FEATURE MORE WORK, LESS SAY


Working Practices which called on government to report annually on the quality of work in the UK, the government’s commitment to promote and create better quality jobs, and the centrality of good work to the government’s Industrial Strategy. In the devolved administrations (as well as


More work, less say T


HE QUALITY OF JOBS HAS become a hot topic among UK policymakers over the last 18 months. This has been triggered by the Taylor Review of Modern


in some local authorities) interest in job quality has also grown. In Wales, for example, the First Minister announced in 2017 that he wanted ‘to make Wales a fair work nation’ and in July 2018 a Fair Work Commission was set up to help make this happen. In Scotland, the Fair Work Convention was established in 2015 and fair work has been a central part of the Scottish Government’s economic strategy for a number of years. The study of job quality has a long history


among sociologists, economists and psychologists. In recent decades, the European Commission, OECD and the International Labour Organisation have all debated the question. It is now widely accepted that good jobs have objective features which have the potential to enhance workers’ wellbeing, while bad jobs constitute health risks. It is also agreed that there are many dimensions to it, including wages, job prospects, the quality of working time and intrinsic aspects of the work


Workers in Britain are working harder and have less say, but are less anxious about losing their job or having their job changed in some way, according to the findings from the latest Skills and Employment Survey. By Professors Alan Felstead and Francis Green


itself. However, there is no agreed standardised, single index of job quality or its dimensions. A recent survey of workers supported by


the ESRC and others sheds new light on some of the more important job quality dimensions and how they have changed. The Skills and Employment Survey 2017 (SES2017) is a nationally representative sample survey of individuals in employment aged 20-65 years old in Britain. A total of 3,306 individuals took part. They were interviewed in their own homes for around one hour. The 2017 survey is the seventh in a series which began in 1986.


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1.7 million workers are very anxious that their hours of work might be unexpectedly cut, raised or rescheduled.


The quality of jobs in the


UK is worsening in more respects than it is improving


The latest results show that the quality of jobs in the UK is worsening in more respects than it is improving. It shows that workers are working harder and have less say, but are less anxious about losing their job or having their job changed in some way. Almost a half (46%) of workers in 2017 strongly agreed that their job requires them to work very hard compared to just a third (32%) of workers in 1992. School teachers in state schools top the list. A remarkable 92% of teachers strongly agreed that their job requires them to work very hard, up from 82% in 2012.


In the five years since 2012, the proportion who said that they had a great deal influence over what tasks they do fell by three percentage points and there was a five percentage point drop in the influence they had over how to do the tasks. Over the longer term the drops have been even greater – since 1992 the scope to decide what tasks to do has fallen by 13 percentage points and discretion over how to execute these tasks has fallen by 18 points. Other forms of participation at work have also fallen. Consultative meetings and problem-solving groups declined between 2012 and 2017, falling by eight and two percentage points respectively. These trends are not simply of academic


interest. Quite the contrary, they have significant implications for economic performance and hence for the wellbeing of us all. Efficiency- enhancing ideas, for example, are more frequently offered and acted upon in organisations where employee involvement is high. Such employers allow employees more autonomy to decide how


10 SOCIETY NOW WINTER 2018 ”


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