Post-crisis precarity: Understanding attitudes to work and industrial relations among young people in the UK

Introduction

Whilst the UK is currently experiencing record levels of employment, this headline figure masks the fact that, ‘two-thirds of the growth in employment since 2008 has been in “atypical” roles such as self-employment, zero-hours contracts or agency work’ (Clarke and Cominetti, 2019: 6–7). Moreover, young people have experienced ‘above-average increases in the rate of atypical employment’ during this time (Clarke and Cominetti, 2019: 42). The implications for industrial relations of the rise of insecure and precarious employment in many sectors is significant and has become central to academic and policy debate in the UK (and elsewhere) in recent years (e.g. Taylor, 2017).

Precarity can be understood broadly as a deviation from the standard employment relationship, with features including low pay, short-term contracts, faux self-employment, few or no guaranteed working hours and few employment rights and protections (see European Parliament Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs, 2017; Grimshaw et al., 2016). ¹ Insecure employment is not new, especially in lower-skilled occupations, although it may have reached a new peak since the 2008 crisis (Prosser, 2016; see also Bessant et al., 2017; France, 2016). Indeed, two decades ago, Richard Sennett warned of ‘flexible capitalism’, wherein ‘uncertainty’ and ‘instability’ were becoming ‘woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism’ (Sennett, 1998: 31; see also Beck, 2002). However, today’s young people are perhaps the first cohort to have experienced the shift towards precarity on a large scale, across occupational groups. In a landmark 2018 book, the late Andy Furlong and colleagues refer to the spread of precarious labour market conditions in recent decades in the UK as ‘a new normality’, which has built up over decades and accelerated in the context of the crisis from 2008. This is an issue because, despite the fact that young people are increasingly likely to be employed in low paid and precarious positions, or suffer from underemployment (Berry, 2016; Booth, 2016; Gardiner and Gregg, 2017; Heyes et al., 2016; Hodder and Kretsos, 2015), they are also less likely to confront such problems through traditional forms of trade unionism (Tailby and Pollert, 2011).

This article seeks to develop our understanding of this ‘new normal’ of precarity by enquiring how it has been internalised into the attitudes of today’s young workers. As Furlong et al. (2018: 92–96) point out, young people would have to acknowledge precarity as a largely immutable reality in order for it to have been fully ‘normalised’. We thus define the ‘normalisation’ of precarity in terms of whether and how young people come to view the conditions of labour market precarity outlined above as fixed features of their economic existence, rather than an aberration they expect to pass. As such, drawing a link between wider labour market processes and young people’s attitudes to trade unions, we interrogate the notion of ‘normalisation’ by considering if, how and why young people seek to operate and succeed (or simply survive) within this economic environment, rather than resist it (through, for example, forms of collective action).

Our specific contribution to scholarship is to qualitatively examine young people’s understandings of the economy, work and industrial relations in order to develop our own understanding of how the material conditions of this ‘new normal’ are being experienced. The research is thus underpinned by two key research questions. Firstly, what is the attitude of young people towards work, their economic circumstances and economic futures more broadly? Secondly, how are traditional industrial relations, including the role of trade unions, seen by today’s young people? These questions will be relevant across many economies, though we focus here on young people in the UK. The article explores these issues through the presentation of original, qualitative data emerging from a series of focus groups and an online community exercise with young people aged between 18 and 25, conducted in October 2017.

The existing literature on young people’s attitudes to work and industrial relations is divided between more attitudinal approaches, which highlight a lack of ‘demand’ for unions amongst young workers (see Cennamo and Gardner, 2008; Cogin, 2012; Ng et al., 2010), and more structural approaches which highlight the way in which changing labour market composition restricts demand for unions (see Freeman and Diamond, 2003; Vandaele, 2012). Transcending this dichotomy, however, our approach here is to exploit the economic crisis as a key event and assess how significant labour market changes may be altering attitudes towards work and industrial relations amongst young people in the UK.

