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2009 23: 343Work Employment SocietyAnna Pollert and Andy Charlwood

The vulnerable worker in Britain and problems at work

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The vulnerable worker in Britain andproblems at work

�� Anna PollertUniversity of the West of England

�� Andy CharlwoodUniversity of York

ABSTRACT

This ar ticle investigates the experience of low paid workers without unionrepresentation. It reports on the findings of a recent survey of 501 low paid, non-unionized workers who experienced problems at work. The results demonstratethat problems at work are widespread and, despite a strong propensity to takeaction to try to resolve them, most workers failed to achieve satisfactory resolu-tions. In the light of these results, we argue that the current UK Government def-inition of vulnerability is too narrow because our results suggest that a largeproportion of low paid, unrepresented workers are at risk of being denied theiremployment rights. Therefore we question the ability of the UK’s current systemof predominantly non-unionized employment relations to deliver employmentrights effectively and fairly.

KEY WORDS

non-unionism / workplace problems / vulnerable worker / low paid workers

Introduction: defining ‘vulnerability’

The issue of ‘vulnerable employment’ has gained prominence in policy dis-course in the wake of tragedies such as the drowning of eighteen Chinesemigrant cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in February 2004 (Lawrence et al.,

2004). The government pledged support for ‘vulnerable workers’ as part of the‘Warwick Agreement’ with trade union leaders in July 2004 (Labour Party,

343

Work, employment and societyCopyright © 2009

BSA Publications Ltd®Volume 23(2): 343–362

[DOI: 10.1177/0950017009106771]SAGE Publications

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2004, 2005: 27), which led to a parliamentary policy statement, Success atWork: Protecting Vulnerable Workers, Supporting Good Employers (DTI,2006). This statement defined a vulnerable worker as:

‘someone working in an environment where the risk of being denied employment rightsis high and who does not have the capacity or means to protect themselves from thatabuse. Both factors need to be present. A worker may be susceptible to vulnerability,but that is only significant if an employer exploits that vulnerability’

(DTI, 2006: 25).

Listed among the risks of vulnerability are working in certain sectors, such as retail,hotels, restaurants, care homes, textiles, construction, security and cleaning, theabsence of human resources (HR) departments and non-unionism (DTI, 2006: 25).

Our starting point is different. Our research, which was designed and con-ducted before the issue of vulnerable employment came to centre stage, investi-gates what happens to low paid (earning at or below the median hourly wage),non-union workers when they experience problems in their jobs. Low pay andnon-unionism provide criteria for defining vulnerability in the labour marketwhich can be easily operationalized. Unions can raise their members’ awarenessof employment rights and provide them with the resources to claim them.Unorganized workers lack these resources and protection.

Differences among the non-unionized mean that not all are equally vulnerable.Arguably, the chief differentiator is labour market power. Those workers who lackfinancially and socially rewarded ‘skill’1 in ‘poor quality’ jobs lack such power, soare low paid. Hence, low pay can also be taken as an indicator of vulnerability.Changes in the structure of the labour market over the last 25 years suggest a polar-ization of jobs, with an increase in both the number and proportion of low paid,replaceable, ‘lousy jobs’ (Goos and Manning, 2007; Kaplanis, 2007) which indi-cates an increase in such vulnerable workers. The spectrum for ‘low pay’ is debate-able. In 2006 the Trade Union Congress (TUC) delineated vulnerability as absenceof collective bargaining combined with low pay, defined as those in the bottomthird of the hourly income distribution. This operationalization meant that 5.3 mil-lion UK employees, or one in five, were defined as vulnerable (TUC, 2006: 7). Abroader approach, adopted by the research reported here, takes lower pay as thehalf of UK employees earning below median hourly earnings. If low pay and a lackof union representation are combined, this higher pay threshold means that one inthree UK employees were vulnerable in 2005 if non-coverage by collective bar-gaining were the criterion of non-unionism (TUC, 2006: 7) or two-fifths if non-union membership were the measure2 (Pollert and Charlwood, 2008).3

Within this definition, there is a spectrum of vulnerability. Migrant workerswithout legal immigration and employee status fall outside employment law pro-tection (Ryan, 2005) and are among the most vulnerable. Workers withoutemployee status in general are also among the most vulnerable. Those workerswho move between unpaid work (primarily within home and family) and paidemployment – predominantly women – are particularly vulnerable, since they are

344 Work, employment and society Volume 23 � Number 2 � June 2009



more likely to have ‘non-standard’ jobs (temporary, casual, fixed-term), whichthe courts judge as outside the contracts of employment and hence employmentprotection (Fredman, 2003). Low paid workers earning below the lower earningslimit for national insurance contributions (primarily part-time women workers)are also excluded from a wide variety of social and employment benefits, such asincapacity benefit, statutory sick pay and maternity pay (Fredman, 2003: 304).Thus, the most vulnerable are low paid, ‘non-standard’, non-unionized workersexcluded from ‘all three regulatory regimes – collective bargaining, employmentprotection rights, and the national insurance system’ (Fredman, 2003: 308).

