Hidden amongst the barrage of cuts announced in the June Budget was a further extension in the work requirements applied to single parents. The last Government had already compelled those with children aged seven and over to seek work from this October. The Coalition announced that it will bring down the age to 5, reckoning that this will save £380 million, and see 100,000 more parents in work.

The Coalition seems to follow the last Government in believing that single parents are not in work because benefit conditions are not tight enough. But we know that nine out of ten single parents want a paid job; the problem is that the jobs they could fit with their family life aren’t out there.

Gingerbread surveyed our members and users of the NetMums website. 62% told us there were no or very few jobs at part time hours that they could apply for; 97% had seen none or very in school hours, and 95% had seen none or very few job-shares.

A scan of the London job pages over two weeks backed up what parents had told us – we saw only 11% of jobs advertised at part-time hours, with none advertised within school hours or as a job-share. We know that across the labour market, there has been a fall in full-time working during the recession. But we think that, rather than opening up new part-time jobs to employees, employers are reducing the hours of their existing workforce to save costs without making redundancies.

Single parents can’t move into jobs that aren’t there – and although the right to request flexible working has helped, workplace reform remains the missing piece of the jigsaw of parental employment. The Coalition has said it wants to extend flexible working to all – we think such moves should come before work requirements are extended to more parents.

Government can also lead the way in changing employment practices in the public sector. Jobs could be offered as flexible or job-share as standard – unless there is a good, demonstrable business case for why this isn’t possible. The ‘business case’ for flexible working is clear – with companies of all sizes seeing benefits in terms of motivation, engagement and commitment.

It’s time that Government took the lead in making sure that more parents benefit from better working practices – rather than simply placing more pressure on them to move into a labour market that doesn’t fit with family life.

The headline grabbing element in today’s pensions announcement is the review into increasing the state pension age for men to 66. Unlike our hopes for the auto-enrolment review, there can’t be much doubt that this is a done deal given George Osborne’s announcement at the Conservative Party conference (even if Steve Webb was sceptical of the figures quoted at the time – though to be fair he did not oppose the idea.)

One welcome element today is the new government’s decision to end the statutory retirement age. While Labour was reviewing this, frankly they could have been bolder. Their fear of ever going against employer lobbying made them move at a glacial pace, although everyone involved in the debate knew that it was bound to happen sooner or later.

No-one can deny that people are living longer, and that more people want the chance to work beyond an arbitrary retirement age. People have been talking about a flexible decade of retirement for many years so that we end the cliff-edge approach to retirement – one day you do your last day of full time work, and the next start retirement.

But we are not going to achieve this by a quicker than expected increase in the male state pension age from 65 to 66. More than half (53 per cent) of 64 year old men are already economically inactive – and only 2 per cent are inactive but seeking work. And while working longer on a flexible basis may be attractive for some – and not just knowledge workers – there will be many, particularly those doing heavy physical or tediously repetitive jobs that will not want to work extra years and see this as ‘work til you drop’. I said more about this in reponse to Vince Cable in an earlier post.

A more flexible approach to retirement would also have to look at employer attitudes to employing older workers and new rights for flexible working that gave people a realistic prospect of constructing their preferred transition from work to retirement.

While people are living longer the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor is getting wider:

• In 1972 65 year old professional men could expect to live 2.5 years longer than unskilled men
• The gap had risen to 4.2 years by 2002
• If the state pension age went up to 70, the goal of many right wing think tankers, professionals would lose 27%  of their current expected retirement, while the unskilled lose 35%.
• male life expectancy at 65 in Kensington and Chelsea is 23 years, in Glasgow it’s 14.

One criticism made of George Osborne when he made his initial announcement at the Conservative Party conference was that he did not seem to be aware of the gender dimension to this issue. It should not be forgotten that the retirement age for women is inceasing in stages from 60 to 65, so a key challenge for the review is what happens to women. Making the gap between the state pension age for men and women bigger would be a breach of EU sex discrimination law so women are bound to face some change in their circumstances too.

EU sex discrimination law  does not allow different ages for benefits. So currently even though men only become eligible for a state pension at 65, they can claim the means tested guarantee credit. This does provide some relief for poorer economically inactive men facing an extra year’s wait before they get their state pension (as long as women don’t face a steep rise to 66 too).

But the triple lock on the state pension uprating (the higher of earnings, CPI or 2.5 per cent) does not apply to guarantee credit. This is newly linked to CPI and will therefore go up more slowly than it did when linked to RPI if past trends are repeated.

The Coalition Agreement commits the Government to extending the right to request flexible working to all employees – a positive and progressive move which would do much to improve working lives and promote gender equality.

But today’s Queen’s Speech has not included a Bill to legislate for this change – and rather than proposing new regulations, commits the Government to the much less specific goal of “removing barriers to flexible working”. The extent of what the Coalition will achieve on flexible working, and its timetable for acting to fulfil the committment in its agreement, therefore remains unclear.

Update: Further details on the Coalition’s plans on flexible working are now on the No. 10 website – it transpires that “rushing” legislation on this issue would not allow for “full consultation” with business and families. Despite re-stating many of the positive benefits that the extension could have – increasing the availability of flexible posts, reducing any stigma attached to making a request and promoting work-life balance for all employees, no legislative timetable is provided.

Today we’ve got a new ToUChstone Extra pamphlet out, “In Sickness and in Health? Good work – and how to achieve it“. It’s challenging the Government and employers to ensure that workplaces don’t just prevent staff from becoming ill, but actively promote good health and well-being through the idea of  ‘good work’.

We spend around a third of our waking hours at work. More than being just an economic process where employees simply trade their time for a wage, work is centrally important to us as human beings. It helps us define our identities, our physical and emotional well being, and even how long we live. We all deserve a fulfilling working life, with job satisfaction and the opportunity to achieve more of our full potential.

But too many of us get stuck with ‘bad work’ instead. You know you’re in this category if you have symptoms like a lack of control over work, poverty pay, repetitive or monotonous tasks, a lack of respect, incompetent line managers, work overload (or indeed getting too little to do), an absence of training and personal development, unsafe working conditions, over-long hours and bullying.

This ‘bad work’ really hurts us. It leads to stress, ill-health and lower motivation. There is a strong link between stress and the use of tobacco, recreational drugs and alcohol, while being stuck at your desk all day and snatched 20 minute junk food lunch breaks can lead to obesity. Workplaces suffer higher sickness absence, higher staff turnover and reduced levels of productivity as a result.

For those employers unimpressed by the idea of helping their staff improve their personal well-being, the idea’s hardly pure altruism. It could lead to a better, more successful organisation with loyal, motivated and productive staff.

We’d like to see a national standard for ‘good work’. Having a practical index for this potentially nebulous idea would help employers look at work organisation and job design, and include effective channels for employee engagement. Of course, many jobs are always going to involve elements of monotony or demanding physical effort, but an index would at least help employers recognise where this is, and compensate to make work better fitted to the people that do it.

It would hopefully encourage employers and employees to work together to ensure that work is no longer seen just as a place where employees go to earn enough for material sustenance, but as an activity that helps satisfy some of Maslow’s higher needs; belonging, esteem and self-actualisation.

We don’t often quote Audrey Hepburn on this blog, so before sending you off to read the pamphlet, I’ll remedy this oversight by giving her the last word:

“Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.”

It’s Work Your Proper Hours Day today – in fact it’s nearly over for many of those who will be taking the TUC’s recommendation and making a point of eschewing unpaid overtime for at least one day in the year.

This year we’ve seen an increase in the number of people working what we’ve dubbed ‘extreme overtime’. This is not extra work conducted on jet-skis, but rather people who do in excess of 10 hours a week above their paid contracts), and 14,000 more reported this in 2009, bringing the total close to 900,000.

And despite what many commentators might have us believe about conditions and motivation in the public sector, a higher proportion of public sector workers worked unpaid overtime in 2009 than private sector workers (25.3% against 18.3%).

The free work these people do in the public sector was worth nearly £9 billion – quite a tidy sum. Public sector workers are also more likely to do ‘extreme’ unpaid overtime (4.9% against 3.1%), and slightly more likely to do more of it (18 hours a week average against 17.8 hours).

