Anyone working in Britain over the past decade would have found it hard to escape the message that working life was undergoing unprecedented upheaval. The full-time job was said to be evaporating as companies sought to free themselves from long-term commitments, while all forms of flexible work—temporary, part-time, or self-employed—were rising rapidly. In 1993, Burton, the clothing chain, said it was cutting 2,000 full-time jobs and creating 3,000 part-time ones. Here was the new world of work.
"Before very long, having a proper job inside an organisation will be a minority occupation," claimed Charles Handy in The Empty Raincoat (1994). In Jobshift: How to Prosper in a World Without Jobs (1995), William Bridges wrote: "Today's
In Britain in 2010, Richard Scase quoted data showing that the number of self-employed manual workers had risen by 450 per cent between 1979 and 1998, and by 300 per cent among managers and professionals. "By far the greatest number of jobs will take the form of non-standard employment," he wrote. Job insecurity would mean financial commitments, such as buying a house, would become more difficult. The post-Fordist workplace would also intrude into the domestic realm. Scase estimated that up to half of all professional activity would be done from home, leading to the erosion of the office as the locus of work. "People will be required to be psychologically and emotionally more mobile," he wrote.
More mobile or not, people were certainly being made more anxious by the prevailing consensus. At the end of the 1990s, the OECD found Britain was second only to South Korea in terms of the proportion of workers who felt insecure in their jobs. Casual employment seemed to beckon for many.
This mood was captured by the film The Full Monty (1997) which dealt with the loss of male, manual jobs in Sheffield. Stealing or stripping for a living were better than taking on "women's work" in Asda, the film implied.
Why was all this happening? According to Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work, work was being obliterated by information technology. Each technological innovation expunged a few more million workers from the production process. Only a huge redeployment of labour to the voluntary sector would avert catastrophe, he said.
As if this was not bad enough, there was another wintry prospect described by sociologist Richard Sennett. The ethic of relentless flux was rupturing the narrative of people's lives, he said. The Corrosion of Character (1998) stated: "Immense social and economic forces shape the insistence on departure… To stay put is to be left behind."
Not everyone was convinced that the future would turn out to be so bleak. The TUC sounded a drab note of caution. In 1999 it observed that permanent jobs accounted for well over 80 per cent of the total—similar to the share in 1984. According to a 1997 study by Bristol University economists, the only noticeable trend in job tenure between 1975 and 1993 was that it followed the booms and busts of the economic cycle.
Such reassurances failed to make much headway against the allure of the "age of uncertainty" thesis. But ten years on from seminal books like The Empty Raincoat, it is a suitable moment to re-evaluate the prophesies.
The intuitive feeling that a great deal about work has changed, at least over the past 25 years, has some truth to it. Many employers do outsource work to contractors and freelancers. Trade unions are much weaker and many workplaces are more pressurised, with the demands of the job reaching deep into domestic life (and helping to make childcare a mainstream political issue). The office still dominates white-collar work, but email and mobile phones have blurred the boundaries between making a living and having a life. And the shift from the manual skills necessary to make physical products to the "emotional economy" of the service sector has gathered pace. The worker's traditional compensation of saying, "Look, here is what I have done" is unavailable in a call centre. Work is consumed at the instant it is produced.
Yet that said, it is clear that most of the prophesies made in the 1990s were wrong. Most critically, the permanent full-time job is more than ever the bedrock of work. Full-time employee posts reached a new record in November 2002, according to the office for national statistics, and have stayed high since. Well over 80 per cent of the entire workforce is in a permanent job, full time or part time. Evidently, computers can create as well as wreck jobs.
Not only has unemployment hit record lows, casualisation has not taken off as predicted. After rising quickly until 1997, the proportion of people doing temporary work has fallen. Today temporary workers account for just 6 per cent of employees, compared with 7.2 per cent a decade ago.
The picture for self-employment is more complex. Today, self-employment accounts for 12.5 per cent of the total workforce, compared with 11 per cent in 1984. Over that period it has undergone significant fluctuations, but since 2001 has been rising quite fast, among both men and women, and especially in professional occupations.
Some of the impression of frantic flux in the 1990s labour market was generated by the belief that time spent in each job was shortening, as employers axed long-servers and young people job-hopped with indifference. But today average job tenure is now seven years and four months, compared with six years and two months a decade ago. (It has risen for women and declined slightly for men over the past few years.)
The most impressive examination of working life in recent times is the Future of Work programme, run by the Economic and Social Research Council. According to Managing to Change? (2004), an ESRC book, organisations engaged in delayering—in search of the super-flexible, "flat" organisation—are outnumbered two to one by those expanding grades; careers are booming. Meanwhile, long-term relationships are in vogue. Employers see the value of retaining staff because it provides the best answer to unpredictable demand: training employees to undertake many roles, rather than hiring and firing, is the path to "intelligent flexibility." Standard employment is now set to increase faster than flexible employment.
Even the switch from manual to interpersonal skills may be exaggerated, according to the ESRC. Some 40 per cent of working people are in manual occupations, the same proportion as in 1990. Numbers in professional, technical or scientific jobs have grown only slightly, accounting for 37 per cent of the labour force, compared with 34 per cent in 1990.
So work is neither much better, nor much worse than it was: it is merely evolving slowly. Such findings contradict many of the central ideas of 1990s futurology. But in turn they raise the question of why theories of labour market chaos caught on as they did.
There are many answers, few of them entirely convincing. It could be that the experience of repeated recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with a subliminal fear of technology and globalisation, made people more receptive to predictions of instability. This may have been reinforced by the decline of union power and the fact that it did become easier for employers to fire people.
Or it could be that change disproportionately affected the group that Andre Gorz calls "the jobbing producers of ideas, fantasies and messages": journalists, researchers, public relations people, academics, artists, propagandists, creative industry types. These opinion-formers may have taken their own experiences for a universal trend.
It will take future historians of the 1990s to shed more light on this. What we can say is that work over the past decade appears to have been the subject of a giant misselling scandal.