In 2008, the TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment (CoVE),described vulnerable employment as ‘Precarious work that places people at risk ofcontinuing poverty and injustice resulting from an imbalance of power in theemployer-worker relationship’ and estimated that there were two million peoplein vulnerable employment (TUC, 2008: 12, 23). We are sympathetic to CoVE’sreference to the ‘power imbalance’ in employment relations but find it ambiguousin that it is unclear as to whether it applies only to the particular kinds of ‘precar-ious work’ of the two million it identifies as vulnerable, or whether it is endemicto the capitalist employment relationship – which is our position. We argue thatthe basis of vulnerability is in the fundamental asymmetry of the capitalist employ-ment relationship between the individual worker and the employer. All workerswithout collective organization are vulnerable, but we narrow this characteriza-tion in terms of the added disadvantage of labour market weakness to the lowerpaid half of the workforce earning below the median. This definition results in asignificant risk for all low paid, unrepresented workers of being denied theiremployment rights. Whether or not this definition is legitimate is, at least partially,an empirical question. What is the experience of lower paid, unorganized workerswhen they experience problems at work? The findings of the UnrepresentedWorker Survey (URWS) provide evidence against which our claim can be assessed.The URWS is a telephone questionnaire, conducted in 2004, to 501 low paid, non-unionized workers (our broader definition of the vulnerable) about the problemsthat they had experienced at work in the previous three years. What problems didthey have? What did they do about them? Did their actions lead to satisfactory res-olutions? In brief, the findings show that the low paid, non-unionized worker hasa very poor chance of resolving problems satisfactorily at work: only 16 percentof the sample did so and almost half achieved no outcome. In the light of this anal-ysis, we offer critical discussion of established definitions of vulnerability andargue that low paid, non-unionized workers are vulnerable to being denied properaccess to fair dispute resolution and establishing their rights.

Conceptualizing ‘problems’ and research methods

The URWS aimed to capture both the nature of, and responses to, workplace‘problems’. It cognitively tested the word ‘problem’ and found it excluded eli-gible respondents who, when asked about work in terms such as ‘worries’ or

345The vulnerable worker in Britain and problems at work Pollert and Charlwood



‘concerns’, recalled a range of workplace grievances. This finding demonstratedthat the threshold for registering workplace experiences as ‘problems’ can behigh, especially at the lower end of the labour market, where habituation toexperiences such as work intensification, insecurity, low pay and coercion lowerexpectations of working life, as illustrated in a study of migrant and ethnicminority workers in the hotel and catering industry (Wright and Pollert, 2007).The URWS initially used ‘softer’ terms, such as ‘difficulty’, ‘concern’ or ‘worry’,and then used prompts to exclude more trivial concerns and to focus on 10potential grievance areas experienced in the previous three years (Table 2).

Who, then, has problems at work? An indication was given in the first phaseof the URWS, which began with regionally representative sampling of householdscontaining workers.4 After exclusion of refusals and households without workerseligible for interview, 1971 workers were asked if they had experienced any one of10 prompted employment ‘difficulties, concerns or worries’ in the previous threeyears and 48.6 percent answered in the affirmative. While caution is required ininterpretation, this response suggests that around half of Britain’s workers haveexperienced a problem at work, a figure only slightly higher than the 42 percentof respondents who reported problems in the previous five years found in a gov-ernment commissioned study, which made similar use of prompts to identify con-crete issues (Casebourne et al., 2006: 98). This was a major increase on a previousstudy, which asked ‘Have you personally experienced any problems at work overthe last three years in relation to your rights at work?’ (Meager et al., 2002: 176).This approach conflated awareness of ‘rights’ with experience of ‘problems’, andfound that only 16 percent reported problems. The contrast underlines the impor-tance of sensitivity and clarity in survey identification of ‘problems’ at work.

The URWS then excluded unionized workers earning above the medianand focused on a sample of 501 lower paid, unrepresented workers with prob-lems at work over the past three years.

Who are the lower paid, non-unionized with problemsat work?

The URWS first compared with the Labour Force Survey (LFS) in 2004 and asub-sample of non-unionized workers earning below the median in the work-force (the ‘vulnerable’ in the LFS) to look in more depth at who experiencesproblems at work. Table 1 presents the results of this analysis.

Table 1 shows that women workers were significantly more likely to bepresent in the URWS than in the LFS but, partly reflecting women’s low pay,their over-representation in the URWS was similar to their dominance amongthe vulnerable in the LFS.5 However, young workers (24 years or less) wereunder-represented in our sample compared to the vulnerable in the LFS – possiblythrough sampling error due to telephone interviewing depending on fixed lines,which may be less common for young workers. Ethnic minority workerswere significantly more likely to be present in the URWS than in the LFS andthe vulnerable in it, which suggests a higher occurrence of problems. Workers in





Table 1 Comparison of the characteristics of low paid, unrepresented workers with problemswith all low paid, unrepresented workers and with the workforce as a whole.