There are surprisingly few such studies focusing on the post-crisis period, and certainly very few focused on the UK. Frustratingly, studies rarely make links between work-related attitudes and understandings of the wider economic context. There have also been none focused on 18- to 25-year-olds; whilst most research on young workers studies the ‘millennial’ age range, our research is focused solely on those who, as adults, have never known anything but the post-crisis economy. Moreover, trade unions (or their absence) are clearly an important part of the labour market landscape for workers, and as such there has been a growing scholarly interest in their renewal in conditions of precarity in recent years (Croucher and Wood, 2017; James and Karmowska, 2016; Kretsos, 2011; Marino et al., 2018; Upchurch et al., 2012). As such, analysing attitudes to trade unions serves our wider objective of understanding the normalisation of precarity, given that such attitudes may indicate the extent to which young people are prepared to challenge prevailing labour market conditions. Do young people see precarity as impeding their exercise of control over their working lives, and are they looking to trade unions to reassert control?

The article contends that young people’s experience of the ‘new normal’ of precarious labour market conditions has been internalised and thus normalised within their attitudes to a significant degree. This does not mean, however, that labour market changes have been accepted passively or unknowingly (cf. Furlong et al., 2018). Rather, there is a recognition amongst these young people of the novelty of their socio-economic circumstances, and thus frustration and anger at the nature of these circumstances. Nevertheless, we also find, as others have (see Worth, 2019), that young people feel that insecure labour market conditions are simply ‘part and parcel’ of the economic order, and that this attitude means these young people focus on how they can succeed within this inherited structure rather than on pursuing structural change. Our research shows that antipathy towards trade unions, even if trade unionism is conceived in fairly positive terms, can be associated with this perspective, insofar as trade union membership is not deemed particularly helpful to young people plotting their career while navigating precarious labour market conditions.

The article first briefly surveys the existing literature on the attitudes of young people to work and industrial relations (including trade unions), and then details the research methodology in the third section. The fourth section presents evidence from the focus groups and online participants, organised thematically according to an inductive analysis of our empirical material, in the following subsections: ‘the economic context’, ‘the labour market, good work and economic security’ and ‘industrial relations and trade unions’. The subsequent section pulls together our analysis of the ‘attitudes to precarity’ and ‘ambivalence to trade unions’, before we conclude in the final section. The article poses a challenge to the notion that conventional forms of trade union activity will succeed in mobilising workers to challenge precarity and marks out a new research agenda around how generational identities transform in the wake of economic crises. Ultimately, however, while in a material sense precarity may have been normalised for today’s young people, further research is required to establish the attitudinal implications of this across the lifecourse.

The existing literature on attitudes to work and trade unions

The existing research has reported a substantial cohort effect on union density, demonstrating that a decline in union membership can be explained by the replacement of older, more unionised workers, by younger cohorts who tend to be less unionised (see Bockerman and Uusitalo, 2006; Bryson and Gomez, 2005). That is, opposed to factors such as, for example, cohort preference changes towards unions, a significant aspect of the decline in trade union membership over the past three decades or so can be explained by an increase in what Bryson and Gomez (2005) describe as ‘never-membership’ amongst younger workers. The reasons for this cohort effect are contested, however. The literature is divided between more attitudinal approaches, which highlight a lack of ‘demand’ for unions, and more structural approaches, which highlight either the way in which changing labour market composition restricts union activity or ‘supply-side’ issues around the capacity of trade unions themselves to organise workers.

On the demand-side of this debate, a significant amount of academic work supports the popular notion that ‘millennial’ or ‘Generation Y’ workers (born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s) are individualistic, uncommitted to their jobs, and have unreasonably high expectations from their employers (and, relatedly, also reject the collectivist underpinnings of trade unionism) (Oliver, 2006). A large part of this literature finds that younger generations of workers place a greater emphasis on both extrinsic values (such as a higher salary) and work freedoms (such as working time flexibility) than previous generations (see Cennamo and Gardner, 2008; Cogin, 2012; Ng et al., 2010). Eddy Ng and colleagues utilise data from a Canadian survey of undergraduate students, for instance, to suggest that millennials place ‘the greatest importance on individualistic aspects of a job’. Half of the respondents surveyed, they argue, were uncommitted to their workplace in the long-term, signifying a ‘significant shift away from the career norms of the past’ (Ng et al., 2010: 289; see also Cogin, 2012: 2287).

