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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: Blackwell Companions to History
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Increasingly, employees are being falsely treated as 'self-employed'. This phenomenon - the 'gig economy' - is seen as the inevitable shape of things to come. In this book, Colin Crouch takes a step back and questions this logic. He shows how the idea of an employee - a stable status that involves a bundle of rights - has maintained a curious persistence. Examining the ways companies are attacking these rights, from proffering temporary work to involuntary part-time work to 'gigging', he reveals the paradoxes of the situation and argues that it should not and cannot continue. He goes on to propose reforms to reverse the perverse incentives that reward irresponsible employers and punish good ones, setting out an agenda for a realistic future of secure work. Crouch's penetrating analysis will be of interest to everyone interested in the future of work, the welfare state and the gig economy.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Front Matter
Abbreviations
1 The Rise of Precarious Work
2 Ambiguities of the Employment Contract
The historical development of standard employment
The drivers of change
Conclusion: the ambiguous trajectory of standard employment
3 The Rise, Fall and Persistence of Standard Employment
The fate of employment rights
The impact of the crisis
Conclusions
4 The Changing Shape of Precariousness
The different forms of precariousness
The overall pattern of change
A new labour market dualism?
5 A New Approach to Employment Security
The future supply of work
Active labour market policy and flexicurity
Extending the scope of good employment
Worker representation
Conclusion: rebalancing the asymmetry of the employment relationship
References
End User License Agreement
Figures
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1a
Employment protection rights for individual workers, OECD member states, 1995 (d…
Figure 3.1b
Strength of regulation of temporary work, OECD member states, 1995 (dark grey) a…
Figure 3.2
Total weeks of paid maternity leave, parental leave and father-specific leave, O…
Figure 3.3
Trade union membership density, OECD member states, 1995 (dark grey) and 2013 (l…
Figure 3.4
Collective bargaining coverage, OECD member states 1995 (dark grey) and 2013 (li…)
Figure 3.5a
Net income replacement rates for statutory and mandatory pensions for persons ea…
Figure 3.5b
Net income replacement rates for statutory and mandatory pensions for persons ea…
Figure 3.6a
Net income replacement rates for initial unemployment benefit, 2001 (dark grey) …
Figure 3.6b
Net income replacement rates for unemployment benefit after five years, 2001 (da…
Figure 3.7
Statutory minimum wages as percentage of mean full-time wages, 1995 (dark grey) …
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
‘Involuntary’ part-time employment as proportion of total employed population, m…
Figure 4.2
Proportion of workers on temporary contracts, 1995 (dark grey) and 2016 (light g…
Figure 4.3a
Male workers on their own account, 1995 (dark grey) and 2015 (light grey)
Figure 4.3b
Female workers on their own account, 1995 (dark grey) and 2015 (light grey)
Figure 4.4
Total non-standard employment (excluding shadow economy), certain OECD member st…
Figure 4.5
Percentage of employees aged twenty to twenty-four in temporary posts (2016) by …
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Colin Crouch, Will the Gig Economy Prevail?
Will the Gig Economy Prevail?
Colin Crouch
polity
Copyright © Colin Crouch 2019
The right of Colin Crouch to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3246-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
For Joan
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Joan Crouch for help with the whole text, and to Mark Freedland for passages of legal interpretation. Neither share responsibility for any defects in the final product.
