Paying for free delivery: dependent self-employment as a measure of precarity in parcel delivery

This article explores supply chain pressures in parcel delivery and how the drive to contain costs to ‘preserve value in motion’, including the costs of failed delivery, underpins contractual differentiation. It focuses on owner-drivers and home couriers paid by delivery. It considers precarity through the lens of the labour process, while locating it within the supply chain, political economy and ‘instituted economic process’ that define it. Focus on the labour process shows how ‘self-employment’ is used to remove so-called ‘unproductive’ time from the remit of paid labour. Using Smith’s concept of double indeterminacy the article captures the dynamic relationship between those on standard and non-standard contracts and interdependency of effort power and mobility power. It exposes the apparent mobility and autonomy of dependent selfemployed drivers while suggesting that their presence, alongside the increased use of technology, reconfigures the work-effort bargain across contractual status

Modelling UK sub-sector industrial energy demand

The importance of considering homogenous economic agents when estimating energy demand functions is recognized in the literature, but so far data availability problems have explained the prevalence of empirical analyses only at an aggregate level. Motivated by the goal of developing the new industrial module to be adopted by the UK government Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) for their econometric Energy Demand Model, we propose the first cointegration analysis that provides evidence on energy demand elasticities with respect to economic activity and energy price at a disaggregated industrial level. While the average of our estimates are comparable to those of the existing literature on the industrial sector as a whole, we find that there is considerable heterogeneity in relation to the long-run impact of economic activity and energy price on energy consumption, as well as to the speed with which firms re-adjust their equilibrium demand of energy in response to economic shocks. Finally, we learn that long-run disequilibria are tackled through altering the level of energy consumption rather than economic activity, a conclusion that has important implications for policy analysis

A 'place based' approach to work and employment: the end of reciprocity, ordinary working families and 'giggers' in a place

The authors define ‘place basing’ as the study of work and employment in a particular place. They are interested in understanding the limitations of work opportunities therein and so focus on workers and jobs that are not subject to the threat of off-shoring or relocation elsewhere but which are low paid and insecure. The authors theorize three contributions to new knowledge that flow from a place-based study of work and employment by demonstrating how precarious flexible often zero hour work eschews reciprocity between employer and employees and workers. They focus their research on ordinary working families and the ‘permissive visibility’ of bad work. The research points to an idealized model of individual and family economic functioning that is able to cope with physical and mental challenges individually without burdening the state. As the findings on workers and households demonstrate, this ideal is far from the reality they experience