Unequal Britain at Work, edited by Alan Felstead, Duncan Gallie, and Francis Green. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015, 240 pp., ISBN: 978‐0‐19‐871284‐8, £50.00, hardback.
| Author | Danat Valizade |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12228 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
Book Reviews 219
claim poverty and informality have ‘always existed’ and/or are a result of a failure of
institutions and regulation, particularly in the South and increasingly in the North.
The book’s sound empirical base and strong analytical argument emphasizes that it
is relational processes, historical and contemporary, that actively create inequalities
and perpetuate the status quo. It is through understanding these interrelated social,
material and political processes that possibilities of pro-labour emancipatory action
can emerge, both in India and in other contexts.
ANITA HAMMER
Faculty of Business and Law, De Montfort University
Unequal Britain at Work,edited by Alan Felstead, Duncan Gallie,and Francis Green.
OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford, 2015, 240 pp.,ISBN: 978-0-19-871284-8, £50.00,
hardback.
Unequal Britain at Work marks a quarter century of scrupulous quantitative research
on determinants and trajectories of job quality. Focusing on incremental job
polarization in the British workplace and its ramifications for social groups and
sectors of the economy, the book draws empirically on the Skills and Employment
Survey (SES), a nationally representative study of workers in the United Kingdom.
A collection of 10 empirical chapters unravels the evolution of job quality, spanning
a period from 1986, when the first such survey was commissioned under the remit of
the ‘Social Change and Economic Life Initiative’, to 2012, the date of the latest SES
survey.The chapters turn to fundamental conceptual ideas, from the evolution of job
quality in class polarization and gender dierences, through precarious (contingent)
forms of employment to organizationalfactors reflected in trade union representation,
dierences in job quality between public and privatesector organizations and the eect
of high involvement management.
A core theme across the empirical chapters is a discrepancy between payinequality
and non-monetary (intrinsic) aspects of job quality.It is demonstrated that while class
polarization relating to pay levels is marked a moderate converging tendency with
regard to non-monetary job quality conceals the fact that privatesector employees and
those in routine occupationsbear the brunt of inequality (Gallie). Gender dierences in
job quality further exemplify a contracting gender paygap accompanied by entrenched
non-monetary inequality (Lindley). The analysis showsthat the past decades have seen
an increasing share of females in ‘good’ jobs, with pay inequality being eradicated at
the point of entry. Yet, occupational segregation between males and females persists,
invoking a gender pay gapfurther down the line.
Unequal Britain at Work is a foray on a dualistic view of the labour market,
predicated upon a clear frontier between high-quality (‘good’) and ‘lousy’ jobs.
Dualization appears to be inadequate to empirical evidence, as the analysis of job
quality among dierent types of precarious labour involving part-time, temporary
work and self-employment demonstrates that neither of these forms can be
unequivocally associated with inferior jobs. Warren and Lyonette find that while
part-time work is dominated by women, especially those with caring responsibilities,
there has been a shift in part-time jobs towards higher occupations. Temporary
employees are a heterogeneousgroup too (Inanc), with those on longer-term contracts
being similar to permanent employees in relation to both intrinsic and monetary
C
2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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