Transforming work: new forms of employment and their regulation

The papers in this issue were originally written in response to a conference call in early 2008 in which we invited papers that would: critically interrogate the claims made about the consequences of the growth of new knowledge economies or the new service economy at different spatial scales. Within and between economies, regions and cities, new divisions of labour, new patterns of workplace participation and the entry of expanding and increasingly diverse labour forces raise a range of questions, from issues of labour market polarization, new social and spatial inequalities, job quality, feminization, economic migration, to questions about the growth of outsourcing, new patterns of trade and new global connections, making the regulation of the labour relation and employment markets increasingly complex. Even when belief in the emergence of a new economy was at its height, optimism about the growth of high-tech and high-status jobs tended to hide what was happening at the bottom end of the labour market. Here the ‘flexibility’ of portfolio careers and rapid job changes for the well qualified and well paid was, instead, reflected in the growth of precarious and casual contracts, self-employment and low-paid work with little security and poor conditions. In the service-dominated labour markets of the industrial West, the growing polarization between ‘good’ and ‘lousy’ jobs (Goos and Manning, 2003) that emerged after Fordism and with the decline of mass manufacturing exacerbated income inequalities and undermined prospects for social mobility. Workers trapped in low-waged and low-skilled employment had few prospects of movement into better-paid work or of gaining the benefits of security of permanent employment (Castells, 2000; May et al., 2007; McDowell, 2006, 2009; OECD, 2001). The limited bargaining power of unions in service industries and small company manufacturing meant that low wages would prevail in what had formerly been middle-class jobs. Finally, the rise in credentialism from the 1970s onwards closed access to many jobs for those without university education at the same time as higher education became more expensive. Significantly, many of the optimistic commentators failed to recognize the consequences of the rising feminization of the labour market. A combination of push and pull factors—rising living standards based on dual incomes, the growing success of young women in school and corresponding increases in their university education, permanently altered the make-up of the workforce. Early on, in the 1970s and 1980s, these trends led to the creation of a whole range of jobs to replace those goods and services previously supplied ‘for love’ in the home, including those in prepared and ‘fast food’ and a range of expanding leisure industries. The rise of well-paid employment opportunities in the knowledge economy for educated women led to low-paid work for millions of working class women whose services replaced hot meals, child care and emotional solace previously provided by home makers. For these women, employment was (and is) often precarious, low paid and insecure. This is especially true for women from minority communities or for recent migrants who have become such an important element in the labour forces serving the more affluent workforce (May et al., 2007). As the recession has worn on, questions about flexibility and its less optimistic flip side, insecurity, have become urgent as unemployment remains high and companies report improved productivity, squeezing more work out of fewer workers. The seven papers in this issue address some of the key issues associated with the transformation of employment security in recent decades. The central focus of the issue is on labour flexibility and the rise in actual and perceived insecurity associated with that flexibility. The authors examine whether working lives have become less predictable and more precarious and, if so, for whom and where? The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines precarious employment as a “work relation where employment security, which is considered one of the principal elements of the labour contract, is lacking. This term encompasses temporary and fixed term labour contracts, work at home and sub-contracting” (ILO, 2005). There are a variety of explanations for the expansion of such employment contracts from the specific characteristics of a service-dominated economy and project-oriented work to employers’ claims to need casual workers to meet peaks and troughs of demand and maintain profits. It is clear, however, that increased labour flexibility and the use of temporary workers have become common in both the public and private sectors. While precarious work is not solely a feature of the bottom end of the labour market—many professional workers now define themselves as portfolio or project workers—the rise in precarious work and insecure employment is most marked and has the most negative consequences at the bottom end of the labour market. It is easier to define precarious work than it is to measure it accurately. In the UK, about one and a half million workers were employed on some form of a temporary contract in 2006 according to official statistics (Labour Force Survey, 2007), this accounts for about 7% of the total workforce who have a claim to be in a precarious employment relationship. However, not all these workers automatically fall into the category, nor is the total figure accurate or inclusive. Labouring in the margins of an expanding economy is an unpredictable and insecure location: one that many workers have an interest in disguising if they are working ‘off the book’ or in contravention of, say, benefit regulations or, for migrants, their visa restrictions. Employers also have an interest in secrecy if they are breaking labour or migration regulations. Thus, one of the major difficulties in producing an accurate picture of the range of different types of work that might be considered precarious is the absence of good statistical data and/or their unreliability. It has been estimated that about 7–19% of all work for wages within the European Union (EU) is undeclared, varying across nation state depending on how the tax and benefit systems work. In the UK, the figure is possibly about 10% (Forde and Slater, 2005). As well as undeclared work, a range of other types of employment contracts constitute precarious work, including working on short-term, temporary or casual contracts, working for an agency or third party rather than being a direct employee, providing a contracted-out service, and working for low wages that prevent the achievement of a decent standard of living. On the basis of this definition, about one in five British workers currently have precarious contracts (Anderson and Rogaly, 2005). Finally, it might be argued that all workers who are subject to discrimination or harassment on the basis of skin colour, sex or legal status and feel unable to seek legal redress are also in a precarious position. