What’s working better: how do we ensure good work for all after coronavirus?
The coronavirus has changed the way we live and work. Since March, the economy has been turned inside out with large numbers of us working from home, whole industries closed for business and commonly-held perceptions of value inverted. The pandemic is both a health emergency and an economic crisis.
Work matters because for most of us it is how we earn a living, feed ourselves and look after our families. While talk of the economy may seem at odds with the rising human cost of the crisis, the economy is about something bigger than shareholder value or the tax avoidance policies of wealthy individuals. There is a growing realisation that health and the economy do not exist in isolation but are deeply intertwined.
The crisis has revealed many of the limits of a UK labour market previously lauded as agile and responsive. It has shown that too many jobs are built on foundations that are insecure and precarious. And that previously unthinkable policy solutions, such as the state supporting the wages of workers, are possible and can be implemented overnight.
In many ways, despite social distancing, the crisis has reminded us how much we do in fact rely on each other. Value is now about compassion rather than company share price. Key workers aren’t CEOs or the C-suite but nurses, carers, scientists, shop workers and delivery people. Our ability to stay safe and healthy relies on the work of others.
The cracks in our foundations
Throughout the crisis, scrutiny of business behaviour has been high. In many ways, we are all in this together. Many businesses have been at the forefront of supporting their workers and customers in the community. The response of the Co-operative and other leading supermarkets working directly with food banks is a good example. Many of the employers that we work with in Prospect have gone beyond government guidance to provide pay and support greater than that provided by HMRC.
Yet, in other ways, the crisis has shone a light on some of the worst practices that underpin our current economic model: for example, those companies paying out huge dividends to shareholders while asking the taxpayer for bailouts to fill the holes in their balance sheet, or others refusing to take advantage of government support and abandoning their employees to the tender mercies of the benefits system. The reliance of many businesses and industries on the willingness of self-employed workers to shoulder huge financial risks has also been dramatically demonstrated, as has the underlying lack of resilience in companies working to a ‘just in time’ model with zero slack in the system.,
The crisis has also brought into sharp relief new and emerging challenges at work, such as the rapid increase in worker surveillance technology to check up on people working from home and the crossover between government and big tech in the use of our data to develop contact tracing apps.
These issues will persist beyond the immediate crisis. Economists suggest that the lockdown will cause the deepest recession in a century. The OBR has said the economy could shrink by 13 per cent this year. The recovery will not be the end of the bad news for many people with an increase in unemployment, falling wages and greater concerns about family incomes and job security. As Kitty Ussher’s essay charts, these burdens will fall hardest on those already experiencing the hard edge of our economic model. It’s going to be a grim few years for the low-paid, gig workers, and for many young and BAME workers.
The five big questions
If lockdown has shown up inequalities in our labour market, it also points to a way forward to resolve them. The speed with which the government implemented its income protection schemes and provided funding to protect jobs shows that political change can happen. The growth in community aid schemes, local support for food banks, and regular support for carers and NHS workers, shows the kind of country we really are and the communities that we want to live and work in.
We need to build on these foundations to create a more embracing vision about the future, where workers fit into it, and what this means for a shared story of good work. The post-crisis response must not be left to individual gestures, it must be a collective decision to do things differently. Here I suggest the five big questions we need to be thinking about as we prepare for the future:
How do we value jobs? First, we need to reward key workers. Coronavirus has forced our society to rapidly reassess the value of work. Whether that is nurses caring for the sick or retail workers helping to keep us fed, the usual perceptions of valuable work have been turned upside down. The challenge now is to convert this moment of clarity into action to reverse the priorities of recent years and forge a new framework that reflects this. Social care and care workers are underfunded. Too many delivery and platform workers are facing precarious conditions with little security. There is an opportunity to talk about value on a scale we have not seen in recent years. What does a Living Wage really mean? Shouldn’t work ensure security and the ability to house, feed and look after yourself?
