ILPC 2027

 The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the personalisation agenda in social care on the job security of union members in the voluntary sector, and the consequences for union efforts to protect and organise its membership. The increased use of individual funding through Direct Payments (DPs) and Individual Budgets (IBs) brings considerable financial uncertainty into social care providers, especially at a time of harsh public sector cuts. Moreover, increasing power and influence over the organisation of social care work is being handed to service users via their designation as ‘customers’ (Cunningham, 2016). Such moves clearly have significant implications for the employment policies of social care providers and hence the working conditions of union members. The paper is concerned with exploring the degree of worker insecurity associated with the personalisation agenda, and the effectiveness of union interventions to prevent threats to the working conditions of its members.

Personalisation seeks to modernise public services by tailoring them to individual user needs, thereby moving away from identical, one-dimensional provision for ‘the average citizen’ (Needham, 2011, pp.3). Yet the policy is further seen as one of the key emerging sources of workforce insecurity in public services (Needham, 2011), as well as another step towards the commodification of care work where services are bought and sold in a market and ‘users’ are re-classified as ‘customers’. Meanwhile, even prior to austerity it was feared personalisation was inadequately resourced (West, 2013). Now personalisation and austerity are intertwined as individual forms of funding can help shrink expenditure (Cunningham, 2016).

Non-profits are embedded in this agenda as they are favoured providers of public services benefitting from government outsourcing (Lowndes and Prachett, 2012: Bach, 2012). At the same time, we know little about the impact of personalisation on voluntary agencies in terms of their stability and security and the impact on workers’ employment terms and conditions, nor how unions engage with this agenda and protect their membership.

In Canada, under similar individualised funding schemes, service users and their families have displaced the traditional roles of employers resulting in them operating as co-managers influencing recruitment of staff. In addition, there have been service ‘user management’ rights enshrined in collective agreements. In other cases, service users have entirely replaced agency-based managers and become the employer of direct support staff. This has involved changes at the level of the work process itself. In particular, services move from a focus on custodial, residential care to achieving more complex objectives of community development and social inclusion (Hickey, 2012).

It is within this context that this paper seeks to ask the following questions.

1.     What is the impact of personalisation on job security of voluntary sector workers?

2.     What impact is personalisation having on collective bargaining and management – union relations?

3.      How are the unions addressing the interests of their members working in personalised services, and are there any opportunities to mobilise further support and membership in this challenging environment?

The paper draws from a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with regional union officials organising the non-profit sector and four case studies undertaken in the voluntary sector. The latter involves interviews with managers, workplace union officials and front-line staff. The results indicate widespread concerns among staff regarding security of employment. Union efforts to ameliorate these threats are focused at the regional, rather than workplace level revealing fundamental differences with management. Difficulties in organising new members stem from personalisation’s contribution to fragmenting work and isolating potential recruits in the community.