Fragmentation Flashcards
From integration to fragmentation, Drivers for change ?
- Belief power of the market to allocate resources and encourage economic development
- Privatization of state owned enterprises e.g. national rail
- De-regulation of economy – particularly labour markets
- Exteriorization of relationships that were previously internal to the structure of the company
- Technological advances capacity to overcome spatial dimensions e.g. call centres
- Aim to reduce cost, improve service quality, enhance competitiveness
Elements of Fragmented Work (Rubery et al 2003 )
- Multi-Employer site
- Out-sourced, sub-contracted labour
- Public sector provision / Recasting of state provision
- Temporary employment agencies
Implications for Work and Employment of fragmentation?
- the changing relationships/power dynamics between organisations
- Implications for understanding the employment relationship
- Impact of these inter-firm relations on work and employment
- Implications for job quality and decent work
- Growing commodification and standardisation of work? (Huws and Podro 2012)
Subcontracted Capitalism (Wills 2007) 4
- Pressure on wages and the conditions of work
- Short-term contracts
- No employment contract with ‘direct employer’
- Breaks mutual dependency
Ambiguity in Multi-Employer Organisation Forms (Rubery et al 2000)
- Supervision and Control
- Performance issues
- Grievance and conflict
- Terms and conditions – working-time / working hours
- Health and Safety – (Lloyd and James 2010)
- Commitment
- Trade Union Recognition/The challenge to labour
Labour outcomes of fragmentation
- Further attempts to render more visible the ‘commodity’ status of labour
- Pressure on labour costs
- Intensification of work
- Tight draconian performance management regimes (see also Newsome and Thompson 2013)
- Technological capacity to integrate the fragmented systems as well as monitor work performance
Employee Representation across boundaries
- Disenfranchised voice/fragmented
- Difficult to generate shared interests across workers with different employers or contracts.
- Decision re recognition may be out of ‘immediate’ employer’s hands
- Ghost at the ‘bargaining table’
- Legal framework on trade union organizing efforts focused on single workplace
Subcontracted Employment and its challenge to Labour
- Growing disconnect between decision making and control by employers and responsibility and accountability for employees on the other (Huws and Podro 2012)
- Protecting Labour Rights
- Organising for improvements – priced out of the market ?
- The living wage campaign in the UK public sector ?
- The living wage campaign across the global supply chain ?
Definition of fragmentation
Albin and Prassl 2016
-The notion of ‘fragmentation’ draws upon a perception of dissolution, and implicitly also decay, of the institutional framework
of employment relations
Zero-hours work and mutuality of obligation
The requirement of ‘mutuality of obligation’ consists of a dual promise from both
sides to the contract—from the employer to provide future work and from the
individual to perform that work.
Standard employment relationship (SER) (Rubery, 2016)
- guaranteed wage income
- adequate and maintainance of ‘real’ wage
- stability
- income during non-work periods
- division of work and non-work times
- skill upgrading
- adjustments to the needs of the individual i.e. doctors appts
- opportunities for voice
- access to employment protection
Fragmented time employment relationship (Rubery, 2016)
- no guaranteed hours or income
- less than adequate subsistence, high travel time costs just for a few hours work
- high risk of reduced demand on employee
- unpaid breaks, days off waiting for work, limited entitlements
- blurring of divide - 24/7 culture of contact
- limited skill investment
- employees bare cost of adjustment or risk job loss long term
- voice limited when no guarantee of work & only one employer (have to always be available for work)
- may not reach threshold for benefits
Fragmented time in Domiciliary social care - possible solutions
- reimbursement of travel costs for short hors/notice work
- guaranteed hours based on past work history
The fissured workplace
David Weil
- more and more organiations taking part in the employment relationship
- partly due to increased capital market pressures and increased focus on core competencies over anything therefore a desire to shed employment (OS)
- no firm wants to take on costs
- OS the cost-cutting function as well as the responsibility and blame e.g. Apple and Foxconn
- temporary contracts - reduces employees ability to resist & little opportunity to negotiate
liberalisation and privatisation of service markets
- neo-liberal policies and anti-monopoly pressure have led to privatisation of service providers such as BT
