A package of policies designed to create more ‘good jobs’ is urged today in a new report. The quality of employment has an impact on health, life expectancy and life chances and government cannot make serious progress towards the reduction of health inequalities unless it has policies to improve job quality for the most disadvantaged. Work is better for health and life expectancy than worklessness, but it is only really good for us if it is ‘good work’, the report argues.
Unless the government shifts attention to the quality of employment then it will fail to achieve an 80% employment rate or its target on reducing child poverty. Too many people are trapped in a ‘revolving door’ of bad, short-term jobs and joblessness, it says.

Lead author David Coats said: ‘The case for full employment and quality jobs go hand in hand. The priority must not just be to get people off benefits and back to work but to keep people in work. The ‘rights and responsibilities’ rhetoric is fair enough, but what’s missing from politicians is any sense of what good, sustainable jobs are and how to go about creating them.’

The report argues good jobs involve stimulating, challenging and varied work, good relationships with colleagues and employers, along with opportunities for progression and development. Other important factors include employment security, a guarantee that workers will be treated fairly by their employers, control for employees over their work and a proper balance between the effort that workers make and the rewards that they receive.

Using a thorough review of the research evidence on job quality, the paper rejects the view of some pessimistic commentators that globalisation and competition are bringing about a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of job quality.

It finds that the differences in job quality are explained by differences in the power balance between employers and unions, the extent to which job quality is seen as a workplace issue linked to a wider political debate about the quality of life, and whether government takes the issue seriously by encouraging, through publicly funded programmes, the identification, dissemination and application of good practice.

The paper finds:

• Job security is higher in the UK than many other EU 15 member states – including France, Germany and Sweden
• Levels of autonomy and task discretion are around the EU average (although this conceals a significant reduction in autonomy and control in the UK over the last 15 years)
• Work in the UK got much harder over the course of the 1990s, although the process has slowed down since the beginning of the decade
• Employees in the ‘high autonomy’ countries (such as Sweden) work at a higher intensity than employees in the UK. Sophisticated work organisation models (autonomous team working, job rotation, joint problem solving) are more widespread in those countries than in the UK.
• British workers seem to be undertaking more monotonous tasks than their counterparts in the Nordic countries and in Germany.

David Coats said: ‘The UK is not the worst performer on all measures of job quality in Europe.

But we are still extraordinarily tolerant of the large numbers of jobs we have that are characterised by routine, monotonous work, tight managerial control, and excessive working hours. To allow this to continue is bad for business, bad for government and bad for people at work. The principles of ‘good work’ are even more important at times of economic turbulence than in times of prosperity because they offer an accurate compass to plot a course towards both full employment and decent jobs.’

The paper calls for:

• The abolition of the individual opt-out from the Working time Directive over a four year period to help reduce the high numbers of people working more than 48 hours a week.
• Strengthening the information and consultation legislation to grant workers’ representatives the authority to address questions of work quality and work performance.

• Imposing new reporting requirements on publicly listed companies to include detailed information about health and safety performance, the incidence of illness, job satisfaction and autonomy and control data, within annual reports.
• A government sponsored ‘challenge fund’ to encourage workplace innovation, boosting productivity and improving the quality of work.

• An ethical approach to public procurement so that government only does business with organisations offering ‘good work’.
• More effective enforcement of existing employment rights, including the National Minimum Wage.
• More widespread application of the Health and Safety Executive’s Stress Management Standards, delivered through the advisory services offered by the HSE, ACAS and Business Link.

Source: Work Foundation