As the word suggests, by their very nature, these forms of work organisation involve a fluid movement across traditional demarcations and throw into doubt the discreteness of many of the categories used in conventional classification systems, including occupational, industrial, and locational categories and categories relating to economic activity rates, establishment size, employment status and working hours. When measuring the size of an organisation's payroll, for instance, should temporary or on-call staff be included? And what about homeworkers, or agents paid on commission? To take another example, under what occupation should multi-skilled workers be categorised when their job descriptions require them to shift between several distinct groups of tasks in response to the employer's requirements? And what is the 'normal working day' in an organisation which, like some large supermarkets, has over a hundred different shift patterns in simultaneous operation spread over a total working week of up to 80 hours?
This paper does not attempt a systematic review of all labour market statistics in relation to flexible work. Its intention is merely to illustrate some inadequacies of the existing statistics as I have experienced them in the course of my own work as a practising researcher in this field.
Before doing so, however, it is worth making two general points. The first is that, although not exclusively so, the study of flexible workers is overwhelmingly a study of women workers. Many of the difficulties encountered in researching flexible work are not in fact new, but exacerbations of problems which have long been recognised in the use of official statistics for the study of women's employment. The second is that the rapid growth of flexible forms of work during the past decade has been a reflection of other changes taking place in the organisation of work, as a result of technological change, of economic restructuring and of deregulation. Again, some of the problems which have been thrown up in relation to the interpretation of labour market statistics are not exclusive to the study of flexible forms of work but are characteristic of the more general difficulties of extracting information about rapidly changing dynamic trends from essentially static data sets. Ironically enough, to the extent that reclassification has taken place to take account of changing workplace realities, this has compounded the difficulties of measuring trends, by removing the basis for comparability over time.
The first is that the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) categories themselves do not always reflect reality very clearly. Many large corporations (for instance ICI, Unilever or GEC) span a number of different sectors in the scope of their activities and the assignment of many of their staff to one sector rather than another must be fairly arbitrary. In other industries, convergence between sectors has been brought about by technological change rather than by ownership structure. An example of this would be the convergence between computers, office machines and telecommunications which has taken place over the past two decades, producing end-products which not only incorporate elements from all three but which may also be marketed to both commercial and domestic consumer markets.
A greater difficulty, from our point of view, is the way in which workers are classified according to the industrial activity of their employer, rather than to their relation to the production process. Thus a cleaner, lorry-driver or graphic designer working for Fords would be classified under the car industry, but the same workers, doing the same jobs for companies to whom Fords had sub-contracted the work would be classified under the relevant service industry. The growth of sub-contracting in recent years has therefore produced some degree of statistical change - in the apparent rate of decline of some manufacturing industries, and concomitant growth of some service industries - which does not reflect any real change in who is actually doing what work for whom. A similar effect may in some cases be produced by the breaking up of large organisations into smaller specialist subsidiary companies, operating as separate profit centres.
Even more serious, for the purposes of analysing the flexible workforce, is the lack of detailed occupational data in these industrially-structured statistics. Because of occupational segregation, the vast majority of women workers, and also the majority of 'flexible' workers' are concentrated in a fairly narrow range of what might be called 'service' occupations, many of which are common to a large number of different industries. These include manual occupations, such as cleaning and catering, and non-manual ones, such as typing, book-keeping, data entry, filing and reception or switchboard operation. Because their skills are not industry-specific, these workers' fate is not necessarily tied to that of any particular industry and, even when in full- time permanent employment, they may move frequently from sector to sector. Indeed, some part-time workers may simultaneously hold jobs in more than one sector. A cleaner, for instance, may clean offices at night and homes during the day; a catering worker might serve school dinners at lunchtime and pints behind a bar in the evenings. Similarly, a 'temp' typist might work in a bank, a civil service department and the headquarters of a manufacturing or retailing company during the course of a single week.
In short, the industrial classification of employment serves to obscure, rather than illuminate, the dynamics of employment in these cross-indstry categories. In order to monitor the fate of such groups of workers, what is required is occupational data broken down into the sort of detail which is available from the Census of Population, and directly comparable to it.
Because of the different sampling methods used, there is also often a confusion, in the interpretation of these figures, between the number of part-time jobs, and the number of part-time workers in various occupational or industrial groups. Because, as already noted, some part- time workers, and indeed some full-time workers, hold more than one job, the two cannot be said to be identical. The tendency to count jobs, rather than quantify the hours of work they contribute, is a common failing among labour market analysts, and has led to an exaggerated view of the growth of certain service industries, such as retailing, catering and financial services, which have in fact witnessed not only a rapid growth of part-time working, but also a reduction in the average number of hours worked by part-time workers, in recent years.
