Not just arms and legs: employer perspectives on student workers

ABSTRACT

The student workforce plays a substantial part in several low-paying industries such as retail and hospitality, and this has grown over time. However, there has been little recent research. The usual assumption is that students compete successfully with the local labour force for low-skill, part-time jobs, but there is little evidence for this. Using results from twelve employer interviews located in two cities in the United Kingdom (Bristol and Cardiff), we reconsider employers’ perspectives on taking on students. We find that, rather than seeing the labour market as an undistinguished mass of ‘arms and legs’, employers are well aware of the pros and cons of employing students, and use this information to build flexible workforces which complement the local non-student labour supply. This fits into the well documented model of the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ workforces. We do find evidence of indirect competition, through changes in the way jobs are advertised and filled. We also note the growth in managers who have themselves worked as students may be changing the ‘frame of reference’ of those managers, further shifting the demand for student workers in the long term.

KEYWORDS:

• Students
• student workers
• casual employment
• employer perspectives

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the interviewees for their participation, time and contributions. For helpful comments we thank Anne Green, Peter Bradley and delegates at the Scottish Economics Society conference in Perth and the WPEG conference in Sheffield.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

Faculty Research Ethics Committee, UWE, Bristol

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Damian Whittard

DamianWhittard is a Senior Lecturer and the Programme Manager for the Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) funded Wage and Employment Dynamics Project (WED) http://www.wagedynamics.com/. This is a £1 million research project to develop novel datasets, by matching government administrative data sources and making them available to accredited research. Prior to this, Damian was the Associate Head of Department for Accounting, Economics and Finance at the University of the West of England, with managerial responsibility for the Economics group. His research interests focus primarily on low pay, education of economics, data governance and access, and regional economics.

Hilary Drew

Dr Hilary Drew is Associate Head of Department for Partnerships and a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at the University of the West of England. Hilary’s research interests are broad and include wellbeing, international HRM and English for Academic Purposes. She has worked on a number of projects on low pay and is a qualitative researcher.

Felix Ritchie

FelixRitchie an applied economist with particular research interests in labour economics, particularly low pay and the use, quality and accessibility of government data, and its policy application. Felix joined UWE in June 2012 after working in a range of jobs in the public and private sector in the UK and abroad. He regularly works with lawyers, computer scientists, statisticians, psychologists, criminologists, sociologists and HRM experts as much of his work is inherently multidisciplinary. Felix has led and won over 40 competitive tenders, generating income of over £2m. He is Principal Investigator for the ADRUK-funded Wage and Employment Dynamics project. Other funders include the ESRC; Eurostat; the Low Pay Commission, the Department for Business, Industry and Skills; the Office for National Statistics; the Intellectual Property Office; NHS Digital; the Open Data Institute; DCMS; the Australian National Data Commissioner’s Office; the Australian Bureau of Social Services; Statistics Canada; the Hellenic Statistical Authority; and the Wellcome Trust .