Analytical essay about industrial relations
peter brown
literaturereview.docx
Literature review
With more and more company are pursuing labor flexibility nowadays. The number of precarious employments is increasing. It manifests as the decreasing of annual average income, growth of long-term unemployment in the society, and rise of non-standard employment. Marketization reform, reconstruction of Enterprise, non-nationalization of economic structure, flexibilization of labor market and economic globalization contributes to the precarious employment. The precarious employment made workers have no guaranteed hours of work, no job security, low wages and no holiday or sick leave pay. It caused many potential risks under precarious employment such as job disorganization, psychology distress, and health and safety problem.
Precarious employment is a form of non-standard employment which has job insecurity, more volatile income, lack of legislative protection, and excluded from employment benefits such as annual holiday pay or sick leave pay. There are many categories of precarious employment, such as causal employment, temporary employment, independent contract, outsourcing and homeworking. In Australia, there are five areas which are associated with precariousness. The first one is employment insecurity. As the expansion of the causal share in labor force, there are more and more employees can be terminated job in short time or without notice. The second one is income insecurity, a lot of workers either don't have regular income or they cannot earn enough wage to maintain the minimum standard of living. This is the result of temporary and part-time employment arrangements. It is intensified when employment is inherently unstable. The third one is benefit is not secure, as a result of causal employment and transformation towards independent contractors. It can be reflected by the abolishment of common law rights of labor compensation claims in Victoria. The fourth one is the insecurity of working hours, because of the increasing number of causal workers and expansion of unregulated departments. There is a significant change to the length and distribution of working hours. The work time per week is irregular and unpredictable. The last one is the corrosion of representative security by the transformation of the labor market structure, the constant oversupply of labor conditions and direct legislative attacks on trade union rights. (Burgess and Campbell, 1998). Moreover, Caldbick et al. (2013, p. 23) found that the flexibilization has changed the workers a lot all over the world. The workers can enter and exit the labor market more easily without the limitation of labor law, training system and union agreements. And the protection of employees’ income and job security by labor market had been reduced. It resulted that many employees are facing with precariousness. Since the neoliberal policies performed in 1980s, they just focus on the flexibilization and deregulation the labor markets, but ignore the potential health consequences of the employees. The recent financial crisis has also made the employment more precarious. The emphasis on the health effects of precarious employment has become more important.
Temporary agency work is one of the precarious employment form. An agency hired agency workers to work with a host employer, but they are still being paid and employed by their agency. They do not have a large share in Australian labor market, but in other countries, they are always work in low skilled and highly dangerous working environment. They have high pressure on low wages, working conditions, health and safety problem, and union membership (Arrowsmith 2006). Underhill and Quinlan (2011) noted that temporary agency workers have lower wages than their colleagues who are directed employed by the employers. And they are not willing to join in the union because of the fear of job loss. They are hired as causal workers, paid for the time when they work for a host. Some of them can work with host for a period of time, while the others are working in different workplaces with very short announcement. They have an uncertain living of life by their cell phones. They are always waiting to be informed the time and location of the next work places. The temporary agency workers are expanding into multiple field of jobs, such as warehousing, constructions, manufacturing, maintenance, food processing, hospitals, call centers and health care.
Precarious employment has many negative impacts. It affects the occupational health and safety. Quinlan and Bohle(2004) concluded that there are three factors associated with occupational health and safety, which are pressures, disorganization and regulatory failure. The first factor is pressure, which is caused by the income insecurity and increasing competition in labor markets. They will contribute to a serious of dangerous behaviors such as work overload, jerry-build, doing some highly dangerous tasks, working when they are injured and doing multiple jobs at the same time. All of the pressure are coming from the job insecurity and the fear of job loss. The second factor is disorganization, the workforce becomes unstable because the causal employees are undertrain and have a lack of experiences and short tenure. The communication between co-workers, the management control, and task assignments will become ineffective. It will also affect the employers’ ability to induct, train and supervise employees. In addition, the causal workers cannot be organized collectively easily. The third factor is regulatory failure. The Occupational health and safety and employment regulation has become weak because of the precarious employment. The awareness of workers of the legal rights, obligations and entitlements are decreasing because of the vulnerability of labor market. There is a limit access to the compensation right and Occupational health and safety. The disputed legal right has been damaged and there is a non-compliance and regulatory negligence caused by the precarious employment. As a conclusion, the temporary agency workers have a higher risk to get injured than the traditional workers. They have an economic pressure because of the irregular working hours and income. They have to accept any placements and work with tensions in order to have the next placement available. When they are injured, they will not report because they do not want to lose a job. Some agency workers performed the jobs without experiences and training which provided by employers and agency, so they are unfamiliar with the jobs. The communication between employee, employer and agency is inadequate; when the workers have some concerns about Occupational health and safety problem or other work place problems, both of them want to avoid the responsibility and push it to each other; thus the problems cannot be solved eventually. Moreover, workers are facing to dismissal if they need to recover from the injuring.