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are at particular risk here, especially those that have been trafficked and/or who have large debts. But many native-born minority workers in low-wage work in the USA, the UK and elsewhere are also in precarious positions. While the development of a polarized workforce is a characteristic of all service-dominated economies, the USA and Great Britain are distinguished from many West European countries by the limited regulation of their labour markets and the ease with which employers are able to both recruit and dismiss workers, especially those with casual, time-limited and other forms of less than permanent, full-time contracts. New forms of non-standard or atypical employment contracts and relations, including casual, flexible, contingent and part-time work, multiple job holding and agency employment became increasingly common in both the UK and the USA (Atkinson, 1985, 1988; Huws et al., 1989; Kalleberg, 2000; Peck and Theodore, 1998, 2001, 2002; Pollert, 1988, 1991; Vosko, 2006). One key question addressed in this issue is whether the transformation of employment and employment contracts is confined to particular regions and places or is ubiquitous, a common characteristic of early 21st century capitalism? Another concerns change over time. It may be that it was the Fordist era, at least in the West, that was atypical (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008) as the male labour aristocracy achieved a degree of employment security that was not matched either before or since. For many, perhaps the majority of workers, women among them, a secure employment contract was seldom on offer even in highly unionized industrial cities. So, obviously, the changing distribution of employment—whether distinguished by sex or by other characteristics such as ethnicity or language ability—has affected the nature and dimensions of precarious work. Finally, what do we know about responses to the increasing insecurity associated with labour flexibility and precarious work? What patterns of regulation have emerged in response to the potential for exploitation and discrimination? The seven papers in this issue address these questions, using different methodological approaches and different empirical examples. The scale of analysis varies from the international to the workplace. Several authors use cross-national secondary data sets; others draw on their own research. While most papers address a specific question about the transformation of work and its associated characteristics and consequences, some are more speculative. Some focus on workers, others on organizations. The last three papers look at different aspects of regulation and change—through legislation, trade union organization and community struggles. This last topic draws on a literature that moves beyond empirical issues to a contemporary theoretical discussion of what work means in the contemporary global economy. If defining insecurity seems to be at heart an empirical issue, dependent largely on the collection of more adequate data, the term ‘precarity’ captures a different, more theoretically oriented debate that has been associated with Marxist intellectuals and activists in Italy and France, especially with a group of Italian intellectuals including Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, Franco Beradi and Maurizio Lazzarato (Gill and Pratt, 2008). Here too, there is a similar optimism and pessimism as captured in the terms flexibility and insecurity in the anglo-centric literature. Again, there is a perhaps overly optimistic confidence in the potential for new forms of work in knowledge-based economies. In this literature, the term precarity has a double meaning in which the precariousness inevitably associated with capitalism also contains the seeds of transformation, of the prospect of a new type of politics associated with the emergence of new political identities and subjectivities. As we argued above, the insecurity characteristic of bottom end work is also an inherent aspect of work in creative industries. In fact, insecurity and individualization typify career trajectories in these industries and are becoming more pronounced with increasing self-employment and eroding union presence (Christopherson, 2008). Theoretical debates among Marxist theorists have drawn heavily on the work by Hardt and Negri in which the significance of the social factory, immaterial labour, affect and subjectivity are key terms. The concept of the social factory is used to capture the ways in which employers and the state reorganized employment relations after Fordism to reduce the power of the organized working class. The repressive state apparatus, new forms of technological control and the power of multinational capital to spatially relocate its arena of production combined to extend forms of workplace control beyond ‘the factory’ into society as a whole. As a consequence, mass production workers were transformed into socialized workers: labour is dispersed, decentralized and deterritorialized, so that ‘the whole society is placed at the disposal of profit (Negri, 1989, 79). These accounts, often termed autonomist, have distinct similarities to the accounts of post-Fordism (Piore and Sabel, 1984) developed by the Regulationist School in particular (Aglietta, 1979; Lipietz, 1992). In the form of the new regionalism, they had a strong influence on Anglo-American economics and geography beginning in the 1980s. One striking difference in these two accounts of economic transformation lies in the political optimism of the autonomists. They are optimistic about the scope for resistance by the multitude rather than organized labour and about the opportunities for creative forms of work in which growing numbers of workers are able to engage in the production of informational and immaterial goods and services. In the extract below, Lazzarato (1996, 133) defines this new form of work, showing how it extends beyond older forms of production into activities not previously defined as ‘work’: On the one hand, as regards the ‘informational content’ of the commodity, it refers directly to changes taking place in workers’ labour processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labour are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control … On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as ‘work’—in other words the kind of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged norm of the bourgeoisie and its children, these activities have since the end of the 1970s become the domain of what we have come to define as ‘mass intellectuality’. What has been missing from the theoretical discussion of precarious work or precarity as a socio-economic phenomenon is a connection to the real-life empirical characteristics of labour flexibility and insecurity. The papers in this issue make that connection, raising questions about the interpretation of changes in worklife as well as about the optimism that infuses the autonomist perspective. As Vosko (2006), a contributor to this issue, has argued elsewhere, “precarious employment is a defining feature of the … labour market, yet it is poorly understood and the consequences are far reaching” (1), and so, we “must engage in a dialogue involving theory, methodology and empirical realities” (2) to clarify the nature and consequences of its expansion. In her research on Canadian employment change, Vosko (2006) argues that precarious forms of work are shaped “by employment status (self-employed or waged work), form of employment (temporary or permanent, part-time or full-time) and dimensions of labour market insecurity as well as social context (such as occupation, industry and geography) and social location (the interactions between social relations, such as gender and ‘race’)” (3–4). It is clear from this claim that an adequate assessment of the causes and consequences of precarious employment and labour market insecurity demands attention to the intersection of economic, social and institutional factors and is above all, a problem that demands an inter-disciplinary perspective. In the papers that follow, the extent, implications and regulation of insecure employment relations are examined in different contexts and through the lens of different disciplines. In the first paper, Francis Green shows that while insecure employment may not have increased as significantly as the theoretical debates about the transformation of work predict, the prospect of insecurity means that for many workers, subjective fears have increased. Green explores the relationship between this insecurity and the nature of economic change and institutional frameworks across the developed and developing world, revealing a geography of insecurity as well as its social characteristics. Women in developing economies—a group of workers largely ignored in the optimistic new economy/immaterial labour debates—are, as they have long been, the group most at risk of insecure and precarious employment. 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