Dualism, Flexibility and Self-Employment in the UK Construction Industry

Abstract

The rise in the number of self-employed workers in the UK has been paralleled by increasing concern that the use of such `peripheral' labour may result in the operation of a dual-labour market acting to reinforce segregation between `good' core employment, characterised by higher pay, fringe benefits and job security, and `bad' peripheral employment with adverse characteristics. In contrast, using evidence gained from a survey of workers in the UK construction industry, this paper shows that, for any occupation/level of skill, there are discrete advantages and disadvantages in both direct and self-employment. It is, therefore, argued that worker preference for a particular mode of employment is the key criterion which determines the case for either relative advantage or disadvantage. In particular, the evidence shows that the large majorities of both direct and self-employed workers who prefer their existing mode of employment undermines dualist conclusions of relative disadvantage arising from self-employment per se.

The Labour Market Consequences of Human Smuggling: ‘Illegal’ Employment in London's Migrant Economy

“…This last fact emphasises once more the importance of social networks in shaping and facilitating insertion outcomes, and confirms the falseness of the assumption that black-market work is necessarily exploitative and concentrated amongst deprived populations (Williams and Windebank 2002). It may also point to a specificity of the construction sector, in which flexibility, off-the-books transactions, self-employment and informality are the norm and seldom imply inferior terms and conditions of work (Nisbet 1997).…”

Unbalanced Development: The Origin of Korea's Self-Employment Problem from a Comparative Perspective

“…These resources include household assets (Hurst and Lizard, 2004), inheritances (Blanchflower and Oswald, 1998), technology (Nisbet, 1997), and social networks (Moog and BackesGellner, 2006). From this view, the transition to self-employment is easier in the service sector than in the manufacturing sector because knowledge and social networks play a greater role in opening a business in the service sector (Buchmann et al, 2005).…”

Voice, Silence and the Business of Construction: Loud and Quiet Voices in the Construction of Personal, Organizational and Social Realities

“…In theory, self employed workers can use their 'fl exible' status to earn higher wages and negotiate better rates of pay from job to job and then recover their expenses within the taxation process (Nisbet, 1997). In practice, however, many self employed workers do not exploit this self employed status and risk experiencing the worst of all worlds-being neither employees nor fully independent contractors.…”