Is Work Being De-standardised?
The purpose of this chapter is to test the proposition that forms of employment not guaranteeing continuity of employment have expanded in the UK. This might include temporary employment of various kinds, agency work that is not included in the standard m
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4.1 Introduction One possible outcome, identified in Chapter 3, if precarity is growing, is the emergence and generalisation across the labour force of an array of non-standard contracts. The purpose of the current chapter is to test this proposition in the case of the UK. Several relevant types of non-standard work that do not guarantee continuity of the employment relation can be identified based on the existing literature: • Temporary employment, of various kinds as discussed below. • Agency work that is not included in the standard measures of temporary employment. • Zero-hours contracts (ZHCs). • Self-employment where it is potentially false self-employment or linked to the emergence of what is sometimes called the “gig economy”.
© The Author(s) 2019 J. Choonara, Insecurity, Precarious Work and Labour Markets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13330-6_4
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As well as considering the extent of these forms of work, their concentration within particular sectors and among particular demographics is explored. Prior to a detailed consideration of these forms of work, there is a discussion of part-time work, justifying its examination under the concept of job tenure rather than job de-standardisation.
4.2 Part-Time Work The UK has exhibited high levels of part-time working for a developed economy since the 1970s. This was not true in the immediate post-war years; part-time employment was just 4 per cent of total employment in 1951 (Gallie 1988, p. 15). By 1995, the figure, defined as those working 30 hours a week or less, had surpassed 25 per cent of employees and remained in the range 24.9–26.1 per cent from then until 2009. In the wake of the 2008–2009 recession, the proportion of those working part-time peaked at just over 27 per cent in summer 2010 before declining, dropping below 26 per cent in 2017 (data from Office for National Statistics [ONS] table EMP01, seasonally adjusted). Parttime work is widely used across the economy. In 2011, 79 per cent of workplaces with over five employees were found to have some part-time employees (Wanrooy et al. 2013, p. 30). Part-time work is strongly associated with gender, being concentrated among women workers, and this connection also grew through the 1990s (Millward et al. 2000, pp. 44–46). The steady post-war growth in female employment is one of the most important shifts in the overall structure of employment in Britain, rising from about three in ten employees in 1954 to four in ten by 1986 to about half of employees today (Gallie 1988, p. 15; Swaffield 2011, p. 174). The expansion of women’s employment since the 1950s “has been virtually entirely an expansion of part-time work” (Gallie et al. 1998, p. 11). Indeed, the growth of part-time work can be seen as the consequence of continued inegalitarianism in gender relations coexisting with the greater integration of women into the labour force. While women often “choose” part-time work, this is, for many, a “choice” imposed on them by virtue
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