Fluent Essays

1.To garner top grades in this assignment, at least three (3) insights from a team-mate will need to be informally used and cited (e.g. “I thank my teammate Jenny for this idea...”) within the 2-3 page essay.2.In your two-page (3-page maximum) Critical Analysis, you may select from this list of possible approaches to take. Students may select one of these or several, or come up with another approach. (a) Distill common themes across several (two, or three or more) readings for that week.(b) Identify similar or contradictory arguments expressed by the authors of the week’s readings. That is, can you and your team identify any debates, or tensions, or contradictions in the readings? Or did you encounter some major points of consensus amongst the authors on certain points?(c) Undertake a critical analysis of two or more articles, consisting of some of the following elements of Critical Thinking3.Avoid Descriptive Summaries The best tip to keep in mind is that this is a Critical Analysis of readings; it is NOT a summary of readings. Your audience has already read the readings, making it your task to advance their thinking about the readings. Of course, you should provide a brief summary of the reading as a reminder to your audience, say, a brief summary of the topic area, or the research question posed, or the author’s core objective or argument. This is to refresh the audience’s memory. 4.Cite Ideas, but Use Informal Citation Style 5.please use simple words and sentence structure as possible berry_and_mcdaniel__2020__post_crisis_precarity_understanding_attitudes_to_work_and_industrial_relatios_among_youth_in_the_uk.pdf hardgrove_et_al.__2015__possible_selves_in_a_precarious_labour_market.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview 894380 research-article2020 EID0010.1177/0143831X19894380Economic and Industrial DemocracyBerry and McDaniel Article Post-crisis precarity: Understanding attitudes to work and industrial relations among young people in the UK Craig Berry Economic and Industrial Democracy 1­–22 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X19894380 DOI: 10.1177/0143831X19894380 journals.sagepub.com/home/eid and Sean McDaniel Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Abstract The 2008 crisis crystallised the trend towards ‘precarious’ labour market conditions which disproportionately affect young people. Few studies since the crisis, however, examine how young people understand and engage with their economic circumstances and industrial relations. This article draws upon rich and original data from focus groups and an online community exercise to examine the attitudes of young people in relation to the apparent ‘normalisation’ of precarity in the post-crisis economy. It argues that although young people have internalised precarious labour market conditions, they recognise the abnormality of this situation. It shows that their view of these conditions as immutable, however, means they often fail to see value in conventional forms of trade union organisation. The article concludes by outlining a future research agenda around economic crisis, generational identities and the future of industrial relations. Keywords Economic crisis, labour markets, precarity, trade unions, young people Introduction Whilst the UK is currently experiencing record levels of employment, this headline figure masks the fact that, ‘two-thirds of the growth in employment since 2008 has been in “atypical” roles such as self-employment, zero-hours contracts or agency work’ (Clarke and Cominetti, 2019: 6–7). Moreover, young people have experienced ‘above-average increases in the rate of atypical employment’ during this time (Clarke and Cominetti, 2019: 42). The implications for industrial relations of the rise of insecure and precarious employment in many sectors is significant and has become central to academic and policy debate in the UK (and elsewhere) in recent years (e.g. Taylor, 2017). Corresponding author: Craig Berry, Department of Economics, Policy and International Business, Manchester Metropolitan University, All Saints Campus, Oxford Road, Manchester, M15 6BH, UK. Email: c.berry@mmu.ac.uk 2 Economic and Industrial Democracy 00(0) Precarity can be understood broadly as a deviation from the standard employment relationship, with features including low pay, short-term contracts, faux self-employment, few or no guaranteed working hours and few employment rights and protections (see European Parliament Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs, 2017; Grimshaw et al., 2016).1 Insecure employment is not new, especially in lower-skilled occupations, although it may have reached a new peak since the 2008 crisis (Prosser, 2016; see also Bessant et al., 2017; France, 2016). Indeed, two decades ago, Richard Sennett warned of ‘flexible capitalism’, wherein ‘uncertainty’ and ‘instability’ were becoming ‘woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism’ (Sennett, 1998: 31; see also Beck, 2002). However, today’s young people are perhaps the first cohort to have experienced the shift towards precarity on a large scale, across occupational groups. In a landmark 2018 book, the late Andy Furlong and colleagues refer to the spread of precarious labour market conditions in recent decades in the UK as ‘a new normality’, which has built up over decades and