ILPC 2027

Claims of growing precariousness abound in the literature on work and employment. In recent years the notion that workplace insecurity has risen forms the common sense of much of the radical left, featuring in the works of writers such as Paul Mason, Slavoj Žižek, Guy Standing and André Gorz.

Where the claims are defended empirically, it is often done with little regard to normal ways of measuring data and constructing categories of analysis. For instance, in the 2015 book The New Social Division: Making and Unmaking Precariousness, Harri Melin and Raimo Blom’s essay claims:  “In the UK, almost two out of three women belong to the precariat, and only one-third of men find themselves in a precarious position.” To get this figure they “simply counted those who are (1) unemployed, (2) have fixed-term labour contracts, or (3) have a part-time job”. This assertion already assumes what it seeks to demonstrate, for instance that women in part-time employment are members of a precariat.

We need better ways of testing for growing precarity.

One consequence we might expect from a weakening of employment relationships and a growing “disposability” of workers would be a decline in the time employees spend with a given employer. Furthermore, if the changes are the result of neoliberalism, globalisation, the shift to a service-based economy or the growing role of finance, these changes ought to be evident in the UK, one of the countries in which such changes were pioneered from at least the early 1980s.

However, ten different studies of employment tenure in the UK labour force, conducted from 1995 to 2011, showed little or no sharp secular decline in tenure.

In this paper, a study of employment tenure in the UK from 1975 through to 2015, based on data in the General Household Survey and Labour Force Survey, confirms and updates these findings. Mean elapsed tenure remains on aggregate around eight years—roughly the same as in 1975. The slight decline in male tenure, largely a consequence of the decline of manufacturing, has been compensated for by the growth of female tenure, driven by factors such as the extension of maternity rights and the increasing stability of part-time employment.  

This does not refute the idea that certain groups of workers find themselves in a vulnerable or precarious position. But it does challenge the idea that this is increasingly the norm for the bulk of the labour force. What needs to be explained is not the rise of precarity but the reasons why employment relations have proved so stable over the past 40 years. The employment relationship is best characterised as one of two-way dependence in which the employer also depends on obtaining and retaining the correct forms of labour-power.

Both capital and the state have an interest in securing the long-term reproduction of such forms of labour-power, not simply in increasing flexibility in employment. This means the tendencies at work cannot be seen as a unidirectional march towards growing precariousness.