Abbreviations
ALMP
active labour market policy
AT
Austria
AU
Australia
BE
Belgium
CA
Canada
CEE
Central and Eastern Europe
CH
Switzerland
CZ
Czechia
DE
Germany
DK
Denmark
EL
Greece
ES
Spain
FI
Finland
FR
France
HU
Hungary
IE
Ireland
IL
Israel
IT
Italy
JA
Japan
KO
Korea
MX
Mexico
NL
Netherlands
NO
Norway
NZ
New Zealand
OECD
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
PL
Poland
PT
Portugal
SE
Sweden
SK
Slovakia
TR
Turkey
TWA
temporary work agency
UK
United Kingdom
US
United States of America
1The Rise of Precarious Work
The death in January 2018 of a courier working in southern England for the German logistics firm DPD attracted unwelcome attention to the dark side of what has become known as the ‘gig economy’. The courier was not an employee of DPD, but for nineteen years had been a self-employed contractor to the firm. His death had been caused by a deteriorating diabetes condition, for which he had missed several hospital appointments. This followed a day when DPD had fined him £150 because, as a result of attending an appointment, he had failed to deliver his allocation of parcels for the day. In the wake of the furore surrounding his death, DPD changed its policy on workers’ medical appointments, but deeper questions remain surrounding the idea of workers who are not employees of a firm and for whom the firm accepts no employer responsibilities, but who can be disciplined by that firm. That is the idea at the heart of the gig economy.
The issue is not a marginal one. The gig economy is seen by many neoliberal policy-makers as an ideal form of work, set gradually to replace the costly rigidities of the old-fashioned employment contract. Firms can maximize flexibility by calling on and paying self-employed workers only when they need them to perform specific tasks, avoiding the social insurance charges, minimum wage obligations and the host of other responsibilities that come with so-called standard employment. Workers can enjoy the freedom of being entrepreneurs, working when they like and for whom they like. In a further response to the case of the diabetic courier, DPD offered its couriers a choice. They could become normal employees, with rights to sick pay, paid holidays and a pension, but being paid a lower rate for their deliveries. This gives workers that ultimate prize of the capitalist economy: freedom of choice.
But are workers in economic circumstances so tight that they cannot risk taking time off for a hospital appointment likely to forego ready money now in order to guarantee sick pay and a pension at some future time? More generally, can a person who works full time for one firm be said to have the freedom of the self-employed? And how can a firm that engages thousands of people as couriers not be their employer? The emerging new world of flexible working arrangements is replete with verbal and legal tricks of this kind. Corporations such as the giant taxi firm Uber, which organize their work over the Internet, claim to be mere ‘platforms’ and therefore outside any employment relationship. If they arrange their affairs skilfully, they can also claim not even to have a geographical location on this planet and therefore choose the fiscally most benign jurisdiction in which to report all their profits. Since the Internet constitutes all that is new and pioneering, anyone who criticizes their practices is accused of standing in the way of progress.
The term ‘gig economy’ is itself deceptive. It resonates with the shows or gigs organized for entertainers, who perform events at various locations, with no long-term commitment to the places or the groups organizing them. But these entertainers are genuinely self-employed; they are in a true free market, working for several different organizations and dependent on no individual one. This is very different from the situation of people engaged in making deliveries day in, day out, for one or two large corporations on which they are almost totally dependent for making a living, and which may well stipulate their hours of work. The description of this as a ‘gig’ seems more like a cynical attempt to associate a problematic form of employment with the romance of the entertainment business than a genuine attempt to define a new form of work relationship.
It is even highly doubtful that the gig is as important as its effusive advocates claim (see, for example, Annabel Denham’s [2018] ‘The Gig [sic] economy is the future and women can lead the charge’). The Brookings Institution estimated that, although gig work was certainly growing fast (between 2010 and 2014, ‘non-employer’ [i.e., gig] firms offering taxi services in large US cities grew by 69 per cent against 17 per cent among firms with employees), such firms accounted for only 3 per cent of total US business revenue (Hathaway and Muro 2016). Research by the McKinsey Global Institute (2016) claimed that up to 162 million people, or 20 to 30 per cent of the total workforce, across Europe and the US were engaged in ‘independent work’. Although McKinsey included the phrase ‘gig economy’ in their report’s title, independent work is a far more extensive category, also covering self-employed persons as normally understood. The figure still seems high, given the general historical decline that has been taking place in self-employment in advanced economies, with only Greece and Spain having proportions like those suggested by McKinsey. There must be some overlap here with the shadow (i.e., illegal) economy, all of whose workers will lack employee status. Also, McKinsey found that about 40 per cent of independent workers were ‘casual’ – that is, not having their work as a major component of their life activities – mainly students, retired people and others who would not be counted as part of the total workforce in official statistics. These groups combined could bring us closer to the McKinsey estimate, but students and retired people doing odd jobs do not presage a new age of entrepreneurs liberated from having regular jobs.
