Category Archives: Work-Futures-Research-Centre

Dr Silke Roth

Since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, there has been a significant increase of women’s self-employment. However, women are still under represented among the self-employed. Obstacles to female entrepreneurship include lack of capital and affordable office space, in particular for small organizations. The women’s cooperative WeiberWirtschaft (women’s economy) was founded to address these problems and enable women to become economically independent. The idea to create a cooperative emerged in the 1980s when a small group of recent graduates and post-graduated discussed the idea of a feminist economy and money cycle. Based on a lot of un-paid voluntary work and significant negotiation skills with a variety of stakeholders the idea of a self-organized center for women founders became reality. Over the course of twenty-five years, the cooperative raised the necessary funds to buy, renovate and extend a historic building (the former socialist cosmetics factory VEB Kosmetik) offering social housing in addition to workplaces. In 2014, the cooperative houses 60 enterprises comprising 150 workplaces. Furthermore, a number of services were established that support the women entrepreneurs, including day care facilities, micro-credit services, a conference center and a mediation unit. In addition, in 2006 the ‘Center for Women Establishing New Businesses’ (GZ) was founded as subsidiary organization. It provides information, consultation and networking opportunities, has so far been contacted by 10.000 women and is supported through the European Social Fund.

The WeiberWirtschaft (WW) is an unusual feminist organization as it is primarily an economic organization rather than a cultural or political organization. Furthermore, it represents a ‘real utopia’, a concept that refers to organizations which are guided by the moral principles of equality, democracy and sustainability. The organizational structure of the cooperative and the low membership shares ensure equality and democracy. Each member – no matter how many shares she owns – has the same voice. Sustainability was a guiding criteria during the renovation and extension of the building. Furthermore, the cooperation engages in intersectional feminist practices: local democratic practices, cooperation between state and community, as well as democratic practices in the transnational context.

What factors and paradoxes contributed to the success of WW and how does this project reflect and inspire feminist transformations?

One of the most important lessons that WW offers is the readiness to cooperate with diverse groups and individuals – or at least to consider it. Social movements, including women’s movements are not always willing to reach out to potential allies and often engage in exclusionary solidarity. The openness to negotiate and to seek support from a range of stakeholders does not mean selling out – the tightrope walk and compromises were (and continue to be) embedded in extensive discussion processes.

Courtyard of the WeiberWirtschaft building in Berlin, Germany

Independence plays a decisive role for assuring the integrity of the organization. In my opinion the extensive volunteer work of the founders and other members of the WW is crucial in this respect. The importance of voluntary work for an organization that creates income opportunities for women may seem paradoxical. WW has been very successful in creating jobs – primarily through the creation of affordable offices and work spaces, but also because some of the volunteer service rendered in the administration of the cooperative could be converted into paid jobs. The pivotal role of volunteering assured that the WeiberWirtschaft has not been co-opted and remained independent and true to herself. Moreover, the boundary between paid work and volunteering is extremely thin as the full-time staff have also put a lot of volunteer service in the WeiberWirtschaft. The volunteers have invested a lot – not only time but also money – but they have also gained a lot. Not just an internationally prominent cooperative, but they have also learned a lot, gained skills and experience and thus qualified themselves. The founding of WW documents realism and vision, wit and humor, but also the lust for power and creating an organization. WW is a “learning organization”, members engage critically with themselves and their environment and are very good at finding resources and the support of experts.

One of the most important lessons is certainly that success is not a zero sum game, but that different groups can benefit if one of them is successful. For example, media attention for WW is good for the tenants. Furthermore, the founders’ center does not only benefit the tenants of WW, but women’s companies worldwide. This demonstrates that economic efficiency does not automatically imply competition.

The WeiberWirtschaft is embedded in the transformations of German, European and global women’s movements. The European Union and the United Nations women’s conferences presented transnational opportunity structures that could be used for the implementation of women’s policy demands. An affinity between (liberal) feminism and neoliberalism has been noted: In a tricky way, the demands of women’s movements for self-determination, self-reliance, individual freedom and autonomy are compatible with the logic of globalized markets. What does that mean? Neoliberalism involves the transfer of tasks that were previously the responsibility of the state to private sector or civil society. In addition, neoliberalism is characterized by an emphasis on personal responsibility and efficiency. These features coincide with feminist demands for self-determination and open up possibilities for women’s NGOs and gender consultants. These changes have been described as a shift from state to market feminism. While it is a welcome development that the expertise and services of feminists are paid adequately, the reliance on project and performance-bound funding encompasses the risk of co-optation and depoliticization. As a feminist organization and ‘real utopia’ WeiberWirtschaft is well positioned to practice system-criticism and represent an alternative to lack of solidarity of emancipation interests.

I am anxious to see if and how the WeiberWirtschaft will return to their original idea, the feminist money economy, and to make the earned surplus available to — for example — feminist projects, single mothers, and to people and businesses in the Global South. This would mean that WW would leave market feminism behind and represent an alternative to neoliberal practices, not only by enabling women to become economically independent, but also through the redistribution of resources and re-evaluation of different forms of paid and unpaid work.

Silke Roth is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton, her research interests include feminist organizations and coalition building. She has observed the formation of the WeiberWirtschaft for over 25 years and is a shareholder of the cooperative.

Femininity, interactive service work and social mobility: reflections from Russia

Dr Charlie Walker

In their recent book Shopgirls, Cox and Hobley illustrate that the connection between retail and qualities traditionally associated with femininity developed in conjunction with women’s gradual entrance into the service sector labour market from the late 19th Century. Alongside their association with femininity, customer-facing forms of service sector employment have also had a historical association with glamour, and in turn, with possibilities of social mobility. This is despite the fact that, as Cox and Hobley document, workers in the retail sector experienced dire working and living conditions well into the 20th Century.

In the early 21st Century, while conditions have improved, this contradiction continues. As Valery Walkerdine has argued, in a context in which working-class people are increasingly denigrated as flawed workers and flawed consumers, service sector employment, alongside the expansion of previously inaccessible educational opportunities, ‘appear to offer possibilities and lifestyles which are tied up with what is traditionally regarded as middle-class status’ (2003: 240). However, in reality, low pay and non-standard contracts continue to be the norm for many in service sector employment. Thus, what has been seen as the cultural feminisation of the economy, with a growing number of jobs that require workers to be customer-focused, communicative, caring, and flexible – qualities traditionally associated, rightly or wrongly, with femininity – should not be assumed to have brought greater gender equality. Indeed, as Lisa Adkins has argued, since women appear to ‘embody’ rather than ‘perform’ femininity, they are less likely to be rewarded for it, and instead, may more easily be positioned as ‘gendered workers’.

The demand for and utilisation of the feminine in service sector employment are central not only to western economies, but also, to emerging economies such as those of Eastern Europe and the BRIC countries. In China, for example, Eileen Otis’s work explores the ways in which women and their bodies have been used as a vehicle for the mobilisation of global corporate capital as the public face of high-class hotels for international businessmen. My own research has explored a similar context in Russia, where images of women also indicate a shift towards a more ‘emphasized’ version of femininity in line with the building of post-Soviet capitalism. My interest, however, has predominantly been in questions of social inequality and social mobility – what sorts of prospects do new forms of interactive service work hold out for working-class young women in contemporary Russia?

I recently published the results of a study conducted in the rapidly developing metropolis of St. Petersburg, which involved interviews with thirty-four young women who were either training for or already working in various forms of interactive service work such as hospitality, tourism and the beauty industry. It was immediately apparent that the young women in the study were very attracted to the work roles they had chosen, and that they distinguished these roles strongly from older forms of employment in, for example, manufacturing. The attraction of service sector roles was rooted in part in their substantive content, including the possibilities it offered the young women to engage in communication-based work, and in what they regarded as creative tasks, as opposed to the ‘monotony’ of employment in the industrial sector, where many of their parents had worked. In addition, employment in hospitality and tourism, and the newer parts of the beauty industry, often held out forms of symbolic capital through their connection with the West, either in the form of western-standard hotels or possibilities for future travel, or simply western-sounding job titles such as menedzher and vizazhist. Finally, the attraction of service work stemmed from its aesthetic dimension, namely, the requirement to perform an idealised version of middle-class femininity, which held out significant appeal for working-class young women.

