Documents Whiteside, Noel 5 results

"Waged work in Britain is being transformed: permanent full-time jobs decline as precarious irregular task-based employment increases. This development is actively supported by government policy (labour market deregulation, the promotion of ‘flexibility'), to promote work as the sole route out of poverty. Using historical evidence, this article argues that, on the contrary, irregular employment was for long understood as a primary cause of poverty, not its cure. It thus generates high levels of social dependency. The UK's earliest labour market policies sought to eradicate casual work and to encourage permanent employment – policies promoted assiduously for most of the twentieth century. Current governments are recreating the labour markets of the late nineteenth century, the conditions that stimulated state intervention in the first place. Three salient points arise. First, irregular employment exacerbates widening social inequalities. Second, it damages public trust. Employers evade employment obligations for task-based workers while state regulations require job-seekers to take on this work. Third, multiple job-holding and unstable employment destroys labour market categories on which policy analysis and the law rely. Legal frameworks governing employment rights are weakened and public understanding of labour markets is undermined."

"Externalities consequent on pension privatization have returned to haunt governments: externalities revealed in falling asset returns, rising administrative costs and increasingly intermittent contributions that reflect more intermittent employment. This article reviews the regulatory complexities following the promotion of personal private pensions, identifies the governance problems these entail and suggests a few measures to restore public confidence and trust. It draws our attention to the political as well as market-based risks implicit in new systems by showing how governments have adapted commercial pension provision to serve social ends and to safeguard the public finances in more ways than one. The conclusions identify solutions to issues that need urgent attention, notably the opaque nature of annuity markets, the provision of independent monitoring and information capacity and a possible reconstruction of retirement itself."

"This paper compares how extensions of pension rights were developed and implemented in major European economies in the decades following the Second World War. Governments in Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain adapted earnings-related systems as a common policy agenda to meet rising public demand for more generous pension provision. However, this generated divergent policy pathways as a common approach became translated through different institutional mechanisms and different conventions of governance - the points at which states could legitimately intervene to secure policy goals. In consequence, divisions between public and private pension provision (and the boundaries of welfare states) were blurred by the emergence of institutional hybrids. Neither state nor market, these developed in continental Europe as negotiated compromises that fostered social representation in the management of collective provision under various forms. By contrast, in the UK such governing conventions were absent and, hence, the division between public and private has proved more deep-rooted. Historical precedent suggests that current pressures towards private pension solutions cannot but produce another compromise in the form of a public-private hybrid to reconcile financial imperatives with popular demands for pension security."

"Focussing on the UK, this paper considers how employment has been understood and identifies the policies pursued to promote specific models of working life over the course of the twentieth century. In recent decades, jobs on offer in Britain have become increasingly precarious, a trend actively promoted by governments of all political complexions. Labour markets have been deregulated, flexibility of employment promoted. As work is consistently identified as the sole route out of poverty, a category of ‘working poor' has emerged. Such government strategies present as a volte face to the politics of the early twentieth century, when social investigation exposed irregular work as a cause of poverty, not its cure, and as the main factor causing a rising incidence of social dependency. The UK's earliest labour market policies sought to eradicate casual work and to encourage permanent employment—policies promoted assiduously for most of the twentieth century. Using convention theory, this paper examines these historical dimensions, to explain why and how governments sought to structure labour market operations—and the legacies bequeathed to us as a result. The principal object of the paper is the analysis of public policy—its rationale and its shortcomings—on which current employment law is founded. The paper exposes how our current understanding of ‘traditional' or ‘regular' job contracts came to be constructed and why ‘work on demand' is understood as ‘irregular', that is, as a deviant form of established employment norms."