What do we mean by good work? The way we work has been transformed during the crisis with home working, flexible hours and the daily juggle between work and childcare. It is unlikely all of these changes will be reversed. But just as technology has made this possible for many workers, others have been left behind. Existing inequalities have been exacerbated by the lockdown. We are now thinking more about mental health and well-being than ever before. It is not just about the nature of jobs people do, it is also about how they are treated at work and beyond. Matthew Taylor has written about the kind of changes we need post-crisis. But the stark reality is recent years have taught many workers to be sceptical of the idea that change, driven by technology or other factors, will be inclusive and positive. Prospect commissioned research from YouGov last year which showed 58 per cent of workers thought they would not be consulted about any technology changes being introduced at work. We don’t just need an analysis of what is wrong with the economy, we also need to start thinking about what good jobs look like, where they are based, and how they are organised.
How do we create an economic transition that lifts everyone up? Our economy was already changing before coronavirus due to advances in the application of new technology. This crisis has not paused the pace of change; it has accelerated it. Whole businesses have switched to home working in a matter of weeks thanks to the latest technology. And whilst much of the high street is under lockdown, the focus on online retail and delivery has increased. These structural changes are likely to deepen. The Resolution Foundation estimates that 11 million workers will be furloughed during lockdown. There have already been nearly two million additional Universal Credit claimants. Business will look to automation and how technology can speed its recovery accelerating which jobs and people will be winners and losers. What kind of economy emerges post-lockdown is also a question about how we manage transition in our economic model.
How do we define our work in a world of rapidly changing technology? The crisis has also placed even more weight on the promise of new technology to transform how we deal with problems. Google, Apple and other tech players are working alongside app developers to create contact and tracing tools using mobile phone data that could help limit the spread of the disease, but there are challenges as laid out by Women Leading in AI among others. Some employers have reached for automated hiring and HR technology to speed up recruitment and to keep tabs on remote workers. Amazon, for instance, recently used data-driven technology to on-board 1,700 staff in a day. The rapid advance of digital technologies into workspaces mean employers are accumulating huge amounts of data on their workforces. For all the focus on individual data privacy, little attention has been paid to data rights at work and the fast-moving frontier of workplace technologies.
How do we create a new social partnership? If it has felt like the government has spoken about trade unions more in recent weeks than in the last decade, that is because it is true. The recognition that we need all parts of society working together in this crisis begs the question of why we were not taking this joined-up approach beforehand. Unions in the UK have been vital in helping the government to design income support mechanisms and assisting employers to ride out the crisis, but all of this has happened from a standing start. Looking to those countries that responded quicker, like Germany and the Nordic countries, trade unions have long been part of the solution. If worker voice has been important to building trust in a crisis, it will be even more important in rebuilding our way of life post-crisis.
Making this a sustainable recovery
When we emerge from the coronavirus crisis we will still be faced with the climate emergency. When thinking about the economic and social structures we will build and rebuild in the coming months, reducing emissions must be absolutely central. This will need leadership from government, business and civil society, especially if the transition is to be achieved in a just way. Again we can learn from abroad: sixty of the largest Germany companies have already agreed to put climate at the heart of their agenda in recovering from the crisis. As Germany takes over the Presidency of the EU they will look to marry up the EU’s recovery plan with a new commitment to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030 on 1990 levels. The growing movement around the climate emergency has been a catalyst for debate around a green new deal. How do we ensure that momentum continues post-crisis?
The biggest challenge will be the desperation many will understandably feel to return to business as usual. As well as the emotional desire for a bit of normality, there are also powerful interests who benefited from the previous ways of doing things financially or politically. If the government wants to deliver for the left-behind people and places that voted it into office last December (albeit in a very different world), these vested interests are ones that they will need to take on. We will also need a concerted effort to counter the narrative that recovery from the crisis requires a strategy that focuses on economic growth and tax cuts for business to the exclusion of all else. It was this short-termism that has left us so unprepared for a crisis and it won’t be what guides us to a fair and sustainable future.
At the heart of our response must be the idea that we can build from today’s new interest in social capital to create a more compelling and shared story about our future, and where work fits into that.
It should not have taken a crisis for some to come to the realisation that we are all human and owe our successes and failures to the strength of the societies in which we live our lives. But these moments of genuine solidarity, of clapping for the NHS or volunteering to deliver food to elderly neighbours, must become more than the stories we tell ourselves about our national spirit. They must become hardwired into the mainframe of our state, our economy, and our culture. There is a chance, perhaps a generational chance, to put the brakes on some of the trends that just a few weeks ago seemed far beyond our control. It is a chance we have to take.