MORE WORK, LESS SAY FEATURE
to do their jobs, are more supportive of those they manage, give employees more opportunity to express their views, and carry out appraisals which affect employees’ earnings and/or training opportunities. Despite these benefits, employee involvement has become a less prevalent feature of British workplaces over the last decade. This comes at a time when productivity growth has been sluggish and the economy would have benefited from greater employee involvement most. To make matters worse, high work intensity
and limited job control can be a toxic combination resulting in ‘high strain’ jobs which can produce high levels of work-related stress. Worryingly, the survey finds that high strain jobs have become more prevalent. For women, the proportion rose by five percentage points between 2012 and 2017, leaving one in five women at an elevated risk of stress. For men, the jump of four percentage points, up to 15% of jobs, took place between 2006 and 2012. Among school-teachers, 28% were in high strain jobs, and 72% reported that they always or often came home from work exhausted. The results are positive in one respect – insecurity levels have fallen. Less than one in ten (9%) workers in Britain in 2017 reported that they had a better than evens chance of losing their job in the next 12 months. This is half the proportion (18%) of workers who made a similar assessment in 2012 – falling from its highest point in the series to its lowest point. The difficulty of getting an equivalent replacement job more or less mirrored this pattern with 17% of workers reporting in 2017 that it would be very difficult to find as good a job as the current one. This exceeds
Among school- teachers, 28% were in high strain jobs, and 72% reported that they always or often came home from work exhausted.
by three percentage points the other low point in the series recorded in 2001. Anxiety about changes to the job has also fallen dramatically. For example, in 2012, 37% of employees were anxious about receiving a pay cut, but by 2017 this had fallen to 28%. Yet insecurity may have taken a different form. Based on the 2017 survey, we estimate that 1.7 million workers are very anxious that their hours of work might be unexpectedly cut, raised or rescheduled. This group is several times larger than those working on Zero Hours Contracts which have received much attention. Those working insecure hours also report higher levels of work intensity, lower levels of pay, and greater exposure to a range of other fears, anxieties and worries than those whose hours of work are more secure. Given the increased policy interest in
monitoring features of good (and bad) work, evidence from the most recent Skills and Employment Survey should be of particular interest and value to the UK government, the devolved administrations and local authorities. We also hope that, in seeking to deepen the evidence base, the instruments developed and supported by this ESRC survey can be used in future national data collection exercises. n
i
SES2017 was funded jointly by the ESRC, Cardiff University and the Department for Education with Welsh Government funding to boost the sample size in Wales (ES/P005292/1). The research team was Alan Felstead, Duncan Gallie, Francis Green and Golo Henseke.
Six initial findings reports have been published; these are available from the project web site:
www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/ses2017 and there is a job quality quiz:
www.howgoodismyjob.com
WINTER 2018 SOCIETY NOW 11
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