Newspaper advertisements for a sales manager and various forms of manual labour draw on different (albeit tongue-in-cheek in the latter case) constructions of femininity

However, taken together, these factors only made up a symbolic form of social mobility. In material terms, none of the young women in the study expected to earn more than they would have done had they chosen to work in industry, and all expected to earn significantly less than their boyfriends and future husbands. This was a realistic reflection of a gender pay gap that, according to Rosstat, stood at 37% in 2008.

Thus, the contradiction between notions of social mobility and the reality of poor prospects in feminised forms of service work appears especially stark in some of the newer contexts of global capitalism. In all of its contexts, though, it is important to unpack the significance of employment shifts that appear to favour a particular gendered worker.

The expansion of service sector employment has been at the heart of the apparent cultural feminisation of the economy, which has often underpinned discourses proclaiming that ‘the future is female’, and that men, or at least working-class men, are becoming increasingly ‘redundant’, as deindustrialising economies offer fewer jobs requiring skills associated with masculinity.
However, as the experience of the young women in the St. Petersburg study indicates, it is crucial not to mistake shifts in the gendered performances demanded by employers with shifts in gender equality.

Charlie Walker’s article ‘“I Don’t Really Like Tedious, Monotonous Work”: Working-class Young Women, Service Sector Employment and Social Mobility in Contemporary Russia’ appears in the journal Sociology

Migrant Workers in the UK – it’s time to talk

If the people who study elections are to be believed the UK Independence Party may take a second parliamentary seat in the Rochester by-election on 20th November. Mark Reckless, the UKIP candidate has made much in his campaign of the need to ‘get a grip’ on migration into the UK and has perpetuated ideas that migrant workers are a drain on the British economy and welfare state. A report in the Independent quoted Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader and MEP as saying that Britain was the “cheap labour economy of the European Union” as a result of “uncontrolled” levels of migration.

Against this recent research analyses by Professor Christian Dustmann and Dr Tommaso Frattini from UCL’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration show that skilled migrant workers from the EU have boosted the British economy by some £20bn over the past decade. This reflects earlier research conducted by Pauline Leonard and Derek McGhee of the Work Futures Research Centre, University of Southampton which revealed the economic benefits brought by EU migrants from the Accession States to the Solent Region.

So what is the truth about migrant workers in the UK – are they a drain or a gain?

We know from data provided by the Office for National Statistics that there have been recent rises in migration into the UK, and that much of this has come in the form of people from the recession-hit European countries Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, and Poland. Net migration from the EU has reportedly reached its highest level since 1964. (The Guardian, Thursday 27 February 2014)

But are these people really “all on benefits” and “taking British jobs” ?

Uncertainty and change in work, economy and society are core issues for us here at the WFRC and so these debates and questions about migrant workers fall clearly within our remit. Earlier this year we learnt about the TUC’s campaign, begun in the South West, which attempted to stand up to the ‘tidal wave of hysteria’ about migration and provide information to bridge the gap between public perception around these issues and the reality. Inspired by their ‘Truth, Lies & Migrants’ campaign we decided to convene our own panel of experts to look at interdisciplinary research, policy and evidence about migration, population patterns and employment in the UK. This idea has grown into a half day symposium on the theme of ‘Migrant Work Futures’ to be held on Tuesday 25th November at Westgate Hall, Southampton. We are delighted to have a stellar line up of academics who are researching and contributing to debates on migration and work who will speak alongside representatives from the Trade Union Congress. We will hear evidence and perspectives from Political Science, Geography and Social Science, learn about the TUC campaign, and, we hope, have a contribution from a local MEP. But most of all we will have a lively and informed debate about Migrant Work Futures based on scholarship and science rather than hyperbole and tabloid headlines.

This event is free but prior booking is required:

We look forward to seeing you on 25th November.

Qualifications, Skills & Gender

Author: Dr Suzanne Reimer, University of Southampton

Dr Suzanne Reimer

In early September, the BBC news website ran a story with the headline ‘Women may take best jobs by 2020.’ Reporting on evidence from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), the BBC claimed that “men could struggle to get highly skilled jobs because women are increasing skills and qualifications at higher rates.” (BBC News: Women may take best jobs by 2020, say researchers).

