In the absence of other supportive measures, the UK’s furlough scheme will reinforce gender inequalities

Rose Cook and Damian Grimshaw discuss the potential long-term impact of the furlough scheme on women and argue that additional measures are needed to ensure a gender-sensitive recovery from the crisis

Shaping and reshaping the work organisation : including or excluding low skilled labour? The case of the nurse assistant in Germany, France and the United Kingdom

The hospital industry could be characterised on the one hand as under “industrial constraints” (just in time, 24 hours opening, and on the other hand as a service activity with, in departments, a high degree of patient oriented activities. Very similar pressure are exerted on hospitals in the three countries (UK, G and F): budget constraints and a trend to “quasi market” regulations (cf. Bartlett/LeGrand 1993); changes in the competitive structure linked with the increasing importance of private hospitals; a new demand for care arising from the ageing population and more complex diseases; new rules to control for the quality of care. Despite these similarities between the external demands and constraints, the organisation of care work and the division of labour remains very different between the countries. Section 1 presents a brief historical perspective of the nurse assistant in the three countries and the major contrast regarding the level and trends of employment. Section 2 analyses the training profiles and access to training. Section 3 describes the tasks performed and draws the job profile of a NA. Section 4 discusses the wage levels and structure and section 5 patterns of mobility.Low wage; Nurse assistant; Hospital; Division of labour; Comparison; Germany; France; the United Kingdom

Working Time, Industrial Relations and the Employment Relationship

This article explores the erosion of the standard working-time model associated with the UK's 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

Market exposure and the labour process: the contradictory dynamics in managing subcontracted services work

Marketization of the employment relationship is a key causal factor explaining the adverse impact of subcontracting low-wage services on employment conditions. This article extends existing sociological theory by analysing the market-making and rule-breaking roles of client and subcontractor firms through qualitative data. It finds that client organisations construct different types and temporalities of marketised cost pressures, that clients and subcontractors exploit their power advantage over labour to evade institutional rules, and that labour process and reputational concerns impose a degree of moderation towards socially desirable outcomes. The theoretical framework ‘unpacks’ marketization by distinguishing the interplay between contracts, regulation and labour process requirements as shaped by clients and subcontractors. In the UK cleaning sector, the potentially positive effects of client and subcontractor actions on employment conditions are marginal, focused on non-pay aspects and introduced primarily for reputational reasons. The evidence indicates the limits of voluntary action and the need for regulation