Living with uncertain work

• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Mark Tomlinson,Sian Moore,Jason Heyes,Kirsty Newsome
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12231

Living with uncertain work

Jason Heyes, Sian Moore, Kirsty Newsome and

Mark Tomlinson

ABSTRACT

This article examines the different forms of uncertainty that workers in precarious

jobs experience on a day-to-day basis. The article highlights the various ways in which

uncertainty at work spills over into workers’lives away from the workplace and pro-

vides a representative and up-to-date comparison of the experiences of workers in per-

manent, fixed-term and casual forms of employment. The article achieves its

objectives through a mixed-methods research design comprising an analysis of data

from the Understanding Society survey and interviews with workers in the retail,

higher education, logistics and social care sectors.

1 INTRODUCTION

It is widely accepted that the apparent recovery of the UK labour market since the

Great Recession masks a number of underlying problems. Many of the new jobs t hat

have been created since the start of the crisis are low waged (Mayhew, 2012), and there

has been a substantial rise in the number of employed workers who want more hours of

paid work (Bell and Blanchflower, 2018). There has also been a growth in insecure

types of employment. The Trades Union Congress (TUC, 2017: 12) has estimated

that 3.2 million workers in the UK face insecurity in work. Insecure workers include

people employed on zero-hour contracts, people in insecure temporary work,

including agency, casual and seasonal workers, and low-paid self-employed workers.

These developments indicate a substantial increase in precarious employment, which

the ILO (2012: 27) defines as work that is ‘performed in the formal and informal

economy and is characterised by variable levels and degrees of objective (legal status)

and subjective (feeling) characteristics of uncertainty and insecurity’. Precarious

employment is likely to involve relatively low wages and a high risk of in-work

poverty, substantial employment insecurity or employment of a limited duration,

weaker employment and social protection rights when compared with other workers

and lower levels of worker control over how and when work is performed (Rodgers

and Rodgers, 1989; Standing, 2011; Vosko, 2010).

Some of the problems associated with precarious employment were acknowledged

in the recent ‘Taylor Review of Modern Working Practises’, conducted on behalf of

the UK government. However, the report also applauded the ‘flexibility’of the UK

labour market, claiming that:

❒Jason Heyes, Management School, University of Sheffield, Sian Moore, Department of Human

Resources and Organisational Behaviour, University of Greenwich, Kirsty Newsome, Management

School, University of Sheffield and Mark Tomlinson, Department of Sociological Studies, University of

Sheffield. Correspondence should be addressed to Professor Jason Heyes, Management School,

University of Sheffield, Conduit Road, Sheffield, S10 1FL, UK. E-mail: j.heyes@sheffield.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 49:5-6, 420–437

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The UK is good at encouraging economic activity and creating jobs. “The British way”works and we

don’t need to overhaul the system. The Review believes that maintaining the flexible and adaptable ap-

proach to labour market regulation has benefitted the UK so far, but focusing more closely on the qual-

ity of work as well as the number of people employed, will take us in the right direction. (Taylor et al.,

2017: 31)

This article explores the concealed costs associated with the UK’s‘flexible’labour

market and employment practices. Drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data,

the article highlights in particular the corrosive effects of uncertainty in relation to

work and employment. The terms risk and uncertainty are often employed in

discussions of precarious employment (Kalleberg, 2009) but are rarely defined and

often used inter-changeably. By contrast, economists regard risk and uncertainty as

separate concepts, following the distinction made by the economist Frank Knight

(1921). According to Knight, risk is present in situations in which the odds of different

possible outcomes occurring can be calculated in advance. In situations characterised

by uncertainty, by contrast, the possible outcomes are unknowable, and therefore, the

odds of specific outcomes occurring cannot be determined in advance. This implies

that outcomes cannot be predicted and it is this aspect of precarious work that

provides the main focus for this article. Using a multi-method approach, the article

examines the consequences of unpredictable working time and work-related incomes

for workers’well-being and shows that unpredictability in employment creates

unpredictability in workers’personal lives. The article also compares the experiences

of workers in casual, fixed-term and permanent employment, focusing particularly on

the consequences of uncertainty in respect of working time and workers’perceptions

of their employment security. The article begins by describing the growth in

precarious work in the UK. It then presents the findings of an analysis of the UK’s

Understanding Society (USoc) survey, which explores the implications of uncertainty

for workers’ability to exert control over their working lives and the resulting

consequences for their job satisfaction and well-being. This is followed by an analysis

of qualitative data gathered from interviews with workers in the homecare, retail,

logistics and higher-education (HE) sectors. These are sectors of the UK economy

in which work-related uncertainty is relatively widespread. The interviews shed light

on the lived experience of uncertainty, the hardships that it imposes on workers and

how unpredictable work influences workplace power dynamics.

2 THE GROWTH OF UNCERTAIN WORK

The economic crisis that commenced in 2008 had a substantial impact on the UK

labour market, leading to a marked increase in unemployment, under-employment

and labour market inactivity, particularly among young people (Goujard et al.,

2011; Heyes et al., 2017). Although the rate of aggregate unemployment began to fall

after 2011, the apparent recovery in the labour market coincided with increases in

forms of employment often associated with precariousness (McKay et al., 2012).

One notable development has been the growth in the number of zero-hour contracts,

which encompass all cases ‘where the employer unequivocally refuses to commit itself

in advance to make any give quantum of work available’(Deakin and Morris, 2012:

167). The number of workers on zero-hour contracts increased from 70,000 in 2006 to

810,000 in 2016 (TUC, 2017: 12). According to the Office for National Statistics

(ONS), 2.8 per cent of all people in employment were employed on a zero-hour

contract in their main job during October to December 2016. In addition to experiencing

extreme uncertainty in relation to the number of hours they may be asked to work,

421Living with uncertain work

© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd