Hazel Conley

Frame Extension in a Mature Social Movement: British Trade Unions and Part-time Work, 1967-2002

Since the 1960s, British trade unions have developed a policy for representing the interests of part-time workers, a significant process of frame extension within a mature social movement. This article seeks to account for this change. It concludes that change was a product of the growth of feminist activism within unions, the deployment of instrumental and solidarity frames and a response to political opportunities provided by both the British state and European Union.

Temporary Work in the Public Services: Implications for Equal Opportunities

This article examines the impact of the growing number of temporary employment contracts in the public sector on equal opportunity theory, policy and practice. Quantitative and qualitative data from two case study local authorities are utilized to examine the mechanisms by which temporary work becomes an equal opportunities issue. A strong association between part-time work and temporary employment status is demonstrated as an important aspect of the gendered nature of temporary work. Links between ethnicity and temporary work are less clear but are based upon the insecurity of targeted funding for teachers and the under-valuation of the skills of the workers concerned. The data indicate that temporary workers are largely excluded from equal opportunity policy and practice, bringing into question a concept of equality that can permit less favourable treatment for certain groups of workers. It is argued that public sector restructuring, particularly concerning decentralization and the quest for flexibility, has facilitated the differential treatment of employees, thereby fundamentally eroding the basis of equal opportunity policy and practice.

Trade unions, equal pay and the law in the UK

Trade unions in the UK have traditionally followed a voluntarist strategy that has preferred collective bargaining and avoided the use of the law wherever possible. The exception to this has been in relation to the pursuit of equal pay between women and men. This article examines this apparent contradiction by examining the ways in which British trade unions have used the equality legislation in the past to secure equal pay through the courts. The article further considers recent legislative changes that, by adopting a reflexive approach, appeared to open up ways for equality bargaining to take place. Unfortunately the conclusion is not a positive one as political conservatism in relation to equality and judicial animosity towards trade unions have secured the status quo, ironically forcing trade unions to continue to use adversarial legal methods to pursue equal pay.

Using equality to challenge austerity: new actors, old problems

This article critically examines the potential for ‘new actors’ in industrial relations to use developments in equality law to challenge government economic policy. The author draws on documentary analysis of the Fawcett Society’s attempt to gain a judicial review of the 2010 emergency budget alongside legal theory in relation to reflexive regulation and literature that examines ‘new actors’ in industrial relations. The aim is to stimulate debate on the role of the state and social movements in pursuing gender equality and how the latter might compete with or complement the role of trade unions. The concluding argument is that, while reflexive legislation provides opportunities for social movements to complement trade union activity, the role of the state remains contradictory, ultimately thwarting legal enforcement of equality when its economic authority and the interests of capital are threatened.

Modernisation or casualisation? Numerical flexibility in public services

‘Flexibility’ is a key feature of the governments modernisation agenda. The government does not define the kind of flexibility it aims to promote in its modernisation agenda; but data indicates that numerical flexibility, in the form of temporary work, is already a characteristic of public-sector employment, particularly in local government. This paper reports on research data that highlights the way numerical flexibility undermines other key aspects of public-service delivery and the modernisation agenda, such as equal opportunities and recruitment and retention. It argues that the poorer terms and conditions of temporary workers provide additional support for trade union claims of the existence of a ‘two-tier workforce’ in local government.

The nightmare of temporary work: a comment on Fevre

Ralph Fevre in his recent article ‘Employment Insecurity and Social Theory: The Power of Nightmares’, in Work, Employment and Society 21(3) (2007), seeks to continue the debate on how job insecurity is theorized and measured in academic research. While Fevre makes some useful general points, his analysis, particularly in relation to temporary work in the UK, requires some qualification. Fevre’s basic argument is that reporting of job insecurity in UK and US labour markets is exaggerated and has been co-opted by political, ideological and economic actors with an interest in putting neo-liberalism, competition and globalization at centre stage. Fevre supports his argument by secondary analysis of large scale survey data and contends that the empirical data does not warrant the academic attention that the concept of job insecurity has attracted. In relation to temporary work, Fevre’s argument is that the low and falling level of temporary work is one of the main indicators that job insecurity is not a significant feature of UK labour markets. He further argues that the reduction in levels of temporary work has favoured women as the gap between men and women employed in temporary work has reduced. Fevre is quite right to point to the problematic nature of statistical data in relation to temporary or ‘atypical’ work. Previous critics have noted the problem of international comparisons of temporary work (Campbell and Burgess, 2001; Meulders et al., 1994). Fevre has avoided a common failure when providing an analysis of job insecurity by acknowledging a distinction between the very concrete potential for job insecurity posed by temporary work and the more generalized feeling of job insecurity any worker may feel in adverse labour market conditions. Doogan (2001, 2005) by comparison prefers to measure labour market insecurity in relation to job tenure and argues that, because the length of job tenure is increasing in European labour markets, the evidence for job insecurity is weaker. One problem with relying on job tenure as a measure of labour market insecurity is that it misses the point that increased job tenure and high levels of temporary employment can exist in the same labour market.

Representing fixed-term workers: The anatomy of a trade union campaign

Purpose – Drawing on literature that examines trade union representation of “non‐standard” workers, this paper aims to analyse the attempts of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) to integrate the interests of contract research staff (CRS) employed on fixed‐term contracts between 1974 and 2002. The paper examines the union campaign under five areas identified in the literature as important to the development of representation of non‐standard workers: trade union orientation to non‐standard workers; recruitment; participation; collective bargaining; extending representation beyond collective bargaining.Design/methodology/approach – The main sources of data are drawn from analyses of union documentation, including internal memoranda and reports dating back to 1974, which chart the antecedents and progress of the AUT campaign against casualisation. This is supported by participant and non‐participant observation of 14 union meetings and events coupled with data from 20 semi‐structured interviews with...

Book review symposium: Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, reviewed by Hazel Conley

(a passivity due to despair about not finding meaningful work), anxiety (due to chronic insecurity) and alienation (due to lack of purpose and social disapproval). As such, they constitute a ‘new dangerous class’ for politics and social instability that is susceptible to being mobilized by extremist political groups and neo-fascist messages. A basic and obvious question is whether the precariat is really a class, or if its internal divisions are sufficiently great to impede collective action in pursuit of mutual interests. Some members are young and highly educated, while others have relatively little education and lack the skills needed to compete in the new global economy. Moreover, the well educated youth in the vanguard of many precarious protest movements are likely to come to blame others within the precariat – such as immigrants, criminals and other defenseless groups – for the difficulties that they experience in the labour market. Nevertheless, Standing makes a compelling case that while the members of the precariat may have differential relationships to the means of production, they still have many vital interests in common and thus it is strategically useful to think of them as constituting a class. Standing argues for a ‘politics of paradise’ to address the concerns of the precariat. This political agenda includes first and foremost the provision of economic security and representation security, the two ‘meta-securities’ that are needed to realize one’s rights in a flexible, open economic system. He also outlines the need for a reconstruction of the concept of work that goes beyond the notion of labour (or market-based work). Quoting (ironically) the free-market advocate Milton Friedman, Standing maintains that it is important to keep these progressive but currently utopian ideas alive until they become politically feasible. The key challenge, of course, is how to translate these progressive principles into collective actions, so as to provide the precariat with a political program that might create the agency it needs to become a ‘class-for-itself’. Standing does not explain in detail how the changes that he proposes are likely to come about and he leaves largely unspecified the kinds of strategies and tactics that might be capable of overcoming the obstacles to achieving the politics of paradise. Still, he offers the optimistic views that the progressive policies he espouses are both possible and increasingly necessary and that we are getting closer to addressing the problems of the precariat due to the recent energy being displayed by current social movements around the world. Whether the politics of paradise triumph over the politics of the inferno remains to be seen, but this book provides a vision of a way forward.

Capital & Class Past and Present: Some Reflections on Our First 25 Years

The first question Capital & Class’s editors asked themselves when it reached  years old is, ‘Why are we still here?’ Capital & Class was a child of , of a radical age that no longer exists. Yet, unlike so many other products of that time it has succumbed to neither respectability, nor age, nor lack of interest. It remains an enfant terrible, the journal of choice for some important questions that cannot be asked anywhere else. It has rejuvenated itself; the Editorial Board was hard pressed to find two members who could even remember enough about the old days to co-write this introduction. The journal is alive, young and kicking with a healthy worldwide circulation of -plus and still rising and a backlog of articles to publish. Whatever  and the journal survived on, it was not academic approval, although not a few research projects now commonplace in social science or liberal arts programmes can trace their roots to Capital & Class’s pages. Capital & Class was a child of struggle and as Fred Lee’s article testifies, it is still thumbing its nose at the academic establishment.  held a year  conference on globalisation and sponsored the thriving Association of Heterodox Economists. The publication of the French students’ petition against the stifling dogmatism and irrelevance of modern economics teaching, and its series of special issues—on globalisation, Capital & Class Past and Present: Some reflections on our first 25 years

The good, the not so good and the ugly: gender equality, equal pay and austerity in English local government

Drawing on theories of responsive and reflexive legislation and gender mainstreaming, this article examines the implementation of the gender equality duty and the Single Status Agreement in five English local authorities between 2008 and 2010. Both of these initiatives coincided with the global financial crisis. The data highlights how organizational restructuring following budget cuts resulted in the separation of these two important initiatives between equality and human resource management teams, preventing the duty from reaching the high expectations of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Women and Work Commission. The reliance on equal pay legislation and the failure to use the gender equality duty missed an opportunity to move away from adversarial forms of legislation and towards more responsive forms of regulation of pay equality.