We can recognise that in some senses these attitudinal differences are transitory, rather than defining of a whole cohort over time. For instance, the macro data show us that the ‘probability of being unionized follows an inverted U-shaped pattern in age, maximizing in the mid-to late 40s’ (Blanchflower, 2007: 1; see also Hodder, 2015: 315). That is, even if attitudinal differences lead younger workers to be less sympathetic towards unions at an early stage of their career, as they grow older they tend to become increasingly receptive to unionisation. Yet we do also know, for instance, that workers aged 16–24 make up an increasingly small percentage of unionised British workers in comparison to two decades ago (see BEIS, 2018: 15). Does this reflect a significant shift in the attitudes of young people towards trade unions or are there more structural factors at play?

The above literature, which views the heightened labour market precarity of young people and subsequent lack of demand for unionisation as a natural product of their ‘essential youthfulness’ (Yates, 2017), has been challenged robustly within the literature. Brenda Kowske and colleagues draw upon repeated opinion surveys over an 18-year period, with data collected from a diverse sample of over 115,000 employees in the US to examine changing work attitudes. Though noting some small attitudinal shifts across generations, on balance the authors argue it is more useful to think in terms of ‘generational similarities’ (Kowske et al., 2010; see also the Finnish study reported in Pyöriä et al., 2017). Methodological differences may explain some of these contrasting findings, with time-lag studies, where attitudes among different generations at the same age are assessed over time, more likely to dispute the notion that today’s young people are radically different to older cohorts. A review of the evidence by Jennifer Deal and colleagues shows that most of this research ‘finds a few small statistical differences, but the differences are few and modest at best’ and that there is no evidence ‘of the types of sweeping differences in attitudes, orientations, and work ethic that populate the popular press’ (Deal et al., 2010).

As Vandaele (2012: 203) notes, ‘the discrepancy between young workers’ positive attitudes towards unions and their low unionization rate’ can best be explained with reference to labour market structure. That is, youth employment rates are lower than the working population as a whole, while those in work are ‘disadvantaged by their crowding at the lower end, or “poor” quality jobs, in certain sectors’, making trade unions less accessible (Tailby and Pollert, 2011: 503; see also Hodder and Kretsos, 2015: 4). Young workers ‘tend to work in sectors that are less covered by union membership, union representation and collective bargaining’ (Vandaele, 2012: 204; see also Freeman and Diamond, 2003). As a result, ‘the union density differential between young and adult workers’ is due to issues within labour markets which pose supply-side constraints, such as a lack of information within the workplace on how or why to join a union, rather than a lack of demand for union representation per se (Bryson et al., 2005: 155; see also Tailby and Pollert, 2011: 518–520).

By and large, structural accounts of the significance of changing labour market conditions, alongside large-scale time-lag attitudinal studies, strongly rebut claims that young people are today somehow distinctly more anti-trade union than past cohorts. Yet, whilst structural arguments highlight the relative weakness of attitudinal approaches, from a theoretical perspective it is important to maintain an understanding of the relationship between the two. The attitudinal-structural dichotomy within the literature should not prohibit a discussion of the relationship between changing labour market structures and the way in which young workers understand the labour market and industrial relations. This is particularly relevant in a context marked by significant labour market and wider economic upheaval, such as that which followed the 2008 economic crisis. This article’s analysis, therefore, remains alive to how structural economic changes may have important knock-on effects for the attitudes of young workers in the post-crisis labour market. So far, there is relatively little work in this area and even less which helps us to understand the attitudes of young workers towards trade unions in the context of the ‘new normal’ of labour market precarity post-crisis (see Furlong et al., 2018).

Research on young workers in the US by Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson and her colleagues (2012) utilises data from the longitudinal Youth Development Study and finds that extrinsic values (for example, desiring a higher salary) have weakened since the crisis, with the young faced with higher unemployment and reduced job security, incomes and advancement opportunities. In the UK, there is some limited non-academic literature on this issue which points to growing anxieties among young people regarding post-crisis economic conditions, which seem to lead to a more pragmatic set of expectations regarding the workplace (obviously, establishing whether such anxiety would have been present anyway, had the ‘great moderation’ era of stable growth continued, is impossible) (Cabinet Office, 2014; IpsosMORI, 2017).

