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Before the coronavirus pandemic arrived, it was clear that jobs were plentiful in much of the developed world. It was harder to know how safe they were. The economist Dani Rodrik diagnosed “A chronic state of scarcity of good jobs.” Another economist, Guy Standing, described growth “Precarious” of insecure workers in many countries.
Others disagreed. In a paper last year, economists Alan Manning and Graham Mazeine concluded that “job security has remained remarkably constant” in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany since at least the turn of the 21st century. The Economist he argued this month, pessimism about the world of work was in vogue but not justified by the facts.
Job insecurity is important because the consequences affect all areas of life. It makes it harder keep a roof over your head form a family, progress at work, stay out of debt and maintain healthy. But the truth is, we don’t really know if insecurity is increasing because we’ve been very bad at measuring it.
The official statistical agencies of most countries have the number of employed, self-employed, with temporary or agency contracts, etc. Some observers have combined an increase of non-standard jobs with increased insecurity. But this is lazy and inaccurate. A part-time worker may enjoy the same rights and protections as a full-time worker, but simply does not work on Fridays. An agency worker can be a locum doctor who has a lot of work and is free to turn down shifts she doesn’t like.
There are some long-term survey data that focus directly on job security, but tend to use a narrow definition: the likelihood that respondents will think they will lose their jobs. It is these data that Manning and Mazeine studied in the US, UK and Germany. It shows a lot of long-term stability (with understandable peaks in times of high unemployment).
However, as the authors acknowledge, the fear of losing a job is only one facet of insecurity and not always the most prominent. For example, a care worker I interviewed in the UK didn’t care that she was losing her job, but she still felt insecure because her employer was constantly changing schedules with little notice.
They could give you 40 hours a week and 20 hours the next. He had to check his phone throughout the workday to see if he had been given more customers to visit. At times, he was overworked; other times it was poorly worked. “I just don’t know if I can pay my mortgage at the end of each month. There is no stability, ”he said.
Office for National Statistics of the United Kingdom measures the number of people with “zero-hour contracts”, who do not guarantee any working hours each week. The latest data suggest that these represent approximately 3% of the workforce, compared to 0.6% in 2007 before the global financial crisis of 2008. But this data set misses the extent of this type of work. The care worker I spoke to, for example, had an “8-hour contract.” I once wrote about “one-hour contracts”Announced by the bank Santander.
In an attempt to fill this gap in official statistics, the British Living Wage Foundation published the results of two surveys last week, based on 2,000 responses each, which found that almost two-fifths of UK workers received less than a week’s notice of their shifts or work patterns. Among low-paid full-time workers, 55% received less than a week in advance and 15% less than 24 hours.
This wouldn’t be problematic for some, but it’s hard to imagine it would be everyone’s preference. (In fact, it would be helpful the next time the survey is conducted to ask respondents if they are satisfied with the agreement).
In a similar vein, the Foundation Foundation analyzed 7 million bank accounts were anonymized in 2018 and found that more than 80 percent of low-paid employees with stable jobs had a volatile payroll, compared to two-thirds of higher-paid employees.
These snapshots are not perfect and cannot tell us if trends are growing or decreasing. But the breadth of instability they suggest, especially for low-paid workers, should serve as a shock to official statistical agencies to capture such data themselves at regular intervals. These new complementary metrics should focus less on what people’s contracts say and more on the reality of their working lives.
There is a great deal of debate about how to improve job insecurity in the wake of the pandemic. We will come up with better answers if we start by asking the right questions.
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