ILPC 2026

 The UK has been characterised as being trapped in a low-skills equilibrium (Keep and Mayhew, 1999), with skills deficiencies given prominence in analysing the UK economy’s current sluggish performance (Tetlow, 2017). Until relatively recently, the UK has been characterised by supply-side policy interventions, with resources targeted at improving workers’ qualifications. Academic discourses, however, suggest a switch to demand-side interventions. This includes, inter alia, proactive engagement of social partners to encourage high-skill ecosystems (Warhurst and Findlay, 2012); and focussing, more broadly, on job quality rather than more narrow conceptions of “high performance” HRM (Lloyd and Payne, 2006). These writers argue that such interventions offer better pathways towards a more productive economy and better-paid jobs. The basic argument is that, without compulsion, many employers will be unlikely to adopt high-road employment strategies.

The UK government is currently adopting an apparently more demand-side approach. Most notably, from April 2017, the Apprenticeship Levy mandates that employers with a wage bill of £3million plus will contribute 0.5% of this bill to funding apprenticeships. Whilst not entirely demand side directed, it can be argued that the Levy will encourage employers to consider how best to leverage local apprenticeship provision and their workers’ skills and qualifications.

We argue that a crucial aspect of understanding the impact of the Levy, and of skills regulation more generally, is to consider HR managers as key agents in transforming regulation into something which might have positive organisational impact. The paper will therefore consider how HR managers are engaged with different forms of skill regulation and how/whether they use regulation to gain leverage within their organisations. Such an analysis should reveal the impact that regulations have on the agency of HR managers and how/whether this agency is deployed in HR work.

The paper will first offer a theoretical review of what we know about the link between skills regulation and HR practices. It will then analyse qualitative data from a pilot study of six interviews with senior HR managers, where respondents were invited to reflect on the role of skills regulation in their own organisations’ HR policies and practices. The data will be analysed using a framework that considers the interactions between the skill levels of specific groups of workers and the form and extent of labour market regulation that affects these workers. It will be argued that it is useful to categorise employer responses to different forms of skill regulation in these terms.

References

Findlay, P. and Warhurst, C. (2012) Skill Utilisation in Scotland, Skills Development Scotland.

Keep, E. and Mayhew, K. (1999) ‘The Assessment: Knowledge, Skills and Competitiveness’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 15(1): 1-15

Lloyd, C. and Payne, J. (2006) ‘Goodbye to all that? A critical re-evaluation of the role of the high performance work organization within the UK skills debate’, Work, Employment and Society, 20(1): 151-165

Tetlow, G. (2017) ‘Low skills and poor infrastructure blamed for UK productivity gap’, Financial Times 4^th September, accessed online at: https://www.ft.com/content/b53933c0-8e23-11e7-9084-d0c17942ba93?mhq5j=e6]