Abstract
Delivering Good Work for All
Books written by policymakers do not normally feature in Work, Employment and Society. However, there is a meeting point. When the journal was launched in the 1980s, there was a hope that its research would speak to policymakers. With these two books, policymakers are speaking, in part, to and about researchers of work.
The author of Do We Have to Work? is Matthew Taylor, who was Head of the No. 10 Policy Unit within the Labour UK Government of 1997–2010. He subsequently led the Conservative UK Government’s 2017 Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices (Taylor et al., 2017) and is now the Chief Executive of the National Health Service (NHS) Confederation. The Dignity of Labour is authored by Jon Cruddas, who was also a special advisor around the last Labour Government and was once spoken about as a possible leader of the Labour Party. He is now a Westminster MP, where he is a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Future of Work. For transparency, both authors are also graduates of Warwick University, though neither from my institute.
Taylor’s is a small book that is part of a Big Ideas series. It is divided into four main parts, which focus on: what is work and why do we do it; how work has changed; the discontents of work; and the possibilities for ‘Good Work’. His starting premise is that work is central to our lives and culture. Taylor sees his work, including the Taylor Review, as part of a Polanyian double movement – a reaction to the current problems with work.
The opening question for Taylor is whether we need to work. If the measure is material, social and psychological wellbeing then the answer is yes. Nevertheless, many of us feel unfulfilled in our work, according to the surveys that Taylor cites. A key culprit is FW Taylor, who not only laid the foundations of people management but continues to shape thinking around the use of AI and digital technology in work, this Taylor believes. In a chapter that outlines the long march to paid employment in a free labour market, Taylor notes three particular shifts in the 20th century as this form of work became the norm: the shift to services, the feminisation of the labour market and the post-war settlement based on ‘social solidarity and industrial partnership’ (p. 71). It is the collapse of the third that has led to the current problems, with rising inequalities and non-standard employment.
In advocating change, he suggests that ‘good work for all could be a rallying cry’ (p. 15). In developing his Big Idea, Taylor makes a distinction between work to earn, work to live and work to thrive. The first involves issues of power and social justice, the second centres on meeting daily needs and the third, agency and identity, including solidarity. With the demise of traditional industries and the rise of consumerism, Taylor argues that we are discontented with work because it lacks fulfilment and we are discontented with ourselves because of our clash of identities over whether we see ourselves as producers or consumers. At this point, there is some ambiguity over whether work still matters. These days, Taylor says, ‘we are what we buy not do’ (p. 93) so that ‘the power of consumerism is another reason we tolerate unfulfilling work’. It is a twist on Goldthorpe and colleagues’ (1967) affluent worker studies of the 1960s in which poor(er) quality work was said to be tolerated as the price of being able to buy washing machines and foreign holidays.
Of course, buying our happiness through shopping does not mean that work is not a problem objectively and Taylor wants to shift the debate back onto work. Drawing on the RSA/Carnegie seven dimensions of Good Work, 1 he argues for a ‘radical’ reshaping of work to be centred on enabling humans to thrive. To do so, he argues that we need to focus on intrinsic motivators: autonomy, competence and relatedness. He cites a range of research and ideas to show how these three aspects of work might be made better – through the Buurtzorg model, works councils, B-Corporations and co-ops for example. While wanting to ensure that job quality improves, Taylor thus recognises that contextual power relations also matter. Improving job quality means changing those power relations; in the future, he says, authority should only be ‘exercised in benign and enlightened ways’ (p. 83). Currently, he notes, the alternative models are at the margins but with policy support they could become mainstream. In turn, this mainstreaming would affect how we use new digital technology, lead to a repurposing of education and change how we think about work–life articulation. In this respect, Taylor upends his opening question with a different ending question: does it need to feel like work?
The starting point for Cruddas is the need for a new dignity of labour to shape society and, through it, create a renewed social democracy. His starting premise is his party’s failure to engage with working-class voters. The problem is its failure to understand the lived experience of these voters and the centrality of work to people’s lives. Despite its name, the reason is the Labour Party’s neglect of work. The book has nine chapters, which, after the introduction, divide equally into two sections: the economics of labour and the ethics of labour.