However this tendency cannot be blamed entirely on the statistics. The New Earnings Survey does in fact provide a very useful breakdown of part-time employment by the number of hours worked. Unfortunately, though, the New Earnings Survey has other deficiencies which seriously restrict its usefulness as a comprehensive source of information about part-time working.
Because it is based on National Insurance records, it omits all workers whose earnings fall below the threshold for payment of National Insurance contributions. This has two effects: to understate the total number of part-time workers, particularly those working a small number of hours per week; and to bias the sample in favour of high-earning workers, thus overstating average hourly pay rates. Because it is a survey of jobs, rather than of people, it also includes some double-counting of part-time workers. Finally, of course, it also excludes part-time workers in the informal economy whose employers are evading the payment of National Insurance contributions.
In the Labour Force Survey, such workers, if they describe themselves as 'temporary', are lumped together with a diverse range of others, including seasonal workers, freelance consultants, trainees and agency workers (although technically speaking this last category should be regarded as permanent employees of the agency). In a study carried out at the Policy Studies Institute in 1987, Bernard Casey, discovered that the Labour Force Survey's 'temporary workers' category covered no less than eleven distinct categories of worker: freelance consultants performing one-off or short-duration tasks; labour-only subcontractors; casual workers; seasonal workers; fixed-term contract workers; workers with a contract dischargeable by performance; apprentices and other workers on training contracts; temporary workers on indefinite contracts; agency workers; employees of works contractors; and participants in special programmes for the unemployed (Casey, B.,The Extent and Nature of Temporary Employment in Britain, PSI, 1987).
Additional difficulties in using the Labour Force Survey for comparisons over time were created by a change in the questionnaire between 1981 and 1984, substituting the categories 'permanent' and 'temporary' for 'regular' and 'casual'. Because a number of people who regard their employment as 'temporary' do not regard it as 'casual', this produced an exaggeratedly large apparent increase in the proportion of the workforce in this category during this period.
It is clearly impossible to reflect all these distinctions in a simple census or survey. However this does not appear to be a sufficient reason for abandoning any attempt at differentiation. At present, the category 'self-employed' includes an incongruous mixture of high-earning professional consultants and small business owners; poorly-paid homeworkers who might well, if they were aware of their rights, be regarded as employees; people who are, to all intents and purposes, employees but who are registered as self-employed, with the connivance of their employers, for the purpose of evading tax; and a number of other groups, including agents and salespeople paid by commission. The category includes both workers whose presence in it is a reflection of their high bargaining power with employers and those whose self-employed status is the result of low bargaining power. This heterogeneity makes it extremely difficult to draw any useful conclusions by monitoring fluctuations in the overall size of this group. It would be equally fallacious to conclude that a sudden growth in self-employment was evidence of successful enterprise as it would that it was evidence of intensified exploitation.
What is needed in order to monitor trends in the flexible workforce is a disaggregation of data on self-employment to make such distinctions possible.
Women's demand for flexible work is usually, in fact, a reflection of precisely such difficulties. Homework, part-time work and casual intermittent work are seen as solutions to the problem of combining income-generation with caring for children or other dependents. For women so encumbered, questions about availability for waged work or work preference can rarely be answered simply. A true picture can only be elicited by the use of conditional questions, such as, 'would you go out to work if safe and reliable childcare facilities were available?' or 'if your mother-in- law could be taken by ambulance to a day-centre' or 'if the hours fitted in with school times'. Similarly, questions such as 'would you like to work at home' must be interpreted in the context of the available alternatives: 'as opposed to going out to work' or 'as opposed to not being able to earn at all'.
In the absence of such survey questions, and the information resulting from them, it is possible to gain neither a quantitative picture of the supply of 'flexible' work nor a qualitative one of the extent to which the supply of such work matches women's actual needs and desires.
© Ursula Huws, 1990
Casey, B., The Extent and Nature of Temporary Employment in Great Britain, Policy Studies Institute, 1987
Huws, U., New Technology and Women's Employment, Equal Opportunities Commission, 1982 (pp 4-24, on methodological problems)
Huws, U., The New Homeworkers, Low Pay Unit, 1984 Bisset, L., and Huws, U., Sweated Labour: Homeworking in Britain Today, Low Pay Unit, 1984
Huws, U., 'Remote Possibilities: Some Difficulties in the Quantification and Analysis of Telework', in Steinle et al (eds), Telework: Present Situation and Future Development of a New Form of Work Organisation, North Holland, 1988
Huws, U., Hurstfield, J., and Holtmaat, R, What Price Flexibility?, Low Pay Unit, 1989
Huws, U., Korte, W., and Robinson, S.,Telework: Towards the Elusive Office, John Wiley, 1990