These survey-based data are valuable for highlighting large-scale shifts in attitudes in the post-crisis period. However, this strictly quantitative approach to studying attitudes can be liable to miss the subtleties of shifting attitudes or fail to notice important contradictory tendencies or ‘gap[s] in explanatory language’ in the way young workers make sense of the world around them (see Worth, 2019: 441). Once we dive into this issue, we see that there is a more complicated story at play. Franceschelli and Keating (2018: 2S), drawing upon interviews with young British workers, highlight a contradiction that exists between the actual labour market conditions facing young workers and their own apparent optimism concerning their own economic circumstances as a result of their ‘faith in the ability of hard work to improve future life opportunities’. Similarly, Leccardi (2017: 348) utilises cross-national survey and case study data to show that despite high levels of uncertainty, young people across Europe appear to be ‘interpreting uncertainty as a window for new possibilities and the unexpected, a potentially risky but positive experience’.

Furlong et al. (2018: 92) set out one way of interpreting this, depicting today’s young workers as ‘boiled frogs’: as precarious labour market conditions have intensified – or normalised – over recent decades, each subsequent cohort has little reason to question the peculiarity of the economic conditions they have inherited, and insecurity is rendered ‘common sense’. The ‘boiled frogs’ thesis thus presents young workers as passive receivers of structural change, rejecting the idea of young workers being part of an angry, anxious and alienated new class of precariat (see Standing, 2011). Rather, utilising Understanding Society data, Furlong et al. suggest that young workers’ experience is more fragmented across the labour market, but is generally characterised by a more passive acceptance of the ‘new normal’ of precarity, with young people gradually building these trends into their expectations and understanding of the economic order (see Furlong et al., 2018: 92–96). As a result, they suggest, ‘there is now a widespread belief that the ability to manage life projects through the development of effective navigation skills places an increased emphasis on the importance of agency in determining outcomes’ (Furlong et al., 2018: 96). Such literature poses the question of whether young people have passively accepted long-term structural changes to labour markets or not. Our study seeks to examine this idea further.

The above literature, moreover, does not directly assess the impact of these changes for industrial relations. In the wider literature, post-crisis research from psychology, based upon evidence from the United States and Europe, suggests that while the crisis may have sharpened some individualistic tendencies amongst young workers, a new form of ‘cooperative individualism’ is more prevalent than a ‘me-first’ sentiment (Schoon and Mortimer, 2017: 5). Utilising survey data from Australia, the US and the UK, Vromen et al. (2015) provide further evidence of this. They highlight the way in which, despite a rise in materialist concerns post-crisis, young workers have come to frame their concerns differently to older generations, with concepts around ‘opportunity’ and ‘choice’ dominating their understandings of the labour market, rather than notions such as ‘class’ (Vromen et al., 2015). That is, as a result of structural changes to labour market conditions, young people appear to be internalising notions of choice and their own entrepreneurial abilities when considering their own successes and failures (Worth, 2019: 442). This issue is even reflected in the way trade unions in the UK have sought to develop their appeal to young workers, moving away from a focus on collective identity towards developing a sense of how unions might be a ‘vehicle’ to help young workers ‘succeed’ (TUC, 2016: 32–33).

Building on the existing literature, then, this study seeks to examine how the attitudes of young adults in the UK are being shaped in the contemporary post-crisis economic environment, particularly in the context of growing labour market precarity, and what implications this has for their view of industrial relations. It does so on the basis of needing to appreciate the link between structural economic changes and how young workers come to make sense of their own position within the labour market and, in particular, the role of trade unions. Recognising that such structural shifts can lead to the development of new attitudes which may be subtle, complex and even contradictory in nature, we approach the study through an agent-centred methodological approach.

