Documents Rubery, Jill 97 results

"This article investigates the intersection between precarious work and precarious lives through interviews with workers in the care, hospitality and art sectors. These revealed that workers experienced precarity as a double-edged sword of time and income uncertainty shaped by the context in which they were embedded – namely their employment, their household and their relations with state welfare and care systems. These three domains shaped both the constraints they faced and the buffers and resources available to them as they managed these time and income uncertainties. A dynamic work–life articulation framework is developed that embeds the strategies workers deploy to mitigate uncertainty within these three domains and their intersections. These strategies may still only result in the least bad and often far from sustainable outcome due to changing contexts and trade-offs between time and income uncertainty."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Drawing on 12 case studies across 10 countries of how trade unions and collective bargaining institutions supported front-line workers in healthcare, social care and food retail, this article finds that pre-existing or new collective bargaining or social dialogue forums provided important avenues for employee voice on pandemic management. Trade unions also supported marginalized front-line workers through multiple tactics, though most initiatives predated the pandemic and often depended upon gaining active state support, which was not always possible. Trade unions were thus pursuing sword-of-justice objectives, though they were sometimes less open to revaluing front-line work already covered by collectively negotiated grading structures."

"Drawing on a multilevel study of commissioning, employers, and care staff, this article explores the role of time in the management of domiciliary care work for older adults in England and the consequences for the employment conditions of care staff. An index of fragmented time practices among 52 independent-sector domiciliary care providers reveals widespread tendencies to use zero-hours contracts and limit paid hours to face-to-face contact time, leaving travel time and other work-related activities unpaid. Care staff interviews reveal how fragmented time creates insecurities and demands high work engagement. Time management practices are shown to derive directly from strict time-based local authority commissioning. Subcontractors, both independent small firms and those belonging to national chains, can at best adopt human resource (HR) policies that are partial routes to failure, as evident in widespread recruitment and retention problems. Informal HR practices to accommodate working-time preferences help to retain individual staff, but adjustments are often marginal, adversely affect other staff and fail to expand the recruitment pool for social care. Labor shortages are likely to persist as long as workers are required to adapt to a regime of fragmented time and to work more hours than are paid, even at pay rates close to the national minimum wage."

"Despite much legislative progress in gender equality over the past 40 years, there are still gender gaps across many aspects of the labour market. Inequalities are still evident in areas such as access to the labour market, employment patterns and associated working conditions. This report explores gender differences across several dimensions of working conditions, examining relevant country differences, analysing the different occupational groups of both men and women, and comparing the public and private sectors. It also looks at the impact of the crisis on gender segregation in employment. Based on findings from the fifth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS), conducted in 2010, the analysis offers a striking picture of women and men at work across 34 European countries today"

"The European Union (EU) has an explicit commitment to raise the employment rate for women and to advance gender mainstreaming (GM) and gender equality in both employment and social inclusion policies. In this article we assess developments in the latest round of National Action Plans (NAPs), with particular attention to the situations in the 10 new member states. GM continues to be patchy and inadequate, with a similarly narrow focus in both 'old' and 'new' member states. After enlargement, the greater diversity of national situations in conjunction with ongoing reforms to EU policy frameworks create new challenges for GM."