accelerated in the context of the crisis from 2008. This is an issue because, despite the fact that young people are increasingly likely to be employed in low paid and precarious positions, or suffer from underemployment (Berry, 2016; Booth, 2016; Gardiner and Gregg, 2017; Heyes et al., 2016; Hodder and Kretsos, 2015), they are also less likely to confront such problems through traditional forms of trade unionism (Tailby and Pollert, 2011). This article seeks to develop our understanding of this ‘new normal’ of precarity by enquiring how it has been internalised into the attitudes of today’s young workers. As Furlong et al. (2018: 92–96) point out, young people would have to acknowledge precarity as a largely immutable reality in order for it to have been fully ‘normalised’. We thus define the ‘normalisation’ of precarity in terms of whether and how young people come to view the conditions of labour market precarity outlined above as fixed features of their economic existence, rather than an aberration they expect to pass. As such, drawing a link between wider labour market processes and young people’s attitudes to trade unions, we interrogate the notion of ‘normalisation’ by considering if, how and why young people seek to operate and succeed (or simply survive) within this economic environment, rather than resist it (through, for example, forms of collective action). Our specific contribution to scholarship is to qualitatively examine young people’s understandings of the economy, work and industrial relations in order to develop our own understanding of how the material conditions of this ‘new normal’ are being experienced. The research is thus underpinned by two key research questions. Firstly, what is the attitude of young people towards work, their economic circumstances and economic futures more broadly? Secondly, how are traditional industrial relations, including the role of trade unions, seen by today’s young people? These questions will be relevant across many economies, though we focus here on young people in the UK. The article explores these issues through the presentation of original, qualitative data emerging from a series of focus groups and an online community exercise with young people aged between 18 and 25, conducted in October 2017. The existing literature on young people’s attitudes to work and industrial relations is divided between more attitudinal approaches, which highlight a lack of ‘demand’ for unions amongst young workers (see Cennamo and Gardner, 2008; Cogin, 2012; Ng et al., 2010), and more structural approaches which highlight the way in which changing Berry and McDaniel 3 labour market composition restricts demand for unions (see Freeman and Diamond, 2003; Vandaele, 2012). Transcending this dichotomy, however, our approach here is to exploit the economic crisis as a key event and assess how significant labour market changes may be altering attitudes towards work and industrial relations amongst young people in the UK. There are surprisingly few such studies focusing on the post-crisis period, and certainly very few focused on the UK. Frustratingly, studies rarely make links between work-related attitudes and understandings of the wider economic context. There have also been none focused on 18- to 25-year-olds; whilst most research on young workers studies the ‘millennial’ age range, our research is focused solely on those who, as adults, have never known anything but the post-crisis economy. Moreover, trade unions (or their absence) are clearly an important part of the labour market landscape for workers, and as such there has been a growing scholarly interest in their renewal in conditions of precarity in recent years (Croucher and Wood, 2017; James and Karmowska, 2016; Kretsos, 2011; Marino et al., 2018; Upchurch et al., 2012). As such, analysing attitudes to trade unions serves our wider objective of understanding the normalisation of precarity, given that such attitudes may indicate the extent to which young people are prepared to challenge prevailing labour market conditions. Do young people see precarity as impeding their exercise of control over their working lives, and are they looking to trade unions to reassert control? The article contends that young people’s experience of the ‘new normal’ of precarious labour market conditions has been internalised and thus normalised within their attitudes to a significant degree. This does not mean, however, that labour market changes have been accepted passively or unknowingly (cf. Furlong et al., 2018). Rather, there is a recognition amongst these young people of the novelty of their socio-economic circumstances, and thus frustration and anger at the nature of these circumstances. Nevertheless, we also find, as others have (see Worth, 2019), that young people feel that insecure labour market conditions are simply ‘part and parcel’ of the economic order, and that this attitude means these young people focus on how they can succeed within this inherited structure rather than on pursuing structural change. Our research shows that antipathy towards trade unions, even if trade unionism is conceived in fairly positive terms, can be associated with this perspective, insofar as trade union membership is not deemed particularly helpful to young people plotting their career while navigating precarious labour