Job Security in the Public Sector is Dwindling

Professor Stephen Wood, co-author of the latest Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) Report, “Employment Relations in the Shadow of Recession”, suggests the Government’s austerity programme will have more effect than the recession has had.

The Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) of 2011 shows that there has been a marked rise in feelings of job insecurity in the British public sector since the mid-2000s (left-hand panel in Table 1). In 2011, however, perceptions of job security in the private sector were close to their previous level, despite the longest recession in living memory. In the public sector, on the other hand, perceived job security had plummeted to the extent that that fewer than half of public sector employees felt secure in their jobs. These trends fed through to employees’ satisfaction with their job security (right-hand panel Table 1).

Table 1: Job Security: Perceptions and Satisfaction

Across the whole economy, employees’ well-being at work has increased slightly between 2004 and 2011. The proportion of employees’ satisfaction with most aspects of their jobs (including pay and involvement in workplace decision-making) increased while those experiencing anxiety fell. The steep decline in satisfaction with job security within the public sector, however, meant that overall job satisfaction and non-pecuniary job satisfaction has decreased significantly.

In workplaces most adversely affected by the recession, levels of satisfaction with pay and with job insecurity were lower and anxiety levels were also lower. The vast majority of workplaces were in fact affected to some extent by the recession, which we take to mean the lengthy period of economic malaise that followed the onset of the financial crisis in late 2008 and the associated rising public debt.

Three-quarters (76%) of workplaces changed some aspect of their staffing practices in response to the recession – action that impacted directly upon the wages, hours or job security of their workers. The most common responses were wage freezes or cuts, moratoriums on filling vacant posts and work re-organisations. Although such measures are unwelcomed by workers, they may have helped avert even worse outcomes – only 14% of workplaces made compulsory redundancies and just 7% made voluntary redundancies. Public sector workplaces were more likely to have taken some action but private sector workplaces were more likely to have had compulsory redundancies and reductions in basic hours.

While the recession has played a role in explaining the adverse trends in well-being, other factors may also be significant. Most notably, job demands have increased in intensity with 27% strongly agreeing in 2004 and 34% strongly agreeing in 2011 with the statement “My job requires me to work very hard”.

Changes in job quality also played a part in the overall increases in well-being observed.  The proportion of employees perceiving high degrees of job autonomy and employees who perceive their management to be supportive and fair has increased. These increases were again less observable in the public sector and well-being levels are noticeably higher in new workplaces.

The biggest change in job quality is nonetheless the decline in job security in the public sector. This suggests that the government’s austerity programme has had more of an effect than has the recession within the private sector, directly contributing to the increase level of strikes and ballots for industrial actions within the public sector, a crucial contemporary workplace phenomenon which WERS 2011 also documents.

All findings reported here relate to workplaces with 5 or more employees.

The full report of the study is in Brigid Van Wanrooy, Helen Bewley, Alex Bryson, John Forth, Stephanie Freeth, Lucy Stokes and Stephen Wood, Employment Relations in the Shadow of the Recession, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

WERS 2011 is the sixth in the WERS series. Interviews for the 2011 WERS were undertaken with around 2,700 workplace managers and 1,000 employee representatives, whilst over 20,000 employees completed questionnaires. Previous surveys were conducted in 1980, 1984, 1990, 1998 and 2004. The 2011 WERS was jointly sponsored by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). NIESR’s contribution was made possible by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation.

The data set from the 2011 WERS is available through the UK Data Service: http://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk