Jill Rubery

Women's employment in Europe : trends and prospects

Based on extensive original research, this volume examines contemporary patterns of womens employment in Europe in the context of the profound economic, social and cultural changes that have taken place in recent years. It considers the progress made towards equal treatment in the labour market in the light of European Union action programmes, and examines the prospects for womens employment under the fourth action programme. The authors conclude that progress towards equal treatment will only occur when gender issues are fully integrated into the European Commissions employment and labour market policies.

Changing Organizational Forms and the Employment Relationship

This paper draws upon new research in the UK into the relationship between changing organizational forms and the reshaping of work in order to consider the changing nature of the employment relationship. The development of more complex organizational forms – such as cross organization networking, partnerships, alliances, use of external agencies for core as well as peripheral activities, multi-employer sites and the blurring of public/private sector divide – has implications for both the legal and the socially constituted nature of the employment relationship. The notion of a clearly defined employer–employee relationship becomes difficult to uphold under conditions where employees are working in project teams or on-site beside employees from other organizations, where responsibilities for performance and for health and safety are not clearly defined, or involve more than one organization. This blurring of the relationship affects not only legal responsibilities, grievance and disciplinary issues and the extent of transparency and equity in employment conditions, but also the definition, constitution and implementation of the employment contract defined in psychological and social terms. Do employees perceive their responsibilities at work to lie with the direct employer or with the wider enterprise or network organization? And do these perceptions affect, for example, how work is managed and carried out and how far learning and incremental knowledge at work is integrated in the development of the production or service process? So far the investigation of both conflicts and complementarities in the workplace have focused primarily on the dynamic interactions between the single employer and that organization’s employees. The development of simultaneously more fragmented and more networked organizational forms raises new issues of how to understand potential conflicts and contradictions around the ‘employer’ dimension to the employment relationship in addition to more widely recognized conflicts located on the employer–employee axis.

National Working-time Regimes and Equal Opportunities

Progress towards equal opportunities is critically dependent upon the development of a more equal and more balanced allocation of time in both paid and unpaid work. Gender divisions relating to working time arise primarily from differences in gender divisions within the household but the extent and form that these gender divisions take in the labor market are moderated or mediated by national working-time regimes. These regimes are found to be extremely diverse across Europe with very different implications for gender equality. Current interests in greater flexibility in working time are leading to pressures to changes in working-time regimes and to an increase in the extent of unsocial hours working. The strategies adopted to meet these pressures may vary by country and sector but the restructuring of working time is also likely to be influenced by gender factors and divisions. The result may be increasing differentiation by both gender and class. Progress towards equality requires a renewal of interest in reducing standard working hours and a questioning of the current assumption that increasing unsocial hours working is essential for competitiveness.

Women and European Employment

1. Introduction 2. The female contribution to the European employment rate 3. Womens employment rates and structural and regional change 4. Unemployment, gender and labour market organisation 5. State policies and womens employment and unemployment rates 6. Household organisation, state policy and womens employment rates 7. The new member state 8. Conclusions Notes References Appendices

Gender Mainstreaming and Gender Equality in the EU: The Impact of the EU Employment Strategy

The visibility of the European Union’s commitment to gender equality has risen considerably since the agreement at the Luxembourg summit in 1997 to include strengthening equal opportunities between women and men as the fourth pillar of the employment guidelines, alongside those of employability, adaptability and entrepreneurship. The inclusion of a new guideline on gender mainstreaming in 1999 that requires member states to consider the gender impact of all policies under each of the pillars1 provided a further major impetus to the integration of equal opportunities issues into the employment framework. This impetus has been reinforced by many of the Council of Ministers recommendations on employment policy which have stressed the need to strengthen mainstreaming or other equal opportunities policies. The European employment strategy is part of the EU’s adoption of the socalled ‘open method of coordination’ (Goetschy, 2001; Rodrigues, 2001) which allows member states to develop policy programmes appropriate to their particular situation but according to agreed common guidelines. This approach is also likened to benchmarking (Terry and Towers, 2000; Tronti, 1999; Plantenga and Hansen, 1999). Employment was the first of these programmes to use action plans along common guidelines but has since been followed by social inclusion. However, in the recent period by far the most important EU influence on equal opportunities policies has come from the employment strategy.