market conditions. The article first briefly surveys the existing literature on the attitudes of young people to work and industrial relations (including trade unions), and then details the research methodology in the third section. The fourth section presents evidence from the focus groups and online participants, organised thematically according to an inductive analysis of our empirical material, in the following subsections: ‘the economic context’, ‘the labour market, good work and economic security’ and ‘industrial relations and trade unions’. The subsequent section pulls together our analysis of the ‘attitudes to precarity’ and ‘ambivalence to trade unions’, before we conclude in the final section. The article poses a challenge to the notion that conventional forms of trade union activity will succeed in mobilising workers to challenge precarity and marks out a new research agenda around how generational identities transform in the wake of economic crises. Ultimately, 4 Economic and Industrial Democracy 00(0) however, while in a material sense precarity may have been normalised for today’s young people, further research is required to establish the attitudinal implications of this across the lifecourse. The existing literature on attitudes to work and trade unions The existing research has reported a substantial cohort effect on union density, demonstrating that a decline in union membership can be explained by the replacement of older, more unionised workers, by younger cohorts who tend to be less unionised (see Bockerman and Uusitalo, 2006; Bryson and Gomez, 2005). That is, opposed to factors such as, for example, cohort preference changes towards unions, a significant aspect of the decline in trade union membership over the past three decades or so can be explained by an increase in what Bryson and Gomez (2005) describe as ‘never-membership’ amongst younger workers. The reasons for this cohort effect are contested, however. The literature is divided between more attitudinal approaches, which highlight a lack of ‘demand’ for unions, and more structural approaches, which highlight either the way in which changing labour market composition restricts union activity or ‘supply-side’ issues around the capacity of trade unions themselves to organise workers. On the demand-side of this debate, a significant amount of academic work supports the popular notion that ‘millennial’ or ‘Generation Y’ workers (born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s) are individualistic, uncommitted to their jobs, and have unreasonably high expectations from their employers (and, relatedly, also reject the collectivist underpinnings of trade unionism) (Oliver, 2006). A large part of this literature finds that younger generations of workers place a greater emphasis on both extrinsic values (such as a higher salary) and work freedoms (such as working time flexibility) than previous generations (see Cennamo and Gardner, 2008; Cogin, 2012; Ng et al., 2010). Eddy Ng and colleagues utilise data from a Canadian survey of undergraduate students, for instance, to suggest that millennials place ‘the greatest importance on individualistic aspects of a job’. Half of the respondents surveyed, they argue, were uncommitted to their workplace in the long-term, signifying a ‘significant shift away from the career norms of the past’ (Ng et al., 2010: 289; see also Cogin, 2012: 2287). We can recognise that in some senses these attitudinal differences are transitory, rather than defining of a whole cohort over time. For instance, the macro data show us that the ‘probability of being unionized follows an inverted U-shaped pattern in age, maximizing in the mid-to late 40s’ (Blanchflower, 2007: 1; see also Hodder, 2015: 315). That is, even if attitudinal differences lead younger workers to be less sympathetic towards unions at an early stage of their career, as they grow older they tend to become increasingly receptive to unionisation. Yet we do also know, for instance, that workers aged 16–24 make up an increasingly small percentage of unionised British workers in comparison to two decades ago (see BEIS, 2018: 15). Does this reflect a significant shift in the attitudes of young people towards trade unions or are there more structural factors at play? The above literature, which views the heightened labour market precarity of young people and subsequent lack of demand for unionisation as a natural product of their ‘essential youthfulness’ (Yates, 2017), has been challenged robustly within the literature. Berry and McDaniel 5 Brenda Kowske and colleagues draw upon repeated opinion surveys over an 18-year period, with data collected from a diverse sample of over 115,000 employees in the US to examine changing work attitudes. Though noting some small attitudinal shifts across generations, on balance the authors argue it is more useful to think in terms of ‘generational similarities’ (Kowske et al., 2010; see also the Finnish study reported in Pyöriä et al., 2017). Methodological differences may explain some of these contrasting findings, with time-lag studies, where attitudes among different generations at the same age are assessed over time, more likely to dispute the notion that today’s young people are radically different to older cohorts. A review of the evidence by Jennifer Deal and colleagues shows that most of