The vulnerable worker in Britain and problems at work

Anna Pollert and Andy Charlwood
Additional contact information
Anna Pollert: University of the West of England, anna.polleat@vive.ac.uk
Andy Charlwood: University of York, ac614@york.ac.uk, Andy.charlwood@gmail.com

Work, Employment & Society, 2009, vol. 23, issue 2, 343-362

Abstract: This article investigates the experience of low paid workers without union representation. It reports on the findings of a recent survey of 501 low paid, non-unionized workers who experienced problems at work. The results demonstrate that problems at work are widespread and, despite a strong propensity to take action to try to resolve them, most workers failed to achieve satisfactory resolutions. In the light of these results, we argue that the current UK Government definition of vulnerability is too narrow because our results suggest that a large proportion of low paid, unrepresented workers are at risk of being denied their employment rights. Therefore we question the ability of the UK's current system of predominantly non-unionized employment relations to deliver employment rights effectively and fairly.

Keywords: non-unionism; workplace problems; vulnerable worker; low paid workers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017009106771 (text/html)

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:sae:woemps:v:23:y:2009:i:2:p:343-362

DOI: 10.1177/0950017009106771

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().