Women and recession

The contributors to this book investigate what impact the recent recession has had on womens employment focusing on the changing patterns of womens employment in relation to changes in industrial organization and labour markets.

Working Time, Industrial Relations and the Employment Relationship

This article explores the erosion of the standard working-time model associated with the UKs voluntarist system of industrial relations, and argues that its renegotiation is likely to be a critical factor in shaping the employment relationship of the future. As numerous studies over the last two decades have revealed, organizations have increasingly seen ‘time’ as a variable that can be manipulated to increase productivity or expand service provision, through making workers work harder, longer or according to management demands. These studies have also drawn our attention to the wider consequences of the increasing demands that organizations place on their employees in the name of ‘flexibility’, impacting both on what workers do while at work and how they organize and plan the other aspects of their lives. This article brings together two literatures, one on time and the other on industrial relations, and suggests that new working-time arrangements are changing the wage-effort bargain and blurring the previously clearly demarcated boundary between work and non-work time. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in six large UK-based organizations, we argue that there is evidence of a move towards a new ‘temporality’ based on an employer-led model of working time, which differs significantly from both the traditional UK system of working-time regulation and that found in Continental Europe.

Women and recession revisited

In earlier work (Rubery, 1988), the extent to which women might act as a flexible reserve over the business cycle was argued to depend on three main factors: the pattern of gender segregation and its relationship to employment change; women’s commitment to labour market participation; and state policy and support for women’s employment. This article revisits these factors in the context of the 2008/9 recession and the follow-on austerity policy to explore how gender segregation is associated with employment change by gender, how far reduced demand is influencing women’s labour market participation, and the implications of changes in public policy associated with austerity and reduced labour demand for women’s future employment position.

Skill and occupational change

In this major new book leading sociologists, economists, and social psychologists present their highly original research into changes in jobs in Britain in the 1980s. Combining large-scale sample surveys, personal life-histories, and case studies of towns, employers, and worker groups, their findings give clear and often surprising answers to questions debated by social and economic observers in all advanced countries. Does technolgoy destroy skills or rebuild them? how does skill affect the attitudes of employees and their managers towards their jobs? Are women gaining greater skill equality with men, or are they still stuck on the lower rungs of the skill and occupational ladders? The book also takes up neglected issues (what do employees really mean by a skilled job? how does skill-change link with changes in social values?) and challenges and discredits the widely held view that new technology has de-skilled the workforce. Skill and Occupational Change exploits the richest single data-set available in contemporary Europe and the authors exemplify many new techniques for researching skills at work: as an economic resource, as a motor of occupational change, and as a basis for personal careers and identity. It provides the most comprehensive, authoritative, and carefully researched set of conclusions to date on skill trends and their implications and draws the authoritative new map of skill-change in British society.

The restructuring of career paths in large service sector organizations: 'delayering, upskilling and polarisation

Drawing on detailed case studies of four large service sector organizations this paper finds little evidence of training provision that links skills development with incremental career progression. Past policies of ‘delayering’ have opened up a ‘gap’ in the job ladder and this has both increased the organizational costs of formal training and reduced the likelihood of informal on-the-job training being seen as the basis for promotion to the next level. Managers are thus faced with the challenge of how to establish a new set of premises upon which to strengthen the workforces loyalty and commitment to the organization, in the context of problems of high staff turnover and low job satisfaction. What we find is a greater emphasis on certificated training provision. However, in the absence of a transparent career path employers rely on more intensive techniques of appraisal and selection of workers for a ‘winner-takes-all’ career path. Given the importance of skills acquisition as an important building block of the ‘learning society’, our findings suggest that policymakers in Britain cannot rely solely upon the employer to bridge the skill gap evident in large service sector organizations.