Before the Gig Economy: UK Employment Policy and the Casual Labour Question

Noel Whiteside

Industrial Law Journal, 2021, vol. 50, issue 4, 610-635

Abstract: Focussing on the UK, this paper considers how employment has been understood and identifies the policies pursued to promote specific models of working life over the course of the twentieth century. In recent decades, jobs on offer in Britain have become increasingly precarious, a trend actively promoted by governments of all political complexions. Labour markets have been deregulated, flexibility of employment promoted. As work is consistently identified as the sole route out of poverty, a category of ‘working poor’ has emerged. Such government strategies present as a volte face to the politics of the early twentieth century, when social investigation exposed irregular work as a cause of poverty, not its cure, and as the main factor causing a rising incidence of social dependency. The UK’s earliest labour market policies sought to eradicate casual work and to encourage permanent employment—policies promoted assiduously for most of the twentieth century. Using convention theory, this paper examines these historical dimensions, to explain why and how governments sought to structure labour market operations—and the legacies bequeathed to us as a result. The principal object of the paper is the analysis of public policy—its rationale and its shortcomings—on which current employment law is founded. The paper exposes how our current understanding of ‘traditional’ or ‘regular’ job contracts came to be constructed and why ‘work on demand’ is understood as ‘irregular’, that is, as a deviant form of established employment norms.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/indlaw/dwab029 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:indlaw:v:50:y:2021:i:4:p:610-635.

Access Statistics for this article

Industrial Law Journal is currently edited by Professor Simon Deakin

More articles in Industrial Law Journal from Industrial Law Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().