McKinsey also distinguished among 30 per cent of all independent workers who were ‘free agents’, voluntarily having such employment as their main work activity, 14 per cent who were ‘reluctantly’ in this category, and would have preferred to find dependent employment, and 16 per cent who were doing such work only because they were ‘financially strapped’. It is not possible to determine from McKinsey’s data the proportions of contented workers in the gig economy. It is, however, clear that such work is not universally welcomed by those working in it. The Taylor Review, established by the UK government to examine working arrangements in the gig, and generally favourable towards the phenomenon, found that only 25 per cent of sixteen- to thirty-year-olds would consider working in it (Taylor 2016: 28). Using a slightly different approach, and coming from a more critical position, the European Foundation for the Study of Working Life found that 17 per cent of all formally self-employed workers in the European Union were ‘vulnerable’, in the sense that they worked for only one customer, while a further 8 per cent had little autonomy in practice (Eurofound 2015).
Further evidence of the small size of the gig will be presented in chapter 4 below. One can easily understand why its advocates want to talk it up and stress its exciting associations with the Internet, as it promises employers a combination otherwise impossible to achieve: workers who are completely subordinate to a firm’s authority but for whom it has no responsibility.
But the gig is just one form taken by a far more extensive, general attempt by firms, neoliberal thinkers and public policy-makers to free employers of responsibilities to those who work for them while retaining if not intensifying the dependence of those workers on the firms. The appropriate term to describe the position of all such workers is ‘precarious’ (Freedland 2016). One form that is popular with employers is ‘on-call’ work or ‘zero-hours’ contracts, where employees are paid only for hours when the employer calls them in, though they have to stand ready and available to be called in at short notice and are often therefore unable to take on other work or indeed leisure activities. The Office for National Statistics (2017) estimated that around 900,000 people worked under such conditions in the United Kingdom, though 28 per cent of those involved were students. Slightly different are ‘marginal’ jobs, known in Germany as ‘Minijobs’ and ‘Midijobs’, where workers are offered work for only a small number of hours in a week and very low earnings, but enough to disqualify them from claiming unemployment benefits. Another form is the use of temporary contracts set to expire before workers acquire any rights. This is found mainly in countries where employees with permanent contracts enjoy extensive rights. It is therefore not so commonly used in countries like the UK or the US, where the rights of standard employees are in any case limited. Finally there is the shadow or illegal economy, where no legal contract exists at all.
It is often argued that the growth of this kind of employment is producing a ‘dualism’ in labour markets, with a division between those who benefit from the full security of standard employment and those left in precariousness. There is truth in this, and we shall further examine it below (chapter 4), but it is partly yet another of the verbal tricks being played in the current politics of labour issues, as it enables ordinary standard employees, moderately or poorly paid, to be stigmatized as ‘privileged’, with the precarious being encouraged to see them as their enemies. Morandini (2017) has shown that, at least in Italy, labour market deregulation is supported not only by managers but also by precarious workers and the unemployed. However, in most advanced economies the rights of standard employees themselves have been steadily eroded. Growing insecurity is becoming a general condition for working people. Many occupations require considerable skill, employers usually want to retain skilled workers, and standard employment contracts are a useful means for doing this. But the people in what Standing (2009, 2011) calls the ‘precariat’ have no professionalism or occupational standards because no one bothers to equip them with skills or even experience. Firms are likely to dismiss them before they acquire the experience that entitles them to job upgrading (Lichtenstein 2010). They never acquire entitlement to such rights as maternity leave. Immigrants are particularly likely to be found among their number, often lacking basic citizenship rights and even elementary knowledge of rights.