The precarious employment also has a negative effect on workers’ physical and psychological well-being. Lewchuck et al. (2003) developed an ‘employment constrain’ model. It has seven factors that lead to poor health for precarious employees, which are uncertainty of employment; unpredictability of wages; precariousness of basic needs; work location, task, workload and scheduling. These uncertainty and employment pressure result the exhaustion, burn out of workers after working, and lead to poorer health. Bohlea et al (2004) also found that causal workers are more likely to have poor health than regular full-time workers because of the unstable working hours and the conflict between work and life. According to different kinds of tasks, they often have irregular working hours and lack of control. Sometimes their work time per day or per week is short while sometimes are very long. The unpredictability and low control of jobs have damaged the balance between family and work; an unbalanced work-life; and some concerns about working hours including insomnia, fatigue and disturbances in exercise and diet.
To improve the health of workers and reduce the precariousness of employment. Caldbick et al. (2013, p. 29) found that encourage the researchers to combine the precarious employment which has a negative impact on workers’ health into the contemporary theory. It should include the temporary contract; voluntarily of workers; health problem and benefits from social protection; and the insecurity of housing, food, income, and social benefits should be taken into consideration. Secondly, the researchers should change the situation that the right and protection of workers has been degenerating. They should find a set of basic social protection measures. Although the flexibility of workforce will continue, we should promote and advocate the emphasis on the importance of workers’ health and family. Leka et al. (2010, p. 299) found that there are many ways to improve worker’s health and psychological risks, such as establishment of legislation; develop practice standard; and signature of related agreements. The government should take measures to protect the workers’ health and safety and alleviate the psychological distress associated with precarious employment.
As a conclusion, the precarious employment has a negative impact on employees and businesses in terms of many aspects. It not only affect employee’s income and benefits, but also affect the business competitive advantages; and have an attack on the society’s work-life model structure and security as a whole. In order to improve the situation, government need to enact policies to balance the work-life and provide more protections to workers; strengthen the standard of OHS; provide more security jobs; carry out civil society construction; provide more entitlements for workers; provide related education and training for workers with professional silks and knowledge to cultivate more workers with high skill and can get a long- term security job; and society could provide some counseling centers for causal workers to relieve their stress and improve their mental health.
Reference:
Arrowsmith, J 2006, Temporary agency work in an enlarged European Union, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg.
Bohle, P, Quinlan, M, Kennedy, D & Williamson, A 2004, ‘Working hours, work-life conflict and health in precarious and "permanent" employment’, Revista De Saude Publica, vol.38, pp.19-25.
Burgess, J & Campbell, L 1998. ‘The Nature and Dimensions of Precarious Employment in Australia’. Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, vol. 8, no. 3, pp.5-21.
Caldbick, S, Labonte, R, Mohindra, K. S & Ruckert, A 2014, ‘Globalization and the rise of precarious employment: the new frontier for workplace health promotion’. Global Health Promotion, vol.21, no.2, pp.23-31
Leka, S & Cox, T 2010, ‘Psychosocial risk management at the workplace level’, in S Leka & J Houdmont (eds), Occupational health psychology, Wiley-Blackwell, Hovokien, pp. 124–56.
Lewchuk, W , de Wolff, A, King, A & Polanyi, M 2003, ‘From job strain to employment strain: health effects of precarious employment’, Just Labour, no. 3, pp. 23–35.
Quinlan, M & Bohle, P 2004, ‘Contingent work and occupational safety’, in J Barling & MR Frone (eds), The psychology of workplace safety, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, pp. 81–106.
Underhill, E & Quinlan, M 2011, ‘How precarious employment affects health and safety at work: the case of temporary agency workers’, Relations Industrielles, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 397–421.