Phrased like that, that the acquisition of qualifications appears as a zero-sum game in which women’s apparent attainment directly hampers the position of men. This representation is potentially damaging for gender equality campaigning, given the extent to which it promotes antagonistic relations between men and women and implies that any improvements in the labour market position of women will be at the direct expense of men.

It is important to evaluate more of the detail contained within the August 2014 UKCES report. This document—in fact produced to compare UK skill levels with those of other countries—had extrapolated from historical trends in order to make predictions about future UK qualification levels. These projections appeared to reveal clear gender differences. Although in 2012 the proportion of men and women with relatively low qualification levels (GCSE or below) was similar, it was predicted that by 2020 this gap would widen. That is, a lower proportion of women but a higher proportion of men would fall into the ‘low qualifications group’ by 2020. In the middle qualifications group (from A-level to undergraduate degree completion) women also were predicted to outpace men by gaining higher levels of qualification. Interestingly, gender differences were reversed for qualifications at postgraduate levels and above: here a growing proportion of men (and a greater proportion of men than women) were predicted to achieve higher level qualifications by 2020. On the basis of this evidence, then, gender divisions are by no means uniform: not all women are increasing their qualification levels relative to (all) men. By extension, the labour market positions achieved by women on the basis of qualifications will also be highly varied.

One of the limitations of the UKCES analysis is that formal qualifications are used as a proxy for skill more broadly. Yet as feminist researchers consistently have identified, the idea of ‘skill’ itself is highly gendered: skills are differently valued depending upon whether they are possessed by men or women. Both now and historically, work done by women often hasn’t been considered to be ‘skilled’. At some times, in some places and in some sectors, formal qualifications may have advanced women’s labour market position, but in other circumstances inequalities persist even when women possess equivalent levels of qualification relative to male contemporaries. For example, the dominance of men in the UK design sector (particularly at senior levels) has endured despite a growing number of women enrolled on undergraduate and postgraduate design courses through the last two decades, as well as some level of expansion in the number of women in junior design posts.

It is important to consider the specificities of skill definition within individual labour market sectors. Within creative industries such as design, formal qualifications may be seen to be important, but design skills also are judged informally. Employers assess job applicants’ abilities in ways beyond simply their level of qualification. Informal evaluation—such as the extent to which employers perceive and assess applicants’ ‘fit’ within an existing work force—clearly can have negative implications for gender as well as ethnic diversity across many jobs. However creative ‘skills’ are often constructed as in some way inherent—as deriving from innate capabilities. In arenas where intrinsic or bodily ability is perceived to form a central part of skill, the potential aptitude of different bodies can be evaluated unequally. For example, in product design, the capacity to construct a physical prototype, to manipulate materials or even to use a hammer is often coded as essentially masculine, and a stereotyped separation of gender boundaries emerges.

The second half of the September BBC news report did in fact allude to the potential disconnection between formal qualification and evaluated ‘skill’: it notes that “… for many women their higher qualifications are not leading to better pay and jobs”. This latter point might more appropriately have been placed as the headline: why is it that women’s qualifications are undervalued and what challenges might be made to this state of affairs?

Dr Suzanne Reimer’s work on gender, design and skill recently was presented at the Third European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy, Amsterdam, October 2014.

Longer nursing shifts might ‘hit patient care’

Peter Griffiths

Our recent paper about the length of nursing shifts in hospitals has attracted quite a lot of attention including, I am reliably informed, a piece in the daily Sun. In simple terms, the issue is this: Traditionally, shift work was organised by dividing the day into three eight-hour shifts. Workers would generally work 5 such shifts per week. This pattern was the norm in nursing for many years. In common with other industries there is now a trend for some hospitals to adopt longer shifts, typically two shifts per day each lasting 12-13 hours. Employees work fewer shifts each week (generally three instead of five). Changes are driven by perceived efficiencies for the employer (fewer handovers and reduced overlap between shifts), and improved work life balance for employees because they work fewer days per week. However, persistent concerns have been raised about negative impacts on the quality of care associated with working longer hours.