Vulnerable workers:unrepresentedworkers survey

Low paid, unrepresentedworkers (Labour Force

Survey)

All workers(Labour Force

Survey)

Individual characteristics

Male 39.12 42.14 53.77***

Female 60.88 57.86 46.23***

Age

<25 16.53 29.71*** 14.27**

25–34 20.36 19.63 21.83

35–44 23.79 20.1 26.32

45–54 24.4 15.89*** 21.91

55+ 14.92 14.86 15.67

Highest educational qualification1

None 14.11 14.84 10.13

NVQ level 1 equivalent 5.44 19.69 13.88

GCSE/ NVQ level 2 equivalent 31.05 20.87 15.36

A level/ NVQ level 3 equivalent 24.19 22.72 22.24

Higher education 21.77 13.34 30.25

Other 3.23 - 9.14

Ethnicity

Non-white ethnic minorities 8.78 6.42*** 7.07**

White 91.22 93.58*** 92.93**

Job characteristics

Sector2

Public sector 17.67 15.87 24.19***

Private sector 82.33 84.13 75.81***

Industry

Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing 1.44 1.61 1.34

Manufacturing 14.43 13.42 13.57

Construction 3.3 6.9*** 8.07***

Retail, wholesale and distribution 18.76 25.69*** 13.45**

Hotels and restaurants 7.01 8.75 4.35***

Transport and communications 4.95 5.27 6.75

Financial intermediation 3.51 2.7 4.18

Other business services 9.07 8.97 11.46

Public administration 5.98 3.34*** 7.04

Education 8.04 6.42 9.09

Health and social services 17.11 11.38*** 12.09***

Other community services 6.39 6.52 5.6

Workplace size

<10 employees 21.76 29.87*** 19.01**

(Continued)




Table 1 (Continued)

Vulnerable workers:unrepresentedworkers survey

Low paid, unrepresentedworkers (Labour Force

Survey)

All workers(Labour Force

Survey)

10–24 employees 20.39 18.23 12.63***25–49 employees 14.87 15.25 12.66*50–249 employees 28.72 21.22*** 21.48***250–499 employees 6.11 6.3 7.11>499 employees 8.15 8.31 15.75***Occupation

Managers and seniorprofessionals

6.68 5.8 14.95***

Professionals 4.05 2.22** 12.41***Associate professional andtechnical occupations

7.89 5.92* 13.79***

Administrative and secretarialoccupations

18.42 17.53 12.62***

Skilled manual occupations 7.49 9.94 11.55***Personal services occupations 16.40 11.4*** 7.61***Sales and customer servicesoccupations

12.96 16.17 7.85***

Semi-skilled occupations 9.51 8.69 7.48*Unskilled occupations 16.60 22.3*** 11.67***Full-time job 78.34 61.97*** 76.11Part-time job 21.66 38.03*** 23.89Non-standard employmentcontract

11.45 7.77*** 5.27***

N 501 5775 57663

Sources: 3rd Quarter (Autumn) of 2004 Labour Force Survey and Unrepresented Workers Survey.1Responses here are not strictly comparable as the LFS asks a much more detailed set of questionsabout qualifications. Because of these differences, no significance tests were performed on thesevariables.2Differences between the URWS and LFS here may arise from differences in the questions. TheURWS asks if workers work for private contractors in the public sector, respondents who are cat-egorized in the URWS column as being in the private sector. In the LFS workers in these jobs mayclassify themselves as working in the public sector.3The base number for the low paid, unrepresented in the LFS is only 10 percent of the base of theLFS. This seeming discrepancy can be accounted for by missing values on questions which relate topay, which means there is only pay information for a quarter of all employed LFS respondents.* Difference compared to the unrepresented workers sample is statistically significant at the 10 per-cent level or better.** Difference compared to the unrepresented workers sample is statistically significant at the 5 per-cent level or better.*** Difference compared to the unrepresented workers sample is statistically significant at the 1 per-cent level or better. Results are based on chi2 tests.



small workplaces (10–24 workers) were more likely to be in the URWS than inthe LFS, but not its non-union, low paid sub-sample, which partly reflects lowunionization in small workplaces (Kersley et al., 2006: 110; Mercer and Notley,2008: 38), but, perhaps surprisingly, those workers in medium-sized workplaces(50–249 workers) were more likely to be in the URWS (i.e. more likely to havereported problems), than in either LFS comparator. Interestingly, full-time work-ers had a similar presence in the URWS to the LFS but a higher one than amongthe vulnerable in the LFS – suggesting more problems or a higher perception ofthem. Retail and hotels and catering had a stronger presence in the URWS thanin the LFS and interestingly, those workers in health and social services had a sig-nificantly higher presence in the URWS than in either LFS comparators, whichsuggests a concentration of problems here. Most strikingly, workers with lessthan six months’ tenure were much more likely to be in the URWS than in theLFS or its low paid, non-unionized sub-sample, as were temporary and agencyworkers, which suggests the importance of insecurity to vulnerability.

