Editorial: new social inequalities and the future of work

This special issue, New Social Inequalities and the Future of Work, brings together a collection of papers that illustrate in differing ways the resilience and recreation of social inequalities in the context of contemporary trends in the world of work. Its draws on research presented at a symposium of the same name, held in June 2018 over two days at the Queensland Office of Industrial Relations and the University of Queensland.¹ The symposium focused in particular on inequalities associated with age and gender, and their possible expansion in future labour markets. Themes explored ranged from training and work experience for young workers, the risks and possibilities for gender equality with changing employment and economic circumstances, the views and aspirations of young workers and the role of social supports for redressing inequalities located at the intersection of social reproduction and paid employment.

A public lecture from leading American sociologist, Ruth Milkman², set the context for the symposium with a critical appraisal of ‘future of work’ scenarios. Milkman (2018) argued that predictions of widespread job losses in the face of technological change have obscured more pressing risks of work degradation associated with the widening power imbalance between employers and employees. Identifying de-industrialisation, de-unionisation and deregulation as underlying forces, Milkman drew attention to processes of risk-shifting from firms to sub-contractors and franchisees, and from employers directly to workers by employing them as ‘independent contractors’, as contributors to rising inequality and precarity in labour markets in the United States. Reflecting on the likely winners and losers in a transformed workforce, Milkman underlined the persistence of complex patterns of inequalities by gender, race/ethnicity, immigration status and age.

These themes of the degradation of work, employer power and increasing insecurity recur in the analyses presented in this special issue, underpinning concerns for the exacerbation of social inequalities and informing suggestions for regulatory reforms with potential to secure a more egalitarian future. The first four papers focus on gender equality, turning different lenses on strategies for, and barriers to, its advancement in the context of changing labour markets and economic conditions.

Howcroft and Rubery’s phrase ‘bias in, bias out’ encapsulates their concern that the gender inequalities currently embedded in employment structures are likely to be reproduced or amplified with technological change unless action is taken ‘to set both the productive economy and social reproduction on a new path’. The pathway they advocate leads towards Nancy Fraser’s vision of a society that transcends male breadwinner/female caregiver norms to produce a model in which ‘all jobs would assume workers who are caregivers, too; all would have a shorter work week than full-time jobs have now; and all would have employment enabling services’ (Fraser 1994, 612, cited in Howcroft & Rubery, this volume).

In examining opportunities for changes supportive of gender equality in the context of future of work scenarios, one option noted by Howcroft and Rubery is the possibility of revitalising the movement towards shorter working hours for all. As a component of Fraser’s vision for a gender-egalitarian future, this goal holds considerable promise; it could be promoted as a response to predictions of increasing unemployment and supported through productivity gains from investment in new technologies (provided they were not disproportionately captured by capital). However, Howcroft and Rubery offer little reason for optimism in relation to this and other opportunities. In a wide-ranging assessment, they raise (among other factors) the potential for reinforcing gender inequalities in the context of new working time and place patterns, the persistence of gender bias in work cultures (particularly in science, technology, engineering, mathematics [STEM] occupations), and gendered assumptions in social protections that are manifest in different ways across welfare state regimes. They conclude with a call to prioritise the challenge of addressing current gender biases in order to provide a more equal foundation for the future of work.

Williams extends this picture by illustrating the influence of one of the possible drivers of increasing gender inequality in future workplaces, namely, job insecurity. Her case study of STEM workers in a large U.S.-based multinational oil and gas company deepens our understanding of the attrition of women from such occupations – in addition to well-recognised factors such as the difficulties for women of managing family obligations and hostile workplace cultures, Williams identifies how women’s career trajectories may be disrupted by the prioritisation of traditional male breadwinner norms in the context of economic risk.

Williams argues that STEM workers are extremely vulnerable in spite of being in high demand, because the firms that employ them lack stability. Her research, conducted during a time of declining oil prices and consequent staff reductions, shows that although the company’s stated criteria for determining layoffs were ‘individual performance’ and ‘skill set’, in practice it was an implicit notion of a ‘deserving professional’ that shaped layoff decisions. The archetypal deserving professional was a ‘compliant young white male U.S. citizen, preferably a new father’. As Williams argues, this construction tends to erase any prior progress made in terms of diversity in hiring and promoting. Her study illustrates the ready reversion to male breadwinner norms in the context of economic downturn and layoffs – providing a stark example of how gender inequalities in work are continually recreated.

Lundqvist’s article takes a historical perspective on gender and the changing nature of paid work, highlighting the state’s role in promoting changes to traditional male breadwinner/female carer norms. Through an analysis of policies to ‘activate’ women into the Swedish labour market in the 1960s, she illustrates how policy makers came to recognise that successful implementation would require attention not only to policy issues such as publicly-funded childcare, but also to attitudinal change in order to overcome widespread negative views on women’s engagement in paid employment. She examines the ‘persuasion’ activities that were driven by Sweden’s National Labour Market Board to effect this change during an era that pre-dated the development and consolidation of gender-equality and work/family policies, showing how they arose through a process of ‘transformative state feminism’ and formed the basis for future policies by bringing the notion of a ‘democratic family’ into the policy discourse.

