Flexible scheduling, degradation of job quality and barriers to collective voice

Abstract

This article examines the operation of flexible scheduling in practice through a case study of a large retail firm in the United Kingdom. It includes analysis of 39 semistructured interviews, participant observation of shop floor work and non-participant observation of union organizing as well as analysis of key documents. The findings highlight the high level of generalized temporal flexibility across employment statuses. This temporal flexibility enables firm flexibility without necessitating a reliance upon contingent workers. Temporal flexibility is found to entail manager-control of flexible scheduling and is shown to be damaging to perceptions of job quality as it acts as a barrier to work-life balance. Union presence and collective bargaining at the firm are found to be ineffective at influencing flexible scheduling so as to improve job quality. This ineffectiveness can be explained by the union operating in an employer-dominated industrial relations environment in which its associational power is unable to compensate for a lack of institutional and structural economic power.

Flexibility in the gig economy: managing time on three online piecework platforms

“…Similar to Gold and Mustafa's () “connected freelancers”, even the most distressed online pieceworkers did not necessarily work extensively long hours as such, but the temporal structures of their days were largely determined by the employers’ requirements. This also echoes Wood's () finding that for workers with little bargaining power, what is formally worker‐controlled flexibility will in practice turn into manager‐controlled flexibility, negating flexibility's expected benefits to the worker.…”

“…The boundary between worker‐controlled and manager‐controlled flexibility can be ambiguous, because the practices of negotiating working times can be bound up in the power relations of the workplace (Lambert et al ., ; Wood, ). For instance, Wood's () flexible supermarket workers were formally free to declare the hours that they were available to work, but in practice had to accept disruptive shifts or risk no longer being offered shifts.…”

“…The boundary between worker‐controlled and manager‐controlled flexibility can be ambiguous, because the practices of negotiating working times can be bound up in the power relations of the workplace (Lambert et al ., ; Wood, ). For instance, Wood's () flexible supermarket workers were formally free to declare the hours that they were available to work, but in practice had to accept disruptive shifts or risk no longer being offered shifts. Likewise in self‐employed work, the technical contractors studied by Barley and Kunda () were formally free to set their own working hours, but in practice some worked through evenings and holidays, because they believed that this would decrease their chances of being laid off and increase the chances of future contracts (similarly in Fraser and Gold, ; Gold and Mustafa, ).…”

An anatomy of zero‐hour contracts in the UK

“…In a context where policy makers have been advocating not only more but also better jobs (e.g. DBEIS, ; ILO, ), the apparent emergence of zero‐hour work is seen as a threat to job quality (Wood, ), while Rubery and Grimshaw (: 240) describe them as having taken ‘an almost iconic status to symbolise extreme flexibility and commodification in the labour market’. Public critique has been so intense that the Labour Party promised to outlaw them in the previous two General Elections, while the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been compelled to publish regular updates on their prevalence.…”

Work-Life Balance versus Work-Life Merge: a Comparative and Thematic Analysis of Workplace Well-Being

“…However, when not controlled properly, flexible offerings by employers can negatively impact employees and company performance. Research carried out at a large UK supermarket uncovered abuse in the management of zero-hours contracts implemented in order to keep costs down (Wood, 2016). Zero-hours contracts require employees to be available a certain number of hours per week, without specifying when.…”