Finally, the majority of the URWS sample, 58 percent, had never been unionmembers, 34 percent had been members at some time and six percent were mem-bers when they had their problems, but without union recognition or representation.

What problems are experienced and did workers doanything to resolve them?

The URWS first asked respondents about all problems experienced at work inany job in the previous three years, then about details of problems in one joband finally about one problem (the ‘main problem’), prioritized as one whichthe worker ‘pushed hardest’ to resolve. Table 2 summarizes the results andshows that problems with pay, work relations, such as stress and bullying,workload, working hours and job security were the chief problems, although allworkers suffered from multiple problems.

Respondents were also asked ‘Do you feel your problems were an infringe-ment of your rights?’ This question was deliberately framed to probe beyond asense or knowledge of legal rights alone. While responses could include refer-ence to infringement of employment rights, they also encompassed ‘rights’ interms of a sense of ‘fairness’ – as expressed in ‘fair treatment of employees’ inthe government’s White Paper Fairness at Work (DTI, 1998: 1.9), and in itsrecent statement on Success at Work (DTI, 2006: 5). Fifty-five percent thoughtthat one or more of their problems were an infringement of their rights and 40percent of all problems experienced were viewed as rights infringements – byeither measure, a substantial proportion.

Only 14 percent of respondents said they did nothing about their problems.This response refutes assumptions of worker passivity: once workers register a‘problem’, they are likely to act. Non-actors were more likely to have been intheir jobs for less than a year and to be in semi-skilled manual occupations.Pessimism and fear were their main rationales, particularly, ‘I did not think




I would be successful’ (12%), ‘others at work had the same problem, and thatmade me put up with it’ (12%) and ‘I was worried I might lose my job’ (11%).

Before acting to resolve their main problem, 61 percent took advice. Thoseworkers with pay, opportunities, discrimination, workload, health and safety,contract and work relations problems, and women, disabled workers and thosewho perceived that their rights had been violated were significantly more likelyto seek advice than others. Several sources of advice were sought, with a thirdapproaching managers and friends and work colleagues. A significant minorityapproached Citizens’ Advice Bureau (CAB) (13%), but few sought advice fromtrade unions, ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) or LawCentres (5%, 3% and 1% respectively). Interestingly, workers were most stronglyinfluenced by the advice of friends or colleagues (20%), followed by family andfriends (16%). Managers had greatest influence for only a tenth of respondents. Themajority (91%) of those workers who took advice then went on to take action,but three-quarters of those workers who did not take advice also went on to act.

The vast majority of all respondents acted to resolve their main problem –86 percent – with discrimination and pay problems leading to an even greater


Table 2 What problems had respondents experienced in the previous three years?

All problems inthe previousthree years

Problems in therespondent’s main(screened) job

Main problemrespondent pushedhardest to solve

% % %

1. Pay (1) 38.1 36.1 16.02. Work relations, such as stress orbullying

36.7 34.3 15.2

3. Workload 31.9 28.5 9.2 4. Job Security 30.3 24.8 6.45. Working hours 28.5 25.3 6.46. Contract or job description 26.5 22.8 4.87. Health and Safety 24.4 21.8 8.48. Opportunities 24.2 20.4 5.4 9. Taking time-off 24.0 21.8 6.010. Discrimination (2) 17.8 15.2 3.8

Multiple problems 1.4Unspecified problems which at firstsaid did not act upon (3)

17.2

N 501 501 501

Notes: Results rounded to one decimal place.(1) Such as not being paid the correct amount, not being paid regularly or not receiving pay forholidays or overtime, etc.(2) Towards yourself.(3) 86 people at first said they did not try to do anything about their main problem, so were notasked about it. Of these, 16 did in fact take action, reducing the ‘non-actors’ from 86 to 70 (14 per-cent of the sample).



predilection (95% and 91% took action respectively). While a sense of rightsinfringed did not make action more probable, regression analysis6 showed thatrespondents with multiple problems – and three-fifths had more than oneproblem – were more likely to act than those with just one.

What did workers do? Respondents were first asked about all actions toresolve their main problem and then about the most important one taken (seeTable 3).

Most workers tried several options (the mean number of actions was 2.2)and Table 3 shows that the majority tried to solve matters informally with linemanagers, followed by senior managers. Very few used formal grievance proce-dures. It could be that this option was not available. Their presence was indeedlow – 62 percent of respondents had such procedures compared with the Britishaverage of 96 percent of employees (Kersley et al., 2006: 213).7 This lowerfigure may be due to low awareness among the sample (although only 4%answered that they ‘did not know’ to this question), as well as the fact that theURWS included workers in workplaces with below 10 workers (22% of respon-dents), whereas Kersley et al. (2006: 14) did not. However, the same low pro-portions (12%) of workers reported that they used these formal procedureswhether or not they stated that they had them. Thus, unavailability of formalprocedures did not explain their low use. External recourse to help was alsovery low – the highest being to a CAB (11% of the sample), the lowest beingapplication to an employment tribunal (2% of the sample).