Research methods

In order to achieve this form of analysis, we utilise a series of focus groups, plus an online ‘community’ exercise, which works like an online focus group conducted over a longer period of time. Focus groups are an increasingly popular methodological tool for understanding the views and experiences of labour market actors (see Hurrell et al., 2012; Korkmaz, 2018; Roche et al., 2014) and were deemed highly appropriate for our study for two principal reasons. Firstly, our interest in the ‘normalisation’ of novel forms of work and industrial relations represents a rather embryonic empirical agenda, and focus groups were deemed to be an efficient mechanism for developing our understanding of attitudes to precarity among a particular age cohort. Secondly, and relatedly, we were explicitly interested in capturing the interaction of participants, or more precisely, in capturing the ideas and narratives articulated in a semi-public, interactive environment. That is, we wished to study the process through which ‘key sub-groups collectively contest and justify the actions of elite political actors via shared values’ (Stanley, 2016: 236). This benefit of the focus group method is clearly aligned to our interest in shared understandings of precarity’s implications. While we include many individual comments from group discussions in the presentation below, the shared sentiments expressed in discussion (including agreement indicated non-verbally) are also key data. In this sense, focus groups are ‘more than the sum of separate interviews’ because of the way in which participants ‘both query each other and explain themselves to each other’ (Morgan, 1996: 139).

Following the methodological literature’s finding that four to six focus groups are appropriate before an information ‘saturation’ point is reached (Morgan, 1996: 144; Stanley, 2014: 900), our study consisted of four 90-minute focus groups, conducted in three different locations: one in Manchester, one in Grantham and two in London. These locations were selected because of their geographical spread across England’s regions, and their different populations and economic size: Manchester is a medium-sized city (< 1m population) in the North West of England, Grantham is a town (< 50,000 population) in the Midlands, whilst London is a large city (> 5m population) in the South East. All participants were aged 18–25 (median age: 23), and there were 32 participants in total (between seven and nine in each group, with men and women equally represented). Participants were recruited locally and randomly, via personal approaches in leisure and commercial centres, and were incentivised to participate with a £40 reward, as practised and recommended in the existing focus group literature (Stanley, 2014: 900–901). ² A single participant was in full-time education, but the vast majority were young people in work, with some currently seeking employment. Graduate and non-graduate participants were equally represented in three of the groups, however, in order to interrogate potential differences between graduates and non-graduates, one of the sessions held in London contained only graduate workers.

Naturally, focus group methodology has its limitations; the group nature of the discussion limits opportunities to interrogate individual subjects’ views and can have a slight ‘polarising’ effect if the group dynamic is dominated by particular individuals (Morgan, 1996: 140). Nevertheless, these considerations did not outweigh the potentially significant gains in rich qualitative data that focus groups can generate. Moreover, the small data pool from which focus groups studies derive their analysis (this study: N = 32) does not lend itself to claims or findings with precise or measurable external validity. It is difficult, furthermore, to compare across different social groupings (class, age, ethnicity, etc.) with this type of data in the way that quantitative data allow for. The purpose of this research, however, was to develop a study that can contribute to our knowledge of young people’s attitudes towards labour market precarity and industrial relations through an in-depth analysis of the ideas of those young people and their interactions with each other (see Stanley, 2016: 240). Unique to focus groups, this type of analysis gains its value from its ability to help to generate important insights or ways of understanding particular phenomena that might otherwise be invisible to other (particularly quantitative) methodological approaches. This approach should be seen as a complement to other forms of scientific investigation, not as an alternative to them.

The online ‘community’ exercise ran for three days in October 2017 and functioned like a social networking website. It was conducted principally to increase the geographical scope of the qualitative research and verify the focus group findings. The exercise gathered real-time qualitative insights into topics identical to those in the focus group. It consisted of eight female and nine male participants (recruited via social media), aged 18–25 (median age 24) and based throughout England, in a closed online network responding to a total of 17 tasks, such as forum discussions, image/video sharing and short polls. An online environment was, moreover, utilised to ensure participants felt comfortable sharing their views.

The research underpinning this article emerges from a wider research project conducted by the authors on the issue of young workers and industrial relations. Although the research programme was developed and managed by the authors, given the nature of the funding arrangements of the wider research project, the focus groups and online community were conducted by private research companies with the experience and resources to organise and host the events at short notice. ³ Our overall research questions animated the drafting of specific questions and prompts. The first set of questions sought to engage participants in a discussion of the wider political and economic context. Following this broader conversation, a second set of questions asked about participants’ views of current labour market circumstances, particularly the rise of employment insecurity and how they understood the term ‘good work’. Finally, a third set of questions asked specifically about industrial relations, in terms of both knowledge of trade unions and views on their activities and services. Our reporting of the empirical data below is set out according to this construction of our questions and is based upon inductive enquiry into the most critical aspects of what both the focus group and online participants told us. In order to conduct this inductive enquiry, all data from the focus groups and online community exercise were transcribed, and then coded and analysed in NVivo. Full focus group transcripts and other documentation of the data are kept on file by the authors.