Our study, based on a cross-sectional survey of 31,627 registered nurses in general medical/surgical units within 488 hospitals across 12 European countries, found that 15% worked these long shifts. But in some countries, most notably England, Ireland and Poland, the practice was far more common. Nurses working longer shifts were more likely to report poor patient safety, quality of care and more care activities left undone. This effect was independent of any effect of working overtime.

Now, there are lots of issues here – in the end this is only self-report. However, these results are consistent with a number of studies from other countries showing higher rates of nurse burnout and even increased patient deaths in hospitals where nurses work 12 hour shifts.

So what are we to make of these findings? Our results suggest that a policy of moving to longer shifts to reduce overall workforce requirements may have unintended consequences and reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of the workforce in delivering high quality, safe care. But the response to our paper in the social media makes it clear that the issue is not simple. While many nurses responding to reports of the study in the ‘trade’ magazine Nursing Times agreed that working long shifts compromised quality, others (and sometimes the same nurses) expressed a strong preference for them. The emphasis seemed to be on the benefits of the extra days off. Most of these benefits were for the nurses themselves, not for the quality of care they could provide.

This presents a dilemma. Personally, the idea of working 12-13 hours in a busy hospital ward is a daunting one. On the other hand the idea that I might only have to work on 3 days per week is appealing. I might be tempted by such a compromise. But what should be done if what is at stake is not simply an equation to be balanced between my preferences and my employer’s desire for efficiency. What is at stake here is the quality and safety of hospital care.

I suspect that there is no going back. Hospitals with 12 hour shift patterns are likely to find it very difficult to move back because their employees, often female and with children, have organised their lives around this pattern. But research such as ours does point to the vital importance of considering some of the staples of research on shift work over the years. It becomes increasingly important to ensure that nurses get adequate opportunity for rest between shifts and are not required to work too many long shifts in a row. And perhaps, if more research like this accumulates, some consideration does need to be given to restricting choice. The EU working time directive governs many aspects of working hours but, as far as I can see, these shift patterns seem largely outside its scope. But in the end, should employees in safety critical work be permitted to choose to work in ways that are known to increase risk and should employers be allowed to ask them to?

(c)evolution-diet.com

Griffiths , P., D’all Ora, C., Simon, M., Ball, J., Lindqvist, R., Rafferty, A.M., Schoonhoven, L., Tishelman, C., Aiken, J.L., in press. Nurses’ shift length and overtime working in 12 European countries: the association with perceived quality of care and patient safety. Medical Care (online early DOI doi: 10.1097/MLR.0000000000000233

Five years into Work Futures

We established the Work Futures Research Centre in December 2008 with four co-directors: Professor Susan Halford, Professor Pauline Leonard, Professor Alison Fuller, and Professor Catherine Pope. Originally supported by the Research Strategy sub-committee of the School of Social Sciences, a year later WFRC became a University Strategic Research Group.

Our objectives are :

– To build a collaborative, interdisciplinary network for academic research on changing forms of work organisation, workforce change, development and learning, and employment

– To improve links with employers, policy makers, and other stakeholders outside the University to strengthen Work Futures research

– To inform and influence the agenda for research on Work Futures and position the University of Southampton as a leading centre for this research

Since 2008 members of our WFRC network have raised in excess of £4.5m in funding across 21 research projects linked to our priorities. Our research has led to over 30 research papers and contributed to different Units of Assessment in the University’s REF2014 submission.

Recent successes include a commissioned scoping study for ESRC, on the ‘New Dynamics of Working’ which will inform research strategy for this major funder. Pauline Leonard and Susan Halford were also recipients of funding from the inaugural PublicPolicy@Southampton project which led to a symposium at the House of Commons on ‘Gender Equality at Work: How far have we come and how far have we got to go?’ in 2013.

WFRC members developed an innovative undergraduate curriculum module ‘Work and Employment Theory in Practice’ and delivered a multidisciplinary seminar series with the Digital Economy USRG focussed on the role of technology in school-to-work transition.

In September 2013, Alison Fuller left the University of Southampton to take up a new post at the Institute of Education at the University of London ESRC Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies. Alison remains a key collaborator in WFRC and Professor Peter Griffiths has joined us as a co-director. Peter is based in Faculty of Health Sciences and brings further expertise on workforce configuration and organisational policy in health sector to the Centre. Peter is currently working on a major review for NICE about staff-patient ratios in the NHS.