The government’s approach to vulnerable workers is based on individualrights and individual resolution: they are to be encouraged to be ‘aware of their


Table 3 What actions did respondents take?

All actions taken% respondents

Most important action% respondents

Type of Action

% (base:wholesample)

% (base: allwho tookany action)

% (base:wholesample)

% (base: allwho tookaction)

Informal approach to line manager 69.3 80.8 37.7 44.1

Informal approach to senior manager 42.7 49.9 21.8 25.4

Joined together with other workers 24.2 28.2 6.8 7.9

Used formal complaints procedure 11.6 13.5 2.4 2.8

Went to Citizen’s Advice Bureau 9.2 10.7 3 3.5

Sought help from friends or family 8 9.3 2.6 3.0

Sought help from a trade union 6 7 2.4 2.8

Approach to co-workers responsible forthe problem

5.2 6.1 3 3.5

Began employment tribunal proceedings 2.4 2.8 1.6 1.9

N 501 429 501 429



rights’, while agencies should ‘help’ them (DTI, 2006: 25–32). Yet the secondsurprising finding of the URWS was the frequency of informal collective voice.A quarter of the URWS and 28 percent of those who took action respondedpositively when asked: ‘Did you join with others in your workplace who shareyour concerns, to get together as a group to pursue your claims?’ This actionwas significantly more likely among workers in the transport, storage and com-munication industries and in health and social work and, interestingly, the moreproblems a respondent had experienced, the more likely they were to take infor-mal collective action, possibly because this increased the likelihood that someof these problems were shared.

Mobilization theory points to the importance of group interest identificationin the process of individuals transforming individual grievances to collectiveaction (Kelly, 1998) and group identification was explored in two ways in theURWS. The first was whether there was any relationship between the socialnature of work and informal collective action. Team-working did predict takinginformal collective action – 30 percent of those respondents working in a teamand able to talk joined with others, compared with 24 percent of the sample tak-ing group action. Secondly, the survey asked respondents whether they felt theirown problem was shared by others. Three-quarters thought that it was, andamong these respondents, three-quarters also said that they attempted group solu-tions. Both of these findings demonstrate a high degree of collective identity andan association between collective identity and collective action – albeit the latterbeing limited in form: for 78 percent of the sample, it was discussing with otherswhat to do about the problem, although 19 percent went as a group to manage-ment, and 13 percent organized a group meeting – arguably more advanced formsof mobilization. Nevertheless, the evidence points to the persistence of collectivityin the workplaces, which has no place in the government’s approach to vulnera-bility, which 1-stead emphasizes worker individualism and passive need for help.

The survey showed, however, that informal collective action was attemptedbut not pursued further. Once informants were asked to focus on the mostimportant action they ended taking, informal collective action accounted foronly eight percent, with approaches to line managers and senior managersaccounting for 44 and 25 percent. Nevertheless, all other lines of action alsodiminished by similar or greater amounts: to three percent using the grievanceprocedure, seeking friends and family, the CAB or a union, and to below twopercent starting employment tribunal proceedings (Table 3).

Outcomes: the paucity of conclusions

The third and striking finding of the URWS was the paucity of outcome to theseefforts. The 86 percent of respondents who took action were asked, ‘Did thisaction lead to any conclusion with your employer?’ – a question framed to iden-tify any conclusion at all, rather than a resolution to the problem. Of the 429respondents who took action, 47 percent had no outcome whatsoever. Just




38 percent reported that their problem was brought to a conclusion and only 49percent of these respondents were satisfied. In total, almost half of those workerswho acted had no result and 18.6 percent reached a satisfactory resolution – 16percent of the whole sample. These low levels of satisfactory resolution resonatewith other research findings, such as Genn’s (1999: 157) study, which found that52 percent of workers who took action on an employment problem with poten-tial legal redress reached no agreement and no resolution, and a West Midlandsemployment advice line survey of its users, which found that just under half ofrespondents resolved their problem (Russell and Eyers, 2002: 2).

When workplaces had mechanisms for regular consultation and communi-cation between employees and management, problems were more likely toreach a conclusion, and to be resolved satisfactorily.8 However, respondentswho had a formal grievance procedure were not significantly more likely to geta conclusion or a satisfactory resolution than those who worked in a workplacewithout such a procedure (Table 4).

Taking informal collective action was more likely than other actions toresult in a conclusion to the problem but not to result in a satisfactory resolu-tion. It appears that it produces ‘voice’ in forcing some kind of outcome but thelimited forms of collective action suggest it is not effective in terms of a satis-factory resolution to those with problems.

