In March this year the “Work Foundation” published a Report, “Zero Choices: Swapping Zero-Hour Contracts for Secure Flexible Working”, in which they said:
“Only one in 16 people who use zero-hour contracts as their main job have a regular income and basic employment protections.
“Of the estimated 1.1 million working age people in the UK employed on zero-hour contracts, almost three in four (73.5%) are in severely insecure work, meaning they must contend with multiple forms of insecurity such as contractual insecurity, low wages, unpredictable pay, and lack of access to rights and protections.
“A further 20.4% are in moderately insecure work and only 6.1% are in secure work, meaning they have a regular income and access to rights. This means that whilst for a minority of people zerohour contracts might be a sustainable form of flexible work, for the vast majority, they represent precarity.
One thing we discovered when preparing for our April 2024 public meeting, “Decent Work – What can we do locally to promote it?”, however, is that there seems to be a lack of what now gets called “granular” detail when it comes to identifying the prime locations for the opposite of “Decent Work” – the precarious, un-unionised and low paid jobs that make up the depressing purgatory through which a proportion of workers are “churned” almost everywhere.
Is Blackburn worse off in this respect than Darwen, or the Ribble Valley, or Manchester? Statistically, there is not a lot that we know.
Sophie Little, speaking at our meeting, told us that the Living Wage Foundation calculated that 16.2% of jobs paid below Real Living Wage in Blackburn, which was higher than the estimated national figure of 12.5%.
What we also know is that Disposable Household Income shows considerable variation across Lancashire, with around a£10,000pa difference between the households in Lancashire with the lowest disposable household income (Blackburn with Darwen (£15,025) and the highest Ribble Valley (£24,734). We also know that Blackburn with Darwen now has the fifth highest level of child poverty in the UK at 40.4 per cent. This is up from 29.8 per cent in 2014/15’s figures and 35.9 per cent in 2019/20.
Our meeting in April had a two purposes.
Firstly, it was a way of making available information about “Decent Work” and about different approaches to either understanding or achieving it. Sophie gave us information about the Living Wage Foundation, about how it had started in 2001, and about how its aim was to determine and promote the wage rate necessary to ensure that households earn enough to reach a minimum acceptable living standard. The Foundation believes that its efforts have moved some 460,000 workers onto the “real” Living Wage, and there are now 14,000 accredited employers.
But – whilst Blackburn with Darwen has over 5,500 active businesses, only 21 are Foundation accredited.
Dr Adrian Wright from UCLAN gave us feedback from the survey on “Work in Lancashire” done by the Institute for Research into Organisations, Work and Employment. Although the sample size was quite small and covered the whole of Lancashire (with just 14% of respondents being from Blackburn with Darwen) there was a clear consistency in the views of the survey respondents and the subsequent interviewees on the key issues.
The survey did not really have the capacity to distinguish between “good” and “bad” jobs, so it gives us more of an overall picture of how Lancastrians see their work; it is really only by implication that we imagine that the “worse” results are more likely to reflect the experience of people in “bad jobs”. As Trade Unionists, we are probably prone also to prick up our ears at the bad news; that 65% of respondents did not have a Trade Union, that 70% felt they had to work longer than contracted to get their work done, that only 55% felt they were fairly paid and that 51% said they felt they had experienced stress, anxiety or depression either because of or made worse by work.
Dr Mat Johnson from the Manchester University “Decent Work and the City” project explained that issues raised by precarious work and enforcing good employment practices were exercising civic authorities in many parts of the world, and that employers who played fast and loose with workers’ prosperity were as much a “global” feature as the ease with which production in some sectors could be moved around the world. What tended to differ was more the extent to which local governments had devolved power and could directly regulate standards.
In Britain, even the various metro-mayors were limited in what they could achieve and all Local Authorities faced budget dilemmas – with social care and statutory responsibilities occupying ever greater proportions of their available resources. They had tended to find that the two most effective leavers for improving local employment options were procurement and exhortation. Procurement strategies ranged from trying to “buy local” to making certain behaviours a requirement in securing public contracts. Exhortation mainly took the form of endorsing and promoting local “Employment Charters”. These latter were more associated with larger and more dynamic Authorities, and they tended to vary in how specific they were – should they, for instance, insist that supporting employers should pay the “real” living Wage, or simply “encourage” this? It might be felt that there was a degree of trade-off between the tightness of objectives and the scope of engagement.
Arguably, we took a bit of a mis-step in pronouncing our own “Employment Charter” – Employment Charter – Blackburn and District Trades Union Council (bdtuc.co.uk) – rather than simply encouraging the Borough to take the lead in gathering together a “coalition of the willing”, even if that were to be on a more milquetoast basis. It does, nonetheless, help us focus our own minds on what we see as the local priorities.
Clearly, getting improvements in work practice where there is no direct Trade Union “effect” is a slow and difficult process. The second of our purposes in hosting the meeting was simply to try and keep the issues alive within the sphere of public debate. Not every campaign has a clear duration. This is one for the long haul, to which it is our intention to return as we consider further activities for the year ahead.