Why Flexibility Fails Precarious Workers

There is a simple truth at the heart of Emily Grabham’s compelling analysis of Women, Precarious Work and Care: The Failure of Family-Friendly Rights: flexible working arrangements are not the solution for this category of workers, they are largely the problem.

Family-friendly rights have been a focus of labour law and policy since at least the late 1990s when the New Labour Government published its White Paper Fairness at Work providing the political and legal framework for the development of family-friendly policies. What is distinctive about Grabham’s study is that it foregrounds the lives of precarious workers to expose the mismatch between policy aspirations and political and social realities when it comes to initiatives purporting to promote the reconciliation of work and care responsibilities. Drawing on the results of a qualitative study, comprising in-depth interviews with 33 precarious workers (both regionally and sectorially diverse), Grabham sets out two key objectives: ‘… to describe in detail what life is like for precarious workers … [and] … to draw on these insights to explain why precarious workers need a new approach to family-friendly rights, and what it could look like’ (p.4).

Methodologically, this a ‘gap’ study, which generates and applies empirical data to highlight the gap between law in the books and law in action. It also adopts a standpoint approach, placing the needs and experiences of precarious workers — whose poor working conditions and lack of access to employment rights place them at a considerable distance from those in a standard employment relationship — at the centre of an analysis of family-friendly rights. Gender is consciously deployed as an analytical tool: Grabham explains her choice to confine the study to women on the grounds that women comprise the majority of those in precarious work and are more likely to need to balance work and care concerns. A gendered approach also enables better account to be taken of the social structural factors that create work/care conflicts, making visible the co-dependence of paid work with unpaid caregiving.

The extent of incompatibility between family friendly employment rights and the work/care dilemmas faced by precarious workers is thus revealed. Family-friendly law and policy, Grabham argues, proceed on the assumption that access to flexible work is the best way to resolve work/care conflicts. Flexibility is supposed to enhance workers’ freedom to choose working arrangements tailored to their needs. Yet, in practice, flexibility too often enhances the power of employers to devise modes of working which are economically and commercially advantageous to them.

Grabham’s study shows that precarious workers lack choice: They lack choice about the kinds of work they do because they are at the mercy of labour market structures designed without them in mind; and they lack any say in negotiating their working arrangements which are entirely driven by employer needs. Precarious work, Grabham concludes, is not “flexible” in a way that [such] workers can find useful’ (p.3).

Grabham also shows that the risks of raising care needs with employers are real and substantial: ‘Employers responded to the care obligations of precarious workers as failings or impediments at best, and, at worst, as a kind of disobedience or refusal to abide by the terms of their contracts’ (p.99). It is difficult to see how legal rights, for example, the right to request flexible work, can operate in an environment where the practical consequence of asserting them is to render workers more rather than less vulnerable to employer abuse.

Of crucial importance here is the inequality of bargaining power which characterises precarious work arrangements. As Grabham argues, this is more than just the structural inequality which underpins the employment relation as a legal concept, or the social inequality which places most workers at a negotiating disadvantage with their economically better resourced employers. The bargaining power of precarious workers with care needs is shaped not just by their asymmetrical relation with their employer, but also by their reliance on a network of people and institutions, formal and informal, who support their care needs. When the work patterns of precarious workers change (as they frequently do), ‘an entire network of people [is] affected’ (p.54). When confronted with scheduling ‘requests’ from employers, the limited time and energy of precarious workers must necessarily be devoted to reconfiguring an already fragile complex of care arrangements, leaving little leeway and less physical or emotional resources for bargaining with their employers.

The strength of Grabham’s analysis lies in mapping the complex challenges which precarious workers face daily, onto the legal and policy framework supporting family-friendly rights, a framework which, she repeatedly reveals, cannot recognise let alone respond to such challenges. Of value too are her thoughtful recommendations for reshaping rights at work better to protect these vulnerable workers. Chief among her recommendations is support for measures to outlaw precarious work arrangements like zero-hour contracts that only benefit employers.

Grabham writes in a consciously accessible style, but this does not detract from the quality and care of her analysis. Aside from the important research outcomes produced, this book is an elegant and engaged model of socio-legal scholarship which takes the lives and experiences of its marginalised research subjects to build knowledge and understanding from the ground up.