What happened to workers unable to bring satisfactory resolution to theirproblems? Theory would suggest that failure to use voice to resolve a problemwould make exit more likely (Hirschman, 1970). However, most vulnerableworkers tried to overcome difficulties, failed in their efforts but remained intheir jobs – 58 percent were in the ‘problem’ job when interviewed. Two-fifthstook action and left their jobs. Regression analysis showed that respondents


Table 4 Outcomes by the presence of workplace grievance procedures and consultation

ConsultationProcedure

GrievanceProcedure

% Yes % No % Yes % No

Respondents who took action (base 429)No outcome 59 67.3* 63.2 60.6Any outcome 41 32.7* 36.8 39.4Respondents who took action (base 429)No outcome/unsatisfactory outcome 77.3 88*** 80.7 82.5Satisfactory outcome 22.7 12*** 19.3 17.5Respondents with an outcome (base 162)Unsatisfactory outcome 43.1 62.8** 46.4 54.1Satisfactory outcome 56.9 37.3** 53.6 45.9

* = statistically significant at the 10 percent level** = statistically significant at the 5 percent level*** = statistically significant at the 1 percent level



who took their problem to a senior manager and respondents who took a caseto an employment tribunal were more likely to have quit, possibly because theseactions suggest heightened confrontation or more serious problems. Workerswho had experienced the problem within the first six months of employmentand ethnic minority respondents were also more likely to quit but, interestingly,those workers who took informal collective action were less likely to leave. Thisoutcome suggests a paradoxical characteristic of spontaneous collectivism: onthe one hand, it was associated with reduced turnover and thus could benefitmanagement, but the fact that it produced conclusions, but not satisfactory res-olutions, may contribute to frustration, which could have many consequences –reduced motivation, lower productivity, absence or further conflict – all ofwhich are arguably counterproductive to ‘stable’ industrial relations.

Workers were less likely to quit if their workplace had a joint consultationmechanism and also if they had a grievance procedure. This outcome suggeststhat regular consultation may benefit dispute resolution and increase retentionbut grievance procedures do not do much for workers in terms of bringingabout satisfactory resolutions to problems, although they serve management byreducing labour turnover with its associated costs.

Discussion

We believe that the results set out above support our contention that vulnerableemployment should be defined more broadly than the current definitionsemployed by both the UK Government and the TUC CoVE. We make this asser-tion because the results show that all low paid and unrepresented workers face asignificant risk of being denied their employment rights because they are likely toface problems at work which are not resolved in their favour. However, there arealso theoretical grounds for doubting the appropriateness of the government def-inition of vulnerable employment. It is not only restricted but is not a definition atall: it merely describes symptoms. These symptoms include a list of industries andcharacteristics associated with ‘risks’ of vulnerability (DTI, 2006: 25), which begsthe question as to the underlying reason for these ‘risks’. Further, the narrowing ofvulnerability to a condition which pertains only after it has been exploited fails todefine it in terms of powerlessness in the employment relationship and the subor-dination to unilateral managerial prerogative. In this approach, to be vulnerable,a worker must already be a victim of abuse. Unlimited managerial power is onlyproblematic if this amounts to ‘exploitation’ – a term never defined.

A definition of vulnerability must be based on diagnosis in the powerimbalance inherent in the employment relationship, an asymmetry recognizedby pluralist, radical and Marxist perspectives in industrial relations. Theindividual employee’s powerlessness can, to a limited extent, be mitigated bycollective representation combined with statutory individual employment rights.However, in Britain, the system of collective laissez-faire (Hyman, 2003; Kahn-Freund, 1959; Lewis, 1986), the dominant mode of employment regulation in




the mid-20th century which went some way to providing this type of mitigat-ing environment was gradually dismantled by Conservative governmentsbetween 1979 and 1997 through trade union regulation, employment rights de-regulation, privatization and the promotion of a ‘flexible’ labour force (Smithand Morton, 1993; Wedderburn, 1989). This development occurred alongside,and arguably contributed towards, the decline in union density, which still con-tinues. According to the Labour Force Survey, in 2008 27.4 percent of UKemployees were union members, down 0.6 percentage points from 2007. In theprivate sector, membership fell 0.6 percentage points from 2007 to 15.5 percent(Barratt, 2009: 2). Non-union members who are covered by collective bargain-ing agreements on pay – ‘free-riders’ – are plausibly less vulnerable to unilateralmanagement but have been declining. Collective bargaining coverage hasshrunk, leaving over two-thirds of employees outside its remit. In the privatesector, which comprises 80 percent of employment (Labour Market Trends,2006), it covers only 18.7 percent, down from 20 percent in 2007. Within thisshrinking of union bargaining coverage, ‘free-riding’ has diminished: in 1998,25.7 percent of non-union members worked in workplaces covered by collec-tive bargaining or a pay review body, but in 2004, only 16.9 percent (Pollertand Li, 2006). Thus, whether vulnerability through decollectivization is definedby non-union membership or non-coverage by collective bargaining, it hasincreased and includes the majority of workers.

