This paper is concerned with whether employees on temporary contracts in Britain report lower well-being than those on permanent contracts, and whether this relationship is mediated by differences in dimensions of job satisfaction. Previous research has identified a well-being gap between permanent and temporary employees but has not addressed what individual and contract specific characteristics contribute to this observed difference. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, this paper finds that a large proportion of the difference in self-reported well-being between permanent and temporary employees appears to be explained by differences in satisfaction with job security. Other dimensions of job satisfaction are found to be less important. In fact, after controlling for differences in satisfaction with security, our results suggest that temporary employees report higher psychological well-being and life satisfaction. This leads us to believe that an employment contract characterised by a definite duration lowers individual well-being principally through heightened job insecurity. Keywords: Temporary employment, Subjective well-being, Job satisfaction, Job insecurity

Over the last decade, the UK has experienced unprecedented increases in migratio n associated with the 2004 A8 expansion of the European Union. These migrant workers have been praised by managers in the UK, who have frequently stated that they perceive these workers to have a strong 'work ethic' when measured on aspects such as absence from work rates. This article examines this perceived migrant 'work ethic' by analysing worker absence data from the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the period 2005-2012. Regression analysis reveals that when A8 migrant workers first arrive in the UK, they record substantially lower absence than native workers, but that these migrant absence levels assimilate within 2-4 years. If employers use this information to make hiring decisions, this may have negative implications for native workers, but, importantly, only in the short run.

This article responds to a recent call in a provocation article in the Human Resource Management Journal by Thompson to use workplace studies to investigate employees' experiences of HR practices. Examining the particular case of absence management, the article investigates the experiences of short-term workers in the food manufacturing industry in the UK. Variations in absence rates between directly employed temporary workers and agency workers are shown to be the result of differing levels of managerial control over absence, which affects workers' ability to use absence as a form of industrial conflict to escape a low-skilled and monotonous work process.

Using Quarterly Labour Force Survey data this article illustrates the involuntary crowding of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe into non‐permanent work when moving to the United Kingdom. The role of agencies in mediating this relationship is examined, as is their new role as actors in industrial relations systems.

Temporary workers in low-skilled roles often experience 'hard' HRM practices, for example the use of the Bradford Factor to monitor absence, rather than using incentives to reward attendance. However, this peripheral workforce has become increasingly diverse in the United Kingdom since the A8 European Union expansion, which has seen over a million migrants from central and eastern Europe register to work in the United Kingdom. Importantly, there is also heterogeneity within this group of workers, for example between those who intend to migrate for a short period of time then return, and those who are more settled and wish to develop a career. By considering the particular case of absence management, this paper examines how these different groups of migrants respond to HRM practices. The key contribution of the paper is to examine how different groups of migrants experience these practices, rather than simply comparing migrant and native workers as two homogeneous groups. The paper presents data from the food manufacturing sector in the UK. In total, eighty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with operations managers, HR managers, union convenors, and workers on permanent, temporary and agency contracts. In addition, data from informal interviews and observation at five companies are presented.

Previous quantitative studies have established a link between precarious work and occupational health and safety (OHS). Using an ethnographically informed qualitative approach, this article investigates the workplace experiences of different types of precarious workers, in particular those who are directly-employed temporary workers and those who are engaged through an agency. Drawing on the work of Andrew Hopkins, the article finds cultural practices that lead to worsened OHS experiences for those who are engaged through an agency. These experiences include inadequate safety training, poor quality personal protective equipment and a lack of clarity of supervisory roles.

No abstract

This article examines the creation of informal workplace hierarchies in the context of recent changes in the UK labour market. Previous studies have identified that deskilling of jobs has removed formal hierarchies among many production workers, and that informal hierarchies based upon factors such as contractual status have formed in their place. The aim of this article is to examine how changes in the labour force mean that new informal hierarchies have developed among migrant and immigrant workers who take these jobs through an agency. Research consisted of 50 semistructured interviews, coupled with lengthy observation of both work and social settings, at three food manufacturers. The article finds that language and cultural issues create a complex informal hierarchy not only between directly employed and agency workers, but also among and within different groups of migrant and immigrant agency workers.The accession of the A8 nations of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to the European Union (EU) in May 2004 (see, e.g. Anderson et al., 2006;Drinkwater et al., 2006;McDowell et al., 2008), coupled with immigration from outside of the EU (Pillai et al., 2007;Vertovec, 2006), has seen a rapid change in the makeup of the UK labour force taking lower skilled jobs, particularly among those who seek roles through employment agencies. This article aims to examine how these changes have affected directly employed managers and workers, as well as examining the experiences of the mainly migrant and immigrant workforces who take these low-skilled jobs through an employment agency. The article investigates how, although the low-skilled nature of jobs in industries such as food manufacturing has removed many official hierarchies, recent changes in the labour market have created informal hierarchies based upon workers' contractual status and ethnicities. It investigates the intersectionality of people's status as an agency worker and also as a migrant or immigrant worker, and how complex inter-and intragroup relations are constructed.