‘Good work’ and the Employment Rights Bill

‘Good work’ is a central part of the government’s policy agenda, as indicated in its key employment-focused documents: the white paper Get Britain Working and the policy paper Next Steps to Make Work Pay. These documents set out the government’s plans to expand access to high-quality employment.

The term ‘good work’ has a complicated history and is often related to concepts such as decent work, fair work, job quality, and meaningful work. The 2017 Taylor review of modern working practices, which drew attention to a rise in non-standard, and often insecure, work, observed that this kind of work was often associated with lower quality working experiences. It called for the government to report on job quality using a consistent set of measurements that allowed trends to be tracked over time.

The Taylor review suggested that key metrics around ‘good work’ were wages, employment quality, education and training, working conditions, work-life balance, and participation and representation. The subsequent government response was formulated in these terms in 2018 as The Good Work Plan. Subsequently, various national and international organisations have developed metrics to measure ‘good work’ in workplaces.

While conceptual differences surrounding good work reflect stakeholders’ varied interests, they have led to the development of different measurement mechanisms. The absence of a unified understanding can slow progress on the issue of good work.

Why does ‘good work’ matter?

Policymakers are interested in ‘good work’ for two reasons. First, they want to engage with how work quality can affect employee motivation and productivity, improving working life for employees and making organisations more successful. Second, stakeholders are concerned with how good work can deliver social justice contributions by helping to reduce workforce inequalities and improve overall living standards and wellbeing.

In the UK, there has been a notable rise in insecure work in recent years, with different impacts across regions and population groups. Insecure work is typically associated with lower pay and less employment protection. Since the pandemic, many jobs have also been transformed and continue to change, in addition to being influenced by technology. This can have varying effects on job quality. For a summary of research and policy around work quality, with particular implications for changes during the pandemic, see the 2022 Commons Library briefing paper Good work: Policy and research on the quality of work in the UK.

A national mapping of the UK’s occupations for the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) around different job quality measures found that a significant part of the workforce lacked access to ‘good work’. This was particularly the case for those in routine occupations and for younger workers.

Employment legislation and ‘good work’

The Labour government introduced the Employment Rights Bill (ERB) within its first 100 days in office. This bill addressed multiple aspects of good work, three of which are highlighted in this briefing: flexible work, family-related leave, and trade union rights. These topics are discussed in relation to the proposed legislative changes outlined in the ERB and are compared with policy approaches in other countries.

Flexible working legislation in the UK has moved towards enhancing accessibility from the start of contracts and making organisations’ decision-making processes more transparent and potentially fairer. The legislation relates to statutory requests, although research suggests that the majority of flexible working, including hybrid working, is organised informally in the UK.

Other countries have also followed a similar legislative model around workers’ rights in their approach to flexible working. Cultural norms are also important to the ease with which employees can access flexible working. Finland, widely regarded as having the world’s most flexible working patterns, has had legislation in place to support this since 1996.

The ERB is extending workers’ rights around several aspects of family-related leave: Bereavement Leave, Ordinary (Unpaid) Parental Leave, and Paternity Leave. In relation to other countries, the UK offers a relatively long period of maternity leave, but at a lower rate of pay. While the bill extends paternity leave eligibility, stakeholders have suggested that the UK’s relatively short paternity leave entitlement can increase pay gaps and inequalities. Unlike most countries, the UK currently does not assign payment for parental leave.

Changes proposed by the ERB around trade union rights include developing provisions around collective sectoral bargaining and industrial action legislation. The UK has been unusual in Europe in that collective bargaining is mainly organised at the enterprise level. The bill sets out to develop a collective sectoral approach around the work of teaching assistants and social care workers, who represent large, relatively low-paid workforces, with high turnover rates. An OECD analysis of its member countries’ collective bargaining systems found that the countries with higher coverage had higher quality working environments.

Future challenges around good work

The briefing highlights some future challenges and concerns related to the concept of good work.

Inequalities around access to ‘good work’ have been documented on a regional level, highlighting the continued significance of the UK’s north-south divide. Population vulnerabilities to insecure work have been documented around age (with young people being much more likely to experience insecure work), gender, disability, and ethnicity. The Insecure Work Index points to industries where insecurity is higher: hospitality, services, and agriculture, where 1 in 3 employees are in insecure work, compared to 1 in 5 nationally.

Informal work can be overlooked in an analysis of ‘good work’, although it is estimated by the World Economic Forum that over half the global workforce is engaged in unregulated, often invisible, forms of work, and about 11% in the UK. Informal work can be hidden within traditional industries such as agriculture or cleaning, but it can also be a self-provisioning tactic to maximise income when people find it difficult to find enough work in the formal economy to survive. Informal work raises issues around job quality in relation to aspects like security and a lack of development opportunities.

Work exploitation takes on a range of forms, the most extreme of which is modern slavery, where job quality is minimised. The Global Slavery Index recently estimated that 122,000 people were working in conditions of slavery in the UK in 2021, often in publicly facing roles and alongside paid workers, such as in construction and nail bars.

Work is currently undergoing rapid change around its incorporation with technology, particularly around artificial intelligence and automation. With this, concerns have been raised that inequalities are developing in access to new technology, most notably around regions, status, and protected characteristics. New technology provides potential to augment job quality by supporting more routine parts of jobs and enhancing job satisfaction. Concerns have also been raised that it could displace jobs, be used to monitor work, and introduce new forms of bias into decision-making that may disadvantage some population groups more than others.