Under the terms of the 2012 Act, ‘any qualified provider’ (AQP) can submit a tender to the local Clinical Commissioning Group to provide healthcare services. Since the act was passed in March, Serco, acting as AQP, have been awarded a £140 million contract to provide Community Services in Suffolk. Similarly, and without a trace of irony, Virgin Care will be providing Sexual Health Services in Milton Keynes. According to Unison, the Serco contract in Suffolk will result in 1000 staff being ‘TUPE’d’ from NHS contracts onto Serco contracts.

TUPE or Transfer of Undertakings [Protection of Employment] arrangements are nothing new. Ruane (2007) describes TUPE arrangements under New Labour PFI schemes, where many support services, such as hospital porters, previously provided by salaried NHS employees, came to be provided through private sector companies (and Serco has form here). Staff ended up performing exactly the same duties, but under different conditions of employment. For example, Ruane details how porters in Durham reported a £30-£40 per week shortfall in salary between TUPE and non-TUPE staff doing the same work. Between 2003 and 2005, and on the back of trade union mobilisation, agreement was reached over a public sector ‘two-tier code’. This code meant that any public sector employees who were TUPE’d to private sector organisations could not be offered a contract deemed to be ‘overall less favourable’ than their previous public sector contract (with the exception of pension provision). The two-tier code was implemented in healthcare through the ‘Agenda for Change and NHS Contractors Staff – a Joint Statement’, which was agreed in 2005.

On 13December 2010 the Cabinet Office withdrew the ‘two-tier’ code across all public sector service contracts, without discussion. It was replaced by six ‘Principles of Good Employment Practice’ These new principles are voluntary and have not been negotiated between government, employees, employers and trade unions as the two-tier code was. The requirement to avoid less favourable conditions is replaced by a commitment to ‘fair and reasonable terms and conditions’, such that;

Where a supplier employs new entrants that sit alongside former public sector workers, new entrants should have fair and reasonable pay, terms and conditions. Suppliers should consult with their recognised trade unions on the terms and conditions to be offered to new entrants.

The implications of this change, in light of the AQP legislation and the bun-fight that de-regulated NHS provision is quickly becoming, are stark and immediate. The NHS, as a collective social good, is constituted as much by its staff — by what it does for its staff and what it garners from its staff in return — as it is by a commitment to universal health care, free at the point of need. The latter isn’t possible without the former. Such is the strength of feeling for these principles of free access to healthcare, that attempts at their reform would be politically unsustainable. Staff are altogether a softer, more indirect and more politically sustainable target. The withdrawal of the two-tier code coupled to the opening up of healthcare to any qualified provider, (and the consequent privatisation and transfer of large numbers of NHS staff) is a far more immediate threat to the future of the NHS than the carve up of primary care that is currently dominating the debate. The implications of this privatisation of staff for the future of the NHS are far more invidious than people realise. There is a very clear danger that the NHS becomes nothing more than a brand, alongside Serco, Virgin Care and others. Once this happens, what becomes of the commitment to free universal healthcare as a collective social good? I would argue the situation becomes terminal.

Reference

Ruane, S. (2007) ‘Acts of distrust? Support workers experiences in PFI hospital schemes’, 75–92, in G. Mooney and A. Law (eds.) (2007) New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and resistance inside the welfare industry , Bristol: The Policy Press.

Kerry was a careers advisor in a career she hated. She took redundancy and spent her pay-out ‘upskilling’, taking a vocational MA, which she thought would increase her chance of a job in the culture industries. She did what is supposed to be right: she aspired to higher qualifications, and she aspired to fulfilling work. She did well on the course. And she learned that what would make the difference to her chances of good, exciting work wasn’t the quality of her work, it was the quality of her network.

Unemployed since the end of the course, Kerry has just found the most temporary of jobs: as a “Peak Relief Assistant” at a local library. She provides holiday and sickness cover for full time workers. On a temporary contract, her working hours are flexible and contingent (on their being holiday and sickness) and her job content is unpredictable. Further, the continued existence of her job is dependent on structural changes to the public sector: in the aftermath of public sector spending cuts, two pincer moves might stymie Kerry’s chances of ‘good’ employment: firstly hers, the most precarious of jobs is easiest to cut, and secondly ‘efficiency savings’ will render more jobs ‘flexible’ so her chance of locating stable employment, and a stable life, will lessen. Kerry experiences of both sides of precarity: the precarity of networked life in the culture industries (Gill and Pratt, 2008), and the precarity of temporary, flexiblised service work (McDowell, et al, 2009). She scrapes an unpredictable living.

Cuts, rhetorical shifts, changing social welfare and the drive to ever more competition are producing a hyper-precarious labour market. This labour market has precarious employment relationships, precarious forms of work (what Barbier (2008) calls ‘jobs without status’), high and rising unemployment, and attacks on already undependable, and moralised, mechanisms of social support. It’s no way to make a living.

References

1. Barbier, J C (2008) ‘There is more to Job Quality that ‘Precariousness’: a Comparative Epistemological Analysis of the ‘Flexibility and Security’ Debate in Europe’. In Flexibility and Employment Security in Europe: Labour Markets in Transition. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
2. Gill, R. and Pratt, A.C. (2008). ‘In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work.’ Theory, Culture and Society Annual Review 25(7–8):1–30.
3. McDowell, L., Batnitzky, A. and Dyer, S (2009) ‘Precarious Work and Economic Migration: Emerging Immigrant Divisions of Labour in Greater London’s Service Sector’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (1) March 3–25 .

My friend called me last Saturday,

‘let’s meet in Hennes’, she said.

I agreed. I thought I’d just have a look and not say anything to her. But I couldn’t help myself (story of my life).

‘I’m not buying anything here, after all those people died’.