New Labour’s employment law reforms, primarily to enforce EuropeanCommunity directives on individual rights, but also introducing statutory unionrecognition and national minimum wage legislation, have retained the legal cur-tailment of union behaviour and collective action (Dickens and Hall, 2003; Smithand Morton, 2001). Union collectivism, far from being fully restored, is accept-able only as part of the ‘third-way’ of ‘partnership’, in which ‘there is little spacefor any concept of workers’ separate interests or distinctive outcomes to theiradvantage’ in a perspective which is fundamentally neo-liberal (Smith andMorton, 2006: 403). The weakening of union power, even for the unionized, wasapparent at the end of the last century, with a decline in the depth and scope ofcollective bargaining (Brown et al., 1998). This decline meant that even unionizedworkers became more vulnerable to unilateral managerial prerogative. In otherwords, the framework of collective representation and employment rights, whichused to exist, has not been rebuilt. In such circumstances, the evidence ofwidespread workplace problems suggested by our results is unsurprising.

Nevertheless, there is some evidence that within the New Labour regime ofemphasizing individual employment rights, employees in unionized workplacesbenefited from the growing union role of enforcing such rights (Brown et al.,2000). For the non-unionized, this regulating union presence is absent – hencetheir vulnerability is magnified. Yet the government asserts that, apart from thenarrow sector which it defines as vulnerable, ‘The climate of industrial relationsin Britain is sound’ and ‘The UK’s industrial relations framework is workingbetter than ever’ (DTI, 2006: 5). This complacent view allows vulnerableemployment to be regarded as a marginal issue not associated with the decline




in collectivism in industrial relations or the fact that 72 percent of the UK work-force is non-unionized. The assumption is that, for the majority of workers,industrial relations are fair and harmonious.

This complacency is perhaps unsurprising because policy on both vulnerableemployment and workplace dispute resolution has so far been informed by littleresearch evidence. In 2001, the government asserted that workers were becomingincreasingly litigious (DTI, 2001: 4) but premised its case on selective use of evi-dence (Hepple and Morris, 2002; Pollert, 2005, 2007a). Ensuing legislation in theEmployment Act 2002 to enforce statutory dismissal, disciplinary and grievanceprocedures from 2004 was then criticized (DTI, 2007) and was repealed in 2009(Employment Act, 2008). The government, remaining committed to ‘seeking toresolve more disputes in the workplace’ (DTI, 2006: 39), proposes a revisedACAS Code of Practice for workplace dispute resolution (ACAS, 2008), the draftof which Thompsons Solicitors, the UK’s major employment rights firm, regardsas ‘more procedure than guidance’ (Thompsons, 2008: 7).

Our research suggests that workplace grievance resolution is not working.Turning first to grievances in general, our survey suggests that almost half ofworkers in Britain have had problems at work in the previous three years, a find-ing consistent with government commissioned research (Casebourne et al.,2006). Among the vulnerable, half felt their problems an infringement of theirrights and the most frequent specific grievances of stress, being given too muchwork without enough time and management taking advantage or bullying, indi-cated a working environment of work-intensification.

The URWS was equally concerned with responses to problems as with theirnature. Most workers (61%) sought advice about what to do. Most (58%)were still in the job in which they had their main problem, which indicates thatthe assumption that the first response to problems among the vulnerable unor-ganized is to leave is incorrect. One of the most striking findings of the URWS isthat passive acceptance is not the dominant response: 86 percent of the sampletried to do something within their workplace to resolve their problem.Importantly, those who had left and those who remained in their jobs wereequally likely to have acted. For policy-makers, a further significant result wasthe low proportion of workers used the official grievance procedure. The evenlower percentage which began employment tribunal proceedings is less surpris-ing in view of similar survey evidence (Kersley et al., 2006: 227). One of themost surprising findings, considering that this study focused on non-unionizedworkers, the majority of whom had no union experience, was the high propor-tion (28% of those who took action) who attempted collective solutions to theirproblems, primarily through group discussion, but also with a minority orga-nizing group delegations to management or organizing group meetings. Thesefindings underline the fact that managerial initiatives and government policy toindividualize employment relations have not destroyed the collective nature oflabour. Elsewhere, we explore the implications of informal collective action forworkplace organization, as well as findings on respondents’ attitudes to tradeunions (Pollert and Charlwood, 2008).




The final and sobering finding is that very few vulnerable workers founda satisfactory resolution to their problems. Indeed, for 47 percent, nothinghappened after all their efforts. Only 18 percent of those workers who tookaction and 16 percent of all those with problems had a satisfactory outcome.Problems that respondents perceived to be violations of their rights were evenless likely to be satisfactorily resolved. Collective action increased the likelihoodof there being an outcome, but not a satisfactory one, and decreased the likeli-hood of exit. Thus, spontaneous collectivity is not dead but, without being har-nessed into organized power, it may only improve employment stability andforce outcomes to problems better than other strategies but not in workers’interests. The existence of grievance and disciplinary procedures did notincrease the likelihood of conclusions to problems or satisfactory resolutions,but decreased the likelihood of exit. They thus appeared to serve managerialinterests in reducing turnover but not in achieving their purpose of assistingdispute resolution. By contrast, when workplaces had mechanisms for regularconsultation and communication between employees and management, prob-lems were more likely to be resolved, and to be resolved satisfactorily.

