Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy, edited by Colin Lindsay and Donald Houston. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2013, 264 pp., ISBN: 978 0 23034 994 0, £55.00, hardback.

Date01 March 2015
Published date01 March 2015
AuthorMelanie Jones
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12102
The side benefits are many, as camaraderie and friendships last long, and stave off
boredom, loneliness and a sense of uselessness.
Vida Needle comes across in Lynch’s book as a benevolent but shrewd employer,
who early on saw the distinct value of an older workforce. The majority have skills
acquired elsewhere, and the employment matrix used by Vida Needle centres on
prospective employees who want to avoid being bored or lonely, who are seeking
additional income, or who dislike volunteering. They deliberately look for candidates
who exhibit these traits. Parallels can be drawn to the UK retailer B&Q, which has run
a high-profile campaign of employing former trades people as professionals highly
qualified to offer advice to customers who come into their shops.
In return, Vida Needle supports flexibility in hours worked, productivity and
output. They overstaff to offset these problems, again paying at the minimum wage.
In their business model, older employees use their low wages to top up their state
pensions. Repeated throughout the book is the attitude of employees to ‘making
money for Fred’ (Fred Hartman is the CEO succeeding his father). The company
maintains a yearly bonus based on several factors, including profit, productivity,
efficiency and skill levels.
Lynch has set up Vida Needle as an intriguing example of continued work in later
years. However, Vida Needle has advantages that are not universal. It is family
owned, well managed and has a strong reputation in a niche market. This benevolent
approach may be difficult to achieve in other industries or circumstances. Not
everyone would value the kinds of jobs that Vida Needle offers, especially if it made
poor use of their skills, experience and abilities. This firm has been studied by many
researchers, particularly from countries coping with the challenges of an ageing
workforce.
This book is an attempt to address the issues of older workers. Lynch offers few
solutions, but suggests that Vida Needle’s success could be reflected in other industries
and should be explored. For that, the book has great value.
DONALD FLYNN and MATT FLYNN
Newcastle University
Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy, edited by Colin Lindsay
and Donald Houston. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2013, 264 pp.,
ISBN: 978 0 23034 994 0, £55.00, hardback.
Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy aims to identify and
examine the factors that have contributed to the increase in disability benefit claim-
ants in the UK since the late 1970s, what is critically referred to by the authors as the
disability benefit ‘crisis’ (p. 4). The book, which is based on a collection of self-
contained but related pieces of analysis, benefits significantly from an interdisciplin-
ary approach, and includes important historical (chapter 3) and international
(chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12) comparisons in order to put the situation in the UK in
context. The latter covers not only countries with similar problems (Sweden and the
Netherlands) but also where the situation has been more modest (New Zealand) or
quite different (Germany). This body of evidence is then used to explore the rationale
and potential effectiveness of recent reforms to the UK disability benefit system.
The analysis, which is supported by a range of predominately quantitative evidence,
is valuable for an academic and policy audience but is sufficiently accessible to be
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174 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.

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