Managing homeworking: health and safety responsibilities

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/01425450010379171
Published date01 December 2000
Pages540-554
Date01 December 2000
AuthorLuise Vassie
Subject MatterHR & organizational behaviour
Employee
Relations
22,6
540
Employee Relations,
Vol. 22 No. 6, 2000, pp. 540-554.
#MCB University Press, 0142-5455
Received June 2000
Revised July 2000
Accepted August 2000
Managing homeworking:
health and safety
responsibilities
Luise Vassie
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Keywords Homeworking, Health and safety, Employment, Status
Abstract This paper reports on a study of companies using homeworkers, carried out to gather
information regarding the employment status of homeworkers and the health and safety
provision afforded to homeworkers. It considers traditional industrial homeworking and home
teleworking. For those having employee status, health and safety provision was not necessarily
commensurate with legal requirements. In the case of self-employed status, the health and safety
provision was deemed adequate if the employment status was one of genuine self-employment.
However, as the analysis of the data suggests if the status was one of employment, then the health
and safety provision is not adequate.
Introduction
The labour market is much more diverse than in the 1970s, with groups of
self-employed, contractors, homeworkers, and temporary and part-time
workers now contributing significantly to the national workforce. There has
been a substantial increase in self-employment, part-time employment and
there are more temporary workers. Companies are getting smaller as they
attempt to concentrate on their core functions, contracting out those functions
that support this core (HSC, 1996).
Definitions of the term homeworking differ widely and, as a result, there are
many and varied estimates of the number of people adopting this working
pattern in the UK (Felstead and Jewson, 2000). Homeworking has been used to
describe a wide range of flexible working patterns:
(1) those who are employed by an organisation but who work at home;
(2) those who are self-employed and work at home;
(3) those who are home-based employers, for example, hoteliers and
publicans who live on ``on-site''; and
(4) those who work from home, for example, salespersons.
This study is concerned with homeworkers as defined by (1) and (2).
The National Group on Homeworking (NGH) estimated that there are in
excess of one million people doing paid work in their own homes under the
control of an outside employer (Huws, 1994). The Health and Safety
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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The author gratefully acknowledges the support of a grant from the Nuffield Foundation
Social Sciences Grant Scheme to undertake this work at Loughborough University and the
organisations that took part in the preliminary discussions and survey programme.

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