Focus group evidence

Analysis

Conclusion

This article has reported on a new set of qualitative data on the attitudes to work, industrial relations and the economic environment more generally, with a relatively novel focus on post-crisis attitudes, and young people attaining adulthood after the 2008 crisis. That young people in the UK are experiencing precarity in the labour market as they transition from adolescence to adulthood is widely accepted, with Furlong et al. (2018) referring to ‘a new normality’ as insecurity spreads from marginal workers to those within seemingly conventional employment conditions. Will this persist as today’s young people progress through the lifecourse? For ‘generational’ research, such questions are inherently ‘known unknowns’. However, the focus of the research presented in this article on attitudes to precarity suggests that young people largely expect precarity to persist, in part because they are not focused on challenging the demise (or hollowing out) of the standard employment relationship.

Whilst the young people engaged expressed anger and frustration with the economic conditions they face in the post-crisis environment, there was a resignation that these wider economic trends were ‘part and parcel’ of the economic structure and needed to be successfully navigated through, rather than overturned. This is reflected, furthermore, in relation to trade unions. Young people appear to be more focused on their own career rather than challenging precarious conditions through collective action. Of course, this may be because their perceptions of material reality compel them to choose a more individualistic and less solidaristic path. The condition of precarity is not accepted because it is deemed acceptable, but rather because it is seen as immutable; the key challenge, from the perspective of these young people, is to most effectively navigate this economic environment as an individual worker.

The research presented here has enabled a novel engagement with the existing literature on age-related attitudes to work and industrial relations. While the findings are consistent with the recognition by some scholars of a more individualistic sentiment among today’s young people in countries such as the UK, we recognise also that longitudinal, quantitative studies tend to identify lifecourse effects whereby attitudes to labour market insecurity evolve as people grow older. Indeed, we find that what today’s young people understand as ‘good work’ is consistent with that reported for older cohorts. It is reasonable to assume therefore that today’s young workers will become less accepting of precarity as they age – and perhaps less individualistic in their attitudes towards overcoming precarity if they do not succeed in navigating their own path to a secure and rewarding livelihood. It is not our intention to suggest that traditional approaches to industrial relations are in terminal decline.

Nevertheless, our analysis starts from the premise that there is a new normality, in terms of the spread and intensity of precarious labour market conditions – in a material sense, precarity has become more entrenched, and it is useful therefore to study attitudes towards this apparent normalisation. We object to Furlong et al.’s depiction of today’s young people as ‘boiled frogs’, but it is of course necessary to recognise the rising temperature, and interrogate the attitudes this process has inspired. Much of the existing literature which captures the evolution of attitudes across the lifecourse utilises data from only the pre-crisis period. Ideally, the research underpinning this article would be supplemented by both large-n quantitative studies and small-n qualitative studies, both capturing the attitudes of more young people, and exploring these views in more depth. Longitudinal research on today’s young people would be extremely valuable, as would studies which segment precarious labour market conditions by industry. Any future research should further explore generational identities, and how they relate to other demographic characteristics. More granular research on young people and new forms of trade unionism (or work-based cooperation more generally) would also be welcome.

Future research could also usefully focus on the attitudinal effect of economic crises; it is clear that the young people engaged by this research recognised the specific characteristics of post-crisis labour market conditions, but whether the experience of the 2008 crisis has had a direct impact on attitudes (and indeed a variable impact across age groups) is less clear. One of our most important findings is that today’s young people in the UK are conscious of precarity – and we tentatively suggest the experience of economic crisis, and the subsequent turbulence, is a factor in this attitudinal shift. If there is a new normality, it ironically manifests in young workers’ attitudes as a belief in the abnormality of their experiences. The related belief identified here in the immutability of precarity – whether warranted or otherwise – helps to explain some of the attitudinal tendencies identified elsewhere in the post-crisis literature on industrial relations.