Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management; Programme Director for BSc Business Management
Interviews with young people in England and Germany reveal how they see precarious work as unavoidable in their pursuit for autonomy and meaning. But if precarious work becomes the norm, are workers at greater risk of exploitation?
“We’ve seen a proliferation in precarious work over in recent decades,” says Dr Chris McLachlan, Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at the School of Business and Management. “Labour market trends show a massive increase in self-employment, especially since the global financial crisis.
“The rise of ‘platform work’ is interesting because these jobs are super precarious. They raise questions around the legitimacy of employment contracts and employment status in a legal sense. Employers are increasingly exploiting this kind of work and it's becoming much more embedded in society.”
Dr McLachlan has been examining this trend through interviews with 18- to 35-year-olds in England working in a wide variety of jobs from teaching assistants and gardeners to hairdressers and electricians. These form part of a study conducted with colleagues at the University of Leeds that compares precarious work in England and Germany. Some of their discoveries have recently been published in Work, Employment and Society.
He explains: “We were trying to understand the biographies of young people to get a sense of how they navigated education and work experience, and the pressures they faced in the labour market that led them to be in these precarious jobs.”
Becoming the norm
“The key theme that came out was normalisation. This is the idea that people don't seem to be resisting precarious work. They seem to accept that it has legitimacy in their lives and in society.
“We identified four reasons for this. The first was that people take on precarious work with the idea of being an entrepreneur who can manage their own time. They have choice, they have autonomy because they work for themselves. This is the idea even amongst bar workers on zero-hours contracts who can earn more money by working more hours.
“Then there was the idea that people normalised it because they'd just done so much of this type of work. This is a phenomenon where young people are repeatedly exposed to bad jobs.
“Another is the idea that precarious work is a rite of passage. Young people are trying to get onto the career ladder or gain experience, and this is just something that they have to do.
A quest for meaning
“The last one, which was the most striking finding, was this sense of people taking on precarious jobs because it would help find more meaning in their work.
“For example, I spoke to a psychotherapist who was training in the NHS but became really annoyed by the bureaucracy of this large organisation. They had a really good, stable, permanent employment contract, but they became self-employed because they weren’t able to do the type of psychotherapy that they wanted to do in the NHS.
“It was a similar situation with a gardener who worked at a prestigious garden. They felt the commercial pressures that the garden was under meant that they couldn't enact their environmental beliefs.
Out of the frying pan into the fire
“If we put an academic lens on this finding, it suggests that capitalism is not fulfilling the needs of people, so they are trying to break free of these traditional capitalist structures. But they're then putting themselves in an even more vulnerable position to get what they want. We use the phrase ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’.
“Some of the middle-class people we spoke to had parental support. But, if precarious work is going to increase, then more and more working-class people, who don't have those safety nets, will be entering this work with the allure of some greater fulfilment. They will face greater risk as a result.
“This is compounded by the relationship that these young people have with precarious work. For example, if we compare English workers with German, we saw more resistance to precarious work in Germany. Maybe in England it's become normalised to the extent that we don’t see as much active resistance or desire to change anything.
“So, precarious work may continue to increase and continue to demoralise and exploit people in a way that means they will end up doing this work for longer than they should.
I think this should be challenged. Platform workers and gig workers are beginning to do this, but my fear is that the normalisation will become too entrenched. If that happens, there will be no resistance to the more exploitative parts of precarious work, like low pay, because this is somehow seen as a route to happiness.”