In the light of our findings, we believe that there needs to be a revision ofpolicy towards vulnerable workers, beginning with recognition that vulnerabil-ity is more widespread than the current definition acknowledges. And becausethe root of this vulnerability is the power imbalances inherent within theemployment relationship, new policies are needed, including stronger rights forunions to organize (because unions provide workers with the resources to claimthe rights that they are entitled to) and tougher enforcement of existing rights.Of course, it is unlikely that any policy response could entirely eliminate therisk of workers being denied their employment rights, but the aim should be togo considerably further to mitigate this risk than is achieved by the currentpolicy framework.

Finally, academic industrial relations has until recently been dominated bythe concerns of institutional processes, the unionized workforce and collectivebargaining and while the decline in unionization and union revitalization arekey areas of analysis, the non-unionized themselves, who comprise the major-ity of employees, have been marginalized to a few, albeit important, case stud-ies (Dundon and Rollinson, 2004; Dundon et al., 2005). The importance ofvulnerability and the predominance of the non-unionized indicate the need formore research on grievances and dispute resolution among those without col-lective representation at work.

Conclusions

Overall, these results must cast serious doubt on the effectiveness of the systemof regulating the employment relationship for the majority of workers – thenon-unionized – and expose the double disadvantage of the vulnerable: not onlydo they suffer from multiple problems at work but when they try to resolve




these problems the overwhelming majority fail. The majority do not exit. Whenworkers quit, they had usually first taken action to try to get a resolution. Thelow rate of any conclusion, let alone satisfactory outcome and the fact thatthese are less likely when workers feel that their rights have been violated sug-gests that the current system of individual workplace problem resolution is notdelivering fairness at work. The fact that collective stoppages have declined ‘tothe lowest ever stretching back to 1930’ cannot be interpreted, as the govern-ment does, as indicating that ‘the UK’s industrial relations framework is work-ing better than ever’ (DTI, 2006: 5). This research has identified processes ofunresolved problems at work which are likely to build a store of resentment andfrustration among Britain’s vulnerable workers.

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by the ESRC in the research project, The unorganisedworker, Routes to support and views on representation. (Grant R000237679, AnnaPollert).

Notes

1 We use the concept of ‘skill’ since it is commonly used in descriptive labourmarket literature. It is contentious, and while there may be objective measuresof skill we recognize that it is also used as a socially constructed concept.

2 These results are derived using the ‘hourpay’ variable from the 3rd quarter ofthe 2004 Labour Force Survey.

3 Of course, it is possible that comparable (in terms of pay) workers who are cov-ered by union representation may experience similar problems in similar ways.However, the problems of unionized workers are beyond the scope of ourresearch.

4 Details of methodology can be found at ESRC project The UnorganizedWorker, Routes to Support, Views on Representation Working Papers, athttp://www.uwe.ac.uk/bbs/research/cesr/workingpapers.shtml.

5 Results based on chi-squared tests. Further details in Pollert and Charlwood(2008).

6 Space constraints prevent the reporting if the full results of the regressionanalysis here but see Pollert and Charlwood (2008) for full results.

7 The question asked was: ‘In the workplace where you were/are having prob-lems, if a problem came up between you and your employer, are there set rulesfor how they should be dealt with? (Prompt if necessary: for example, the mak-ing of a written statement or warning, or a formal meeting).

8 The survey question for Joint Consultation was: ‘Could/can staff or their rep-resentatives meet regularly with managers to discuss workplace issues?’ It thuscovers both representative organizations and forms of direct communication,




such as briefing meetings. Again, response depended on respondents’ percep-tions. Only 3 percent said they did not know, and 60 percent said they had sucha mechanism. This is not directly comparable to WERS 2004, which found thatonly 42 percent of employees worked in workplaces with a joint consultativecommittee – down from 46 percent in 1998 (Kersley et al., 2006: 127). In theURWS, 73 percent of respondents had consultation procedures in workplacesof over 500 workers, but only 54 percent of those in workplaces with below 25workers. These accounted for 41 percent of the sample.

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Anna Pollert

Anna Pollert is Professor of the Sociology of Work at the Centre for Employment

Studies Research at Bristol Business School, the University of the West of England.

Previously, she was at the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan

University, the University of Greenwich and the Industrial Relations Research Unit,

University of Warwick. She has published widely in the areas of class, gender, workplace

relations, worker representation and the transformation of the former ‘communist’

countries of Central Eastern Europe to capitalism. Her books include Girls, Wives, Factory

Lives (Macmillan, 1981), Farewell to Flexibility? (editor, Blackwell, 1991) and Transformation

at Work in the New Market Economies of Central Eastern Europe (Sage, 1999). She is cur-

rently focusing her research on the experience of non-unionized, low paid workers.

E mail: anna.polleat@ vive.ac.uk.




Andy Charlwood

Andy Charlwood is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at The York

Management School, University of York. Previously he worked at the Universities of

Warwick, Leeds and Kent and was a research associate at the Centre for Economic

Performance at the London School of Economics. His research interests include the

causes and consequences of trade union decline, worker representation and job quality.

Email: [email protected] and [email protected]

Date submitted April 2008Date accepted October 2008




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