A band aid on a gaping wound: Taylor and modern working practices

• Author: Phil Taylor
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12129
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019

100 © 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 34:2

ISSN 0268-1072

Review Article

A band aid on a gaping wound: Taylor and modern working practices

Good Work: The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices, reviewed by Phil

Taylor

When charged with the task of commenting on the Taylor Review, it is tempting

to dive straight into an evaluation of its detailed treatment of the platform/gig

economy, its consideration of worker/employee status, denitional issues associated

with control/dependence (Wood and Graham, 2018) and the merits of its recom-

mendations in relation to these. Although undoubtedly important, focus on these

largely technical and legalistic considerations should not occlude reection on the

origins, contexts, assumptions and the purported wider purposes of the review.

To recall, for Taylor the review was intended to contribute to ensuring that

‘all work in the UK should be fair and decent with a realistic scope for devel-

opment or fullment’. It is against the yardstick of this explicitly ‘stated objective’

that the report should be judged and which, it is argued here, it spectacularly

fails to do. If the intention was to undertake a specic examination of zero hour

contacts (ZHCs), the gig economy and self- employment, then these parameters

should have been explicitly articulated, and the review should not have claimed

to be concerned with ‘modern working practices’ more broadly. Indeed, the de-

clared remit included ‘not just new forms of labour such as gig work’ but a

consideration of ‘good work in general’ (p. 7). Thus, it is legitimate to critique

the review for sins of omission as much as for its sins of commission.

After all, the review was prompted by urgent societal concerns surrounding

work and employment in contemporary Britain, which of course included the

much commented upon employment rights’ decits relating to ZHCs, (bogus)

self- employment and the gig economy, but were not exclusive to them. The rev-

elations of the terrible conditions at the Sports Direct warehouse at Shirebrook—one

of the triggers for the Conservative Government’s decision to initiate the review—

seemed to many to epitomise the ills of modern workplaces; low paid, insecure

employment, consisting of arduous toil, performed by disposable workers lacking

elementary rights and for whom in- work poverty was an inescapable condition.

The ‘Just About Managing’, to whom Prime Minister May appealed were not

mainly Uber or Deliveroo workers or those on ZHCs but all kinds of workers,

including those full- time permanents who remain the bulk of the UK’s workforce.

In tacit acknowledgement of widespread negative perceptions regarding the ‘quality

of work’, commissioning the Taylor Review represented an attempt to demonstrate

that something was being done to meet their concerns.

Setting aside the specic question of the appropriateness (or otherwise) of the

recommendations for gig/platform workers and the self- employed that have been

dealt with effectively by Bales et al. (2018) and others, including contributors to

this special issue, the Taylor Review is plainly decient in getting to grips with

many of the unwelcome ‘modern working practices’ in contemporary Britain. The

review’s near- exclusive concentration on the labour market, or more accurately

its sanitised version of the UK’s labour market, and contractual issues, means

that it ignores change in the realms of work organisation, labour process and

employment relations that undermine work quality.

New Technology, Work and Employment