Work Futures for Older Workers

This edition of the Work Thought Blog was contributed by WFRC chair Susan Halford.

As the 21^st century unfolds, it is rapidly becoming clear that most of us – in the West at least – will have to stretch our working lives far further into old age than the recently retiring generations. The steps taken by governments, employers and financial institutions to deal with the ongoing pensions’ crisis means that most of us will simply not be able to afford to retire in our early or mid-60s. Meanwhile, and in any case, the ageing demography of Western nations will demand that older workers stay in the labour market longer to fuel the emergent recovery and beyond.

Nowhere are the demands for older workers going to be more keenly felt than in the healthcare sector, where the conditions described above are greatly exacerbated by the needs of an ageing population for services and care. In short there’s a double whammy: an ageing workforce must meet the demands of an ageing population. To make matters worse, the healthcare sector currently has one of the worst records for long-term sickness and highest rates of early retirement of any sector in the labour market. It’s a triple whammy.

More generally, one thing is clear: we cannot continue to provide healthcare services in the way we have been doing. Whilst the precise solutions vary, there is widespread recognition that the balance between primary and community care must shift, so that fewer people are treated in expensive hospital beds, and that the traditional boundaries between professions and organizations must be breached to enable more flexible, joined up services. And new technologies are being introduced to underpin these changes, promising improved information, that can be used to manage complex patient trajectories, across multiple boundaries and provide detailed management information from which further lessons can be learnt and efficiency improvements made. But here’s the paradox: research across a range of disciplines suggests that the prevalence of early retirements rises in those organizations with the highest levels of change, particularly change linked to technical innovation. To put it bluntly: we have a looming workforce crisis in public healthcare, that will lead to major social crisis if we can’t resolve it, and current changes designed to secure the future of the health care system may only make things worse!

So it is rather important that we begin to unpick the dynamics of this. What is the relationship between organizational change and early retirements? Is this inevitable? And are there ways that we might intervene? The answer depends on how we understand age and ageing. If, as some research has suggested, older workers are simply more conservative and resistant to learning or change then we have a problem and, in healthcare especially, one that may be exaggerated by the physical demands of clinical work. However, recent research by WFRC in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Tromsø suggests a rather different explanation. This three year project with doctors and nurses over 50 years old, including some in retirement, at two large University hospitals in Norway concluded that it is not age per se that leads to early retirement but rather the conditions of work and organization of the workplace that leads to staff feeling under-valued, out-of step and incapable. It is not age that makes these workers resistant to change; its change – and the way it is (mis)managed – that makes these workers feel old. Feeling old, often for the first time, leads to thoughts of retirement. In particular, changes to the organization of work may make certain skills redundant, whilst staff are sometimes expected to just pick up new skills with very little training (especially related to the use of digital systems). Furthermore, the continued organization of working hours around the standard shift pattern can make the work too much for those with physical limitations, as well as those with domestic responsibilities (ageing parents can be as much of a conflicting demand for time and energy as children, but few employers are willing to recognise this). These points are underscored by the many cases that were found in the research where older workers were happily staying in healthcare work. These were the niches where older workers skills were still valued, where training and support was given, and where line managers made special arrangements to enable appropriate working hours and responsibilities (albeit ‘below the radar’ of senior managers). Notably, the research found that working conditions for nurses were far more likely to produce age than those for doctors reflecting – perhaps – the greater autonomy and higher status of the medical profession and the associated capacity to achieve concessions e.g. reduced hours. Note too the gendering of these professions.

Overall then the challenges of an ageing workforce are not primarily about age, in and of itself, they are about how we design work, how we structure our workplaces and what we expect of our staff. Whilst these points may be very familiar in relation to previous debates about gender at work, to date we have barely scratched the surface in thinking about them in relation to age and ageing. Now is the time to so, to support those of us who must continue working into later years and to ensure that we retain a skilled and committed workforce to care for all of us into the future.

Work Thought Blog

Category Archives: Work-Futures-Research-Centre

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