this research ‘finds a few small statistical differences, but the differences are few and modest at best’ and that there is no evidence ‘of the types of sweeping differences in attitudes, orientations, and work ethic that populate the popular press’ (Deal et al., 2010). As Vandaele (2012: 203) notes, ‘the discrepancy between young workers’ positive attitudes towards unions and their low unionization rate’ can best be explained with reference to labour market structure. That is, youth employment rates are lower than the working population as a whole, while those in work are ‘disadvantaged by their crowding at the lower end, or “poor” quality jobs, in certain sectors’, making trade unions less accessible (Tailby and Pollert, 2011: 503; see also Hodder and Kretsos, 2015: 4). Young workers ‘tend to work in sectors that are less covered by union membership, union representation and collective bargaining’ (Vandaele, 2012: 204; see also Freeman and Diamond, 2003). As a result, ‘the union density differential between young and adult workers’ is due to issues within labour markets which pose supply-side constraints, such as a lack of information within the workplace on how or why to join a union, rather than a lack of demand for union representation per se (Bryson et al., 2005: 155; see also Tailby and Pollert, 2011: 518–520). By and large, structural accounts of the significance of changing labour market conditions, alongside large-scale time-lag attitudinal studies, strongly rebut claims that young people are today somehow distinctly more anti-trade union than past cohorts. Yet, whilst structural arguments highlight the relative weakness of attitudinal approaches, from a theoretical perspective it is important to maintain an understanding of the relationship between the two. The attitudinal-structural dichotomy within the literature should not prohibit a discussion of the relationship between changing labour market structures and the way in which young workers understand the labour market and industrial relations. This is particularly relevant in a context marked by significant labour market and wider economic upheaval, such as that which followed the 2008 economic crisis. This article’s analysis, therefore, remains alive to how structural economic changes may have important knock-on effects for the attitudes of young workers in the post-crisis labour market. So far, there is relatively little work in this area and even less which helps us to understand the attitudes of young workers towards trade unions in the context of the ‘new normal’ of labour market precarity post-crisis (see Furlong et al., 2018). Research on young workers in the US by Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson and her colleagues (2012) utilises data from the longitudinal Youth Development Study and finds that extrinsic values (for example, desiring a higher salary) have weakened since the crisis, with the young faced with higher unemployment and reduced job security, incomes 6 Economic and Industrial Democracy 00(0) and advancement opportunities. In the UK, there is some limited non-academic literature on this issue which points to growing anxieties among young people regarding post-crisis economic conditions, which seem to lead to a more pragmatic set of expectations regarding the workplace (obviously, establishing whether such anxiety would have been present anyway, had the ‘great moderation’ era of stable growth continued, is impossible) (Cabinet Office, 2014; IpsosMORI, 2017). These survey-based data are valuable for highlighting large-scale shifts in attitudes in the post-crisis period. However, this strictly quantitative approach to studying attitudes can be liable to miss the subtleties of shifting attitudes or fail to notice important contradictory tendencies or ‘gap[s] in explanatory language’ in the way young workers make sense of the world around them (see Worth, 2019: 441). Once we dive into this issue, we see that there is a more complicated story at play. Franceschelli and Keating (2018: 2S), drawing upon interviews with young British workers, highlight a contradiction that exists between the actual labour market conditions facing young workers and their own apparent optimism concerning their own economic circumstances as a result of their ‘faith in the ability of hard work to improve future life opportunities’. Similarly, Leccardi (2017: 348) utilises cross-national survey and case study data to show that despite high levels of uncertainty, young people across Europe appear to be ‘interpreting uncertainty as a window for new possibilities and the unexpected, a potentially risky but positive experience’. Furlong et al. (2018: 92) set out one way of interpreting this, depicting today’s young workers as ‘boiled frogs’: as precarious labour market conditions have intensified – or normalised – over recent decades, each subsequent cohort has little reason to question the peculiarity of the economic conditions they have inherited, and insecurity is rendered ‘common sense’. The ‘boiled frogs’ thesis thus presents young workers as passive receivers of structural change, rejecting the idea of young workers being part of an angry, anxious and alienated new class of precariat (see Standing, 2011). Rather, utilising Understanding Society data, Furlong et al. s ... Purchase answer to see full attachment