The first part of his book is a critique of mainstream and Marxist economics. The former is pilloried for becoming abstracted, mere mathematics without meaning. The latter is pilloried for its vague vision of a post-capitalist future and lack of focus on work, other than to say it will be done by the clever robots. By contrast, in the decades following the Second World War, economics was dominated by the ‘Oxford/Warwick School’ of industrial relations that advocated a pluralist class settlement that regulated capitalism through national corporatism involving collective bargaining – the same ‘industrial partnership’ cited by Taylor. The real impact of neo-liberalism from the late 1970s under the Conservative Right was to shift the national conversation and policy focus away from reconciling class differences to individualising work and society and, moreover, the understanding of work. In its wake, New Labour lacked an alternative intellectual coherence. Instead, it subcontracted employment regulation to Brussels, while at home it embraced the knowledge economy. In this knowledge economy, the new means of production, the argument went, was inside individual workers’ heads and so gave them labour market power as individuals. New Labour then shunned trade unions and class politics as old school. At the same time, employers became subsidy junkies through tax credits to top up low wages and state-expanded training and education. As Blair eulogised the knowledge workers at the top of the new hourglass economy, the working class at the bottom deserted the Labour Party.
During this shift, human labour became viewed as a fixed input of production. All UK Governments are now preoccupied with the performance of the labour market and levels of employment and unemployment, and ignore how work is performed. Indeed, how work occurs inside firms has become ‘a black box – beyond understanding or explanation’ (p. 54). And yet, Cruddas argues, labour is not fixed; instead, with a nod to Harry Braverman (1974), it is organised, directed and controlled in production. What is needed, he argues, is a new approach to understanding and managing labour.
The second part of the book explores what an alternative left position might be. For Cruddas, it is a new politics of work underpinned by new ways of thinking about human labour, recognising that it provides identity, dignity and belonging, without which the spectre of authoritarian populism haunts the UK.
In making his pitch, Cruddas also draws on survey data to show that Britons overwhelmingly want work that offers intrinsic benefits but which too many working-class jobs fail to provide, offering instead precarity and powerlessness. The problem is that current politics has downgraded work, with the hard right exploiting this neglect. In the US, the working class turned to opiates and Trump, and in the UK to Brexit and Boris. A new politics needs to get passionate about work, Cruddas argues. It must recognise that ‘Good work can help to build a good life’ and that we need ‘to organise a society that seeks to create and reward good work’ (p. 100). Its intellectual driver should be a renewed cross-disciplinary Oxford/Warwick School that helps create meaningful work, regulate employment and civilise capitalism. In sum, good work should be a central tenet of public policy, underpinned by applied research. He even suggests a ‘What Works’ centre for good work.
Clearly the two books are stablemates. Both are advocates of work and, more specifically, good work. Taylor is more precise on what that means, with Cruddas light on detail. Cruddas, however, extends the argument to also wanting to recuperate the study of work. Although the varying font size – indicting the importance of the points being made – is initially irritating, functionally it works, making Taylor’s book an easy read. It offers a potted history of work and the influential thinkers who have variously shaped and interpreted its development and outcomes. As a perfect primer, undergraduates will love Taylor’s book. Having quickly read it, they will be able to knowledgably blag their way through sociology and business seminars. It might also be useful for their tutors, pulling out the headline points of some of the ‘big books’ that they have promised themselves that they will read but have not yet had the time to do so. In the days before textbook dominance, Cruddas’ book would have been on the essential seminar reading list for final year students. Although at times backward-looking – perhaps reflecting reading from a 1990s industrial relations course – it has a thesis that deserves discussion and debate. The critique of the (Marxist and New Labour) Left’s technophilia alone is worth the price of the book. The simple message from both books is that work did, does and will continue to matter, and we ignore it to our intellectual (and political) peril.
The key issue is whether these books will help shift the dial towards good work. For change to occur, there needs to be a problem in need of solving, an idea about it that might be solved and the political will to apply that solution to the problem. Both Taylor and Cruddas are convincing on the problem and solution. What might trigger political (meaning government) action is less well developed. Taylor flags the Covid pandemic as a possible trigger for change or possibly climate change and the new digital technology. Some change has occurred as a result of the pandemic but it is not the all-pervasive, sustained change some claimed during the crisis. Similarly, even if new green jobs are created in volume, many will look familiar in how they are organised and managed (Cardenas Rubio et al., 2022), and while the robots might not be coming to take all the jobs, many of the new ones being created and the old ones being reconfigured will likely be variations on existing themes (Hunt et al., 2019). For Cruddas it is the application of an intellectual argument from a new school of thought on work. The problem is that Cruddas is right in his diagnosis: work has been downgraded but both politically, and, it should be added, as a field of study within universities.
While all universities to varying extents continue to research and teach work, industrial relations, recast now as human resource management, has low status in some business schools and has been abandoned in others, and it has withered in sociology departments. There is still research that tries to theorise ‘new’ work and champion the voices of the working class – as Pettinger (2019) and McBride et al. (2018), respectively illustrate – but critical masses now only exist in a few universities – Manchester University and King’s College London, for example. However, neither’s research has distilled into a discernible school of thought. While it is true that, because of the UK Government’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) there is a need for UK universities to demonstrate impact on policy and practice, what was significant about the Oxford/Warwick School but missing now is ‘systematic practical research into the workplace inform[ing] public policy’ (Cruddas, p. 40).
The vacuum of concentrated applied expertise in universities was made stark during the Covid pandemic. While the UK Government drew heavily on advice from health experts in SAGE, it lacked an expert advisory group on work – and yet work was a vital weapon in both keeping the country going – through essential workers – and helping contain the virus – as people were ordered to work from home. It was a response to this gap that led to the establishment of the Renewing Work Advisory Group of Experts (ReWAGE) 2 during the pandemic in an attempt to pull together fragmented expertise from across UK universities and channel it towards government.
The challenge for ReWAGE, and indeed anyone interested in driving change in work, is that the UK no longer has a Ministry of Labour or an equivalent. Responsibility for work is split across three UK Government departments with little linkage between them. Moreover, there is no single monitoring and evaluation agency for work. Following the shock of Brexit, the UK Government did task a minister with improving job quality in the UK but, despite a Good Work Plan (HM Government, 2018) being published, implementation has been slow. Instead, it has been left to the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the English regions to pick up the policy baton. And pick it up they have, and have run hard with it. However, they all lack the legislative powers over employment that might deliver change to work. 3 As a consequence, the translation of policy into practice on any meaningful scale in these nations and regions is still an aspiration.
The political trigger for change at the UK level might be Conservative Party desire to retain its new working-class voters or the Labour Party needing to woo them back. It is telling that by explicitly and loudly promoting Fair Work and re-introducing a weak form of national corporatism, the Scottish National Party has successfully shut out the Labour Party in Scotland electorally for over a decade. Moreover, as austerity is re-imposed, Beveridge (1942) long ago recognised that full employment with decent jobs is good for government coffers – welfare is reduced and tax receipts raised. If the political will to shift the dial on good work does (re-)emerge, the UK will need to establish a single ministry, develop legally binding minimum standards of job quality, create a unified agency responsible for monitoring and enforcing those standards and require the minister to regularly report progress on delivery of good work (see Warhurst and Knox, 2022).
It would help if part of that agency was tasked with advising and practically supporting workplace transformation. The role and added value of researchers would be twofold: first, independent, problem-solving research, working with government, employers, trade unions and civil society to frame those problems and, second, building on newly redeveloped action research, help implement the solutions. It was an approach adopted by researchers behind the Quality of Working Life movement that was part of the golden age of industrial partnership eulogised by Taylor and Cruddas, and for which the UK came to lead the world until the early 1970s (Guest, 2022).
Researchers of work, particularly sociologists, will need to rediscover their disciplinary confidence and voice if they are to take up these roles. In support, resources will need to be forthcoming from universities and the research councils. In addition, universities should send out a signal that they want to be active partners in workplace transformation, firstly, by including policy and practitioner engagement in their recruitment and promotion criteria and, secondly, by adopting good or fair work practices themselves. If researchers and their universities are to answer the call by Taylor and Cruddas to deliver good work for all, an enabling research culture and capacity within universities needs to be redeveloped and encouraged to be applied.