Lundqvist’s analysis underlines the importance of state intervention in generating changes in social norms, although she also observes that the measures adopted were only partially successful, drawing attention to the gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work that remain evident in contemporary Sweden. In spite of the high levels of women’s labour force engagement, echoes of male breadwinner norms are still present in this ‘dual earner’ society, for example, in men’s under-representation in the uptake of generous parental leave entitlements and in unpaid labour. This invites the question of whether a contemporary version of the ‘persuasion’ strategies adopted to encourage women’s entry to the labour market in 1960s’ Sweden might be what is needed to drive attitudinal change in relation to men’s engagement in care, as a further step towards the future goal of a democratic family – a notion commensurate with Fraser’s gender-egalitarian vision described earlier and advocated by several papers in this collection.

Whitehouse and Brady focus on parental leave as an employment entitlement with potential to support such a gender-egalitarian vision and deliver benefits broadly to include those with lower levels of labour force and socio-economic status. They examine contingencies that limit this promise, including the risk of declining access if future labour markets are increasingly fragmented into discontinuous and insecure forms of employment. Analysis of the Australian case shows ongoing (if slowing) decline in the prevalence of ‘standard’ (full-time permanent) employment, although some of the trends anticipated in future of work debates (such as reduced employment continuity and increases in ‘dependent self-employment’ through misclassification of employees as independent contractors) were not evident in the national data. Eligibility criteria for Australia’s paid and unpaid parental leave entitlements permit relatively broad coverage (at least in formal terms) within this context, but not without some limitations and gaps in coverage that could widen in a future labour market.

Whitehouse and Brady also show that the capacity of Australian parental leave policies to advance gender equality is significantly constrained by policy design features that default to a maternal care model, thus running counter to visions of a more gender-egalitarian sharing of paid and unpaid work. While the capacity for policy change in Australia is hindered by path dependencies reflecting historical developments in social welfare and industrial relations arenas, some possible directions for advancement are outlined. In addition to moving beyond ‘primary carer’ principles that reinforce male breadwinner/female carer norms, Whitehouse and Brady argue for strengthening the ‘employment entitlement’ elements of the policy framework through measures that engage employers more closely with parental leave provisions, and extension of the regulatory framework to restrict their capacity to evade these and other responsibilities.

The final paper in the collection moves beyond gender equality issues to consider the attitudes of young workers to job security, reflecting on what they presage for social equalities in the future. In this article, Woodman examines intergenerational differences in expectations and desires relating to (in)security in employment among young Australian adults, focusing in particular on widely-held beliefs that more recent generations value flexibility over security. Drawing on longitudinal survey data comparing Generation X (those born from around the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s) and Generation Y (those born from around 1980 to around 2000 – the ‘Millennials’), Woodman shows that both cohorts (at age 23 and 30) ranked security well above flexibility in the criteria they saw as most important for a job.

Woodman elaborates this picture with data from qualitative interviews, illustrating a number of similarities between generations in attitudes to security and flexibility, but also a generational shift in terms of how security is conceptualised. While Generation X commonly expressed anger at not having job security after dutifully competing further study and training that should have guaranteed this, Generation Y was more likely to ‘creatively reinterpret security’, accepting high levels of uncertainty and working to develop employability through the acquisition of flexible skill sets. Woodman argues that this represents a re-imagining of security as less secure forms of work are normalised, rather than a demand from new generations for flexibility above security. His use of a sociological generational frame within which to analyse data from mixed methods longitudinal cohort studies adds considerable depth to our understanding of the ways in which job insecurity is perceived by young adults. For debates over social inequalities and the future of work, his findings warn against a sanguine attitude to the erosion of security in employment on the basis that it will no longer be valued by upcoming generations.

In summary, the papers in this collection highlight the complex ways in which social inequalities are recreated and challenged, and illustrate some of the ways these processes are playing out in the context of contemporary trends in employment. The risk that technological change will erode job quality, enabling increasingly ‘insecure, episodic, intensive and low paid work’ (Howcroft & Rubery, this volume), provides the basis for these explorations, which underline the vulnerability of social equalities across a range of countries. This is particularly evident in the difficulties of making and sustaining advances beyond male breadwinner/female carer norms, and is reflected in the commonly perceived need for ongoing interventions if a more socially egalitarian future is to be achieved. In these ways the collection echoes many of the ideas raised in the panel discussion³ at the end of the 2018 symposium – ideas that included the importance of paid work and its regulatory framework in the shaping and redressing of social inequalities, the need for a new politics of time and for more democratic households, and a reimagining of the role of the state as an active agent for driving such changes (for example, as advocated by Pearson 2014). In combination with Milkman’s (2018) concluding wish list, which included a ‘good jobs’ agenda alongside extended and enforced labour standards, these ideas provide a set of alternative strategies for imagining how the risks of contemporary technological changes might be avoided and social equalities advanced.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The symposium was sponsored by The University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology and the Queensland Office of Industrial Relations. It was initiated and organised by Dr Michelle Brady, in collaboration with Professors Gillian Whitehouse, Paula McDonald and Greg Marston. Details of the symposium and the presentations delivered over the two days can be found at: https://polsis.uq.edu.au/symposium-new-social-inequalities-and-future-work.

2. Distinguished Professor of Sociology, The Graduate Centre, City University of New York.

3. Panel members included Associate Professor Liz Hill (University of Sydney), Associate Professor Kay Cook (Swinburne University), Associate Professor George Morgan (Western Sydney University), Professor Greg Marston (University of Queensland). We thank these panellists for their insightful comments that we have drawn on here.