gender inequalities in domestic labour, and the interplay of household and workplace power relations. Three insights are fundamental for our focus here. Firstly, feminist socio-economics demonstrates that the interaction between the spheres of production and social reproduction is central to the gendered structuring of labour market segmentation (Folbre, 1994; Humphries and Rubery, 1984). Early labour market segmentation theory usefully veered off to the demand side in a rejection of neoclassical economists’ assumed supply-side logic, but failed to revisit the supply side and thus was criticised for not questioning stylised assumptions about the matching of periphery jobs with periphery workers.

Feminist research has made major critical advances here and shows how the politics of social reproduction and the household division of labour directly affects the delineation by employers of work into ‘good jobs’ and ‘bad jobs’. Historical investigations exposed the construction of the male breadwinner in need of a family wage and the constraints imposed by the associated widespread beliefs that women worked for ‘pin money’ (Humphries, 1977). These issues still reverberate in contemporary accounts of sex discrimination in many countries, where women are still too often treated by employers, policy-makers and men as secondary rather than dual or equal earners. Sex discrimination takes many forms. There is evidence that employers exploit gender profiling and gendered wage practices in the belief that women are less committed to work than their male counterparts. Also, many country studies point to the adverse consequences of underdeveloped and gender biased welfare and family support policies for women’s wage penalties over the life course. Furthermore, employers’ exploitative practices towards female workers who are assumed to be locked into local labour markets are found to hinder wage prospects and the exercise of autonomy at work (Cooke and Xiao, 2014; Figart et al., 2005; Korpi et al., 2013; Lewis et al., 2008; Merluzzi and Dobrev, 2015; Rubery et al., 1999; Tavora and Rubery, 2013; Ugarte, 2017; Weinkopf, 2014).

Table 1.1 Three theoretical approaches to understanding inequalities in work and employment

Notes: The term ‘social actors’ refers to employers, trade unions, governments (national and pan-national) and civil society organisations; VET = vocational education and training.

A second insight from feminist socio-economics concerns its critical analysis of the wage–skill nexus and an alternative theoretical development of the notion of undervaluation. The productive value of jobs done predominantly by women is likely to be undervalued because women have historically been less able than men to establish high status for those occupations and sectors of female-dominated work, such that for the same skill level the jobs occupied by women are more likely to be attributed periphery status and paid at a lower level than those carried out by men (e.g. Walsh, 1990). These complex gendered processes play out over long periods of time and as women make inroads into once male-dominated occupations, there is a risk the relative status and wage attached to the job falls (Cohn, 1995; Reskin and Roos, 1990). Because skill is a socially constructed concept, employers are likely to make a ‘value association’ between unpaid work performed in the home by women and similar work performed in the wage economy: if the tasks are widely undertaken outside the workplace without formal training then it is judged ‘unskilled’. This gendered practice is reinforced in societies where ‘cultural ideas deprecate work done by women’ (England, 2005: 278), where fathers fail to take on an equal share of domestic work (Fagan and Norman, 2013) and where employers deny women discretion in their work (through for example ‘job crafting’, see Leana et al., 2009). The archetype example is care work, which remains invisible, low status and exploited in most societies (Hebson et al., 2015). For the employer, the outcome of undervaluation is access to a higher quality of labour for a given wage (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2007).

A feminist life course perspective on the labour ma...