Work in Britain's Informal Economy: Learning from Road‐Side Hand Car Washes
| Author | Trevor Colling,Ian Clark |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12286 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12286
56:2 June 2018 0007–1080 pp. 320–341
Work in Britain’s Informal Economy:
Learning from Road-Side Hand
Car Washes
Ian Clark and Trevor Colling
Abstract
The United Kingdom has over 10,000 hand car washes (HCWs). This
article examines two research questions: what do HCWs reveal about the
informalization of employment? and what is the prospect of regulation of
them? Setting HCWs in a theoretical framework shows that they are part
of a growing industry which is becoming an increasingly familiar and visible
part of the economy, where control of labour costs is a key factor. Employers
make a strategic choice to engage precarious and vulnerable, usually migrant,
labour securing further competitive advantage at the cost of pronounced labour
exploitation and long hours — the tendency towards informalization. Therein
a low-cost business model disciplines competition to usurp higher productivity
mechanized car washing.
1. Introduction
In 2004 there were virtually no road-side hand car washes (HCWs) in the
United Kingdom. By 2013 estimates suggest the presence of 10,000 ‘informal’
road-side hand car wash sites, approximately 3,000 more than in the ‘formal’
car wash sector (CWA 2014).
How Did We Get Here?
Hand car washing is a growing industry where informal employment
practice and associated control of capital and labour costs appear as key
factors. Accordingly the contribution this article makes is to examine two
research questions; first, what do HCWs tell us about the informalization of
employment in the United Kingdom? Second what regulatory challenges do
HCWs pose for statutory and voluntary regulation of them?
Ian Clark is at Nottingham TrentUniversity and Trevor Colling is atKing’s College London.
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2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Work in Britain’s Informal Economy 321
To address these questions the article divides into three parts. Section 2
positions HCWs within a theoretical framework for infor malization in
employment. We embed this framework in the established literature on the
connection between the formal and informal economy where re-structuring
in the former has generated opportunities in the latter. More specifically our
framework and its applicationto HCWs enable us to contribute to debates on
the presence of migrant labour in low-skill precarious work. Many authors
locate this within a social revolution comprising economic re-structuring,
the diusion of neo-liberalism and the emergence of finance-led capitalism
designed to restore the power of elite interests in the United Kingdom by
de-regulation and privatization (Cox and Nilsen 2014: 136; Harvey 2007).
However, there is less explicit discussion of how these developments create
transmission mechanisms that produce employment relations outcomes at
firm level in the formal economy, the informal economy or the relationship
between them. To remedy this gap Section 3 traces the space occupied
by newly emergent employers in road-side HCWs where there is little
history of employment practice. This absence enables us to contrast cost-
minimization strategieswhich inform much precarious informal work with the
‘good worker’ rhetoric associated with superficial explanations of employer
preferences for migrant labour exposed by other authors; that they are
cheap and work hard (E. Rodr´
ıguez 2004; MacKenzie and Forde 2009). We
do so by establishing our contribution more firmly in the extant literature
on employer strategies for the use of precarious often migrant labour in
the informal economy and the more limited literature on HCWs. We also
position the emergence of HCWs in contemporary approachesto economic re-
structuring focused on ‘post-capitalism’ and the tension between automation
and casualized low-paid work. In Section 4 wedetail our research method and
our findings on HCWs. We t hencomplete the article with a discussion of our
research questions and follow this with a conclusion.
2. The tendency to informalization in employment
To substantiate our argument that HCWs are located at the intersection
between the formal and informal economy we provide a framework to
understand the tendency to informalization in employment relations. The
informal economy is defined as paid activities that are unregulated by, or
hidden from the state fortax, social security and or employment law purposes
but are otherwise lawful (Williams 2006, 2014).
The informalizationof employment relations can occur in four ways.First, a
business maybe formally constituted but utilize forms of employment practice
which are precarious (Standing 2014). This occurs through the use of zero
hours contracts and other forms of casualization (Adams and Deakin 2014),
use of agency workers (Hoque et al. 2008) and ‘posted’ migrant workers
(Caro et al. 2015; Lillie 2012) and questionableor false self-employment status
currently associated with the so-called gig economyor platform capitalism (de
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2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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