That made it impossible for my friend to even try anything on (I think she might go back without me; and I will confess to her now I was wearing something I’d bought in H&M last year the next time we met).

I’ve read Naila Kabeer’s (2000)The Power to Choose, and was persuaded so well by her arguments against reading Bangladeshi working women as cultural dopes, stepping blindly into exploitative paid work whilst carrying the burden of housework and facing down challenges to their reputations as good women. Kabeer’s incorporation of how culture is “woven into the content of desire itself” (2000: 328) is persuasive. Women chose paid work outside the home and still counted as good, they liked working in a clean place for good wages far more than labouring in a field, and took pleasure in contributing to meeting their family’s desire for more income.

Kabeer gives the garment workers agency and voice. They are not an innately malleable, grateful, reserve army of nimble fingered knitters; they are not victims of a disorganized capitalism where feminism and neoliberalism combine to turn “a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” (Fraser, 2009). For Fraser, the normalisation of the dual income family working for low wages in insecure employment marks a failure of feminism, for (without realising it) privileging choice no matter what.

When War on Want describe sickening factory conditions and I read of these injuries and deaths, this is damage, and Fraser’s is the line that persuades me. As I don’t want my consumption practices to cause harm, that means no to H&M. In turn that means job losses, either because political pressure on H&M makes them choose a new subcontractor (one less famous for its working conditions), or because of the fall in demand caused by my bleeding, liberal, western heart. This is damage too. I’m not adding much to an unanswerable debate other than easing my own conscience by playing out the tensions: strong conclusions are impossible when there’s only a choice between forms of damage.

References

1. Fraser, Nancy (2009) ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’. New Left Review 56.
2. Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose. Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.

“well Pettinger, what’s it to be”.

“dunno sir”

Mr Heckthorpe starts reading from the list of possible careers, starting at A.

“Accountant?”

“ Yeah, that’ll do.”

Mr Heckthorpe gets the yellow pages to start calling all the accountants in Bradford, alphabetically. This is long before professionalisation made accountancy a graduate-only occupation. At ‘C’ (for Claridge Turner), he finds an opening, and my Dad starts his training. (It’s not quite the youth employment officer who thinks Billy Casper’s only right for manual labour in Kes.)

Dad reckons he considered holding on till Mr Heckthorpe reached bricklaying… and the Pettinger world would have been quite different.

In the recent discussions of careers advice (renamed careers guidance… advice is a dangerous thing to proffer too readily), it’s very easy to find funny stories about its failures, as Philip Hensher does. But it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well: matching people, with all their presumptions about work, their knowledge and abilities, to a spectacularly wide range of occupations. To know what jobs exist, yet alone have an inkling of what they demand, what pleasures they offer, what you need to do to get them, would be an enormous undertaking.

Now, as a sociologist of work, I’ve being asked to contribute to a career development module to improve the ‘employability’ of students – because the main benefit of education is, apparently, to provide an oven-ready workforce. No mind that my research expertise is in customer service work (please, no rubbish jokes about the likely destinations of sociology graduates: our students learn to think independently and question commonsense understandings of how the world works, which some employers value). There are two things I want to tell them:

1. the jobs they’ll end up in ten years are probably not ones they think are possible now: there’s more complexity to the labour market than they can imagine.
2. that asking people to talk about their careers produces stories about luck and happenstance as much as decision making and direction (see e.g. Arthur, Inkson and Pringle, 1999).

But luck and happenstance demand decision-making in turn, and even good possibilities throw up conundrums that need worrying out. When a friend asked for advice about what direction to take in a career he’s well established in, I stuttered a tepid, milksop answer, one that stressed feeling and intuition. I had no expertise to offer in the moment, no wise-sociologist suggestion to assess the possibilities of each role, to consider how each would be formative of future possibilities. This means I encouraged him to make decisions based on values which Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) associate with the ‘new spirit of capitalism’: emotional responses to a quest for autonomy, creativity and self-fulfilment, which those engaging in the flexible network of the ‘projective city’ ought to aspire to. Not certainty, a ladder, security and a plan for a future as a company man.

And I wonder whether it is right of me to reproduce these new spirit values as the ones that matter most. For my friend, already a winner in the global labour market, it works well. For my students, the selling of autonomy and flexibility as virtues maybe more problematic: they certainly understand that work should be fulfilling, suit their personalities and such like, but I don’t know that sort of work is so easy to find and hold. And if a lad like my Dad is about to leave school in Bradford with a few GCSEs, I’m pretty certain he’ll find it harder to get work that has meaning to him, and certainly impossible to leverage the sort of mobility Dad found when he stepped onto the bottom rung of a well-placed ladder.

References

1. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
2. Arthur M. B., Inkson K., and Pringle J.K. (1999) The New Careers: Individual Action and Economic Change. Sage: London.

However, I’ve never met an economist with a reasonable explanation for human behaviour. Alcock suggests that working hours are subject to an income effect and a substitution effect (either an increase in your hourly pay makes you work more hours because you get more back, or the same increase makes you cut hours because you can maintain your standard of living with less effort). Implicit in this is the naive assumption that people choose their working hours.

The waiters, shelf-fillers and road-sweepers whose wages are falling, are working in organisations that don’t permit them to choose hours. They’re likely to work for companies which strictly control overtime, possibly working where flexibilised working time is imposed, and they may be on a zero hours contract with no say over when and how long they work for. Purcell et al (1999) found that manual and lower skilled workers were less able to control their working hours, and benefited less from flexibilisation. The economists mantra of choice gets in the way of understanding labour market experiences.

References

1. Purcell, K, Hogarth, T. and Simm, C (1999) ‘The costs and benefits of ‘non-standard’ employment’. Joseph Rowntree Foundation.