Now of course, there are mitigating reasons for this – just as the stories about public and private sector pay recently weren’t quite as clear cut as they may have appeared. The types of work done in the public and sector aren’t directly comparable, and in any case have changed in recent years with trends such as public sector outsourcing to the private sector.

But next time you see a story about the cost of lazy public sector workers in the paper on your commute home, you might like to consider there are probably still quite a lot of them at their desks, racking up that £9 billion of extra work.

It’s Work Your Proper Hours Day today. We work it out from ONS’ ASHE and LFS surveys as the day when the average person who works unpaid overtime stops working for free and starts earning for themselves.

One of the features of the recession has been people moving to shorter hours or taking part-time work in order to avoid the dole queue. This has also led to a fall in the number of people putting in extra hours at work. But there has also been a surprise increase in people doing ‘extreme’ unpaid overtime, with nearly 900,000 workers giving away an average of 18 hours of free work a week last year.

There’s no direct link between excess overtime and underemployment, but those people who are struggling to find enough or indeed any hours to work must be wondering why some workers are doing so much for free.

Staff are understandably doing all they can to help their company recover from the recession – and bosses should use today thank them for going that extra mile in difficult times. But working time still needs to be properly managed. A long hours culture is bad for workers’ health and family life, and bad for an organisation’s productivity – whether the hours are paid or not.

Nicola has written for Left Foot Forward about the response from parts of the business lobby to the Government’s introduction of legislation to make the six months of maternity leave transferrable between parents. She disputes that new rights will impose ‘enormous costs’ on employers, and asks:

“If de-regulation is so necessary, why are so many other successful economies surviving with better protection for people at work? If regulation is such a key determinant of economic success, why have the US and the UK suffered so badly in the downturn? The truth is that some of the world’s most productive economies combine good rights at work, strong trade unions and low unemployment. The idea that wealth creation only comes about when few have rights is simply wrong in a modern knowledge economy.”

Read her full post over at Left Foot Forward.

Today the Government and the opposition have each launched new policy documents on supporting families. While both recognise the importance of flexible working as a means to allow parents to balance work and care, they also share a lack of wider discussion about the ways in which working lives impact on families.

The Conservatives would extend the right to request flexible work to all parents with children aged under 18 (it’s currently available until children are 16), and plan a new system of flexible parental leave (a version of which the Government are already implementing), while the Government plan to review the notice period for paternity leave (currently 15 days), ‘look at’ whether parents should be able to take parental leave when children are aged over 5 and ‘raise awarness’ of family friendly rights.

Neither make any mention of those parents who do not have the rights to request flexible working or take parental leave in the first place – those with ‘worker’ rather than ‘employee’ employment status – nor of the wider issues of job security and quality for parents at work.

Today’s labour market statistics show that close to half a million temporary workers can’t find permanent jobs, evidence shows ever slowing wage growth for middle income families and those on casual, agency and dubious ‘self-employed’ contracts are still excluded from many employment rights – both parties could do with a more comprehensive look at the importance of secure and fairly paid jobs for enabling positive families lives.

The recession could lead to a travel revolution, as organisations and staff look to cut costs during the current economic turmoil.

I’m making this prediction during Commute Smart Week, which is run by my organisation Work Wise UK. Now in its fourth year, the week  highlights a number of ways of avoiding the misery of traveling to and from work in the dark, and the depression and despondency that many experience as a result, by working and commuting ‘smarter’.

Thousands of employers are already seeing the benefits to themselves and their staff by implementing a smarter working policy. Policies such as staggering work journeys, home working, and encouraging cycling and walking, are enabling staff to get to work in a better way and in the process saving time and money whilst improving health and wellbeing.

Now, with businesses looking to make the most of their resources in the difficult economic climate, being green and commuting smart have never made more commercial sense. The CBI estimates that road congestion alone costs the UK economy some £20 billion per year. Even a limited take-up of smarter working could save £1.9 billion per year within five years.

Commuting for long periods of time has become a part of the UK’s working culture. The excessive time spent commuting is seriously affecting our work-life balance. Not only is the amount of time spent actually commuting an issue in itself, but the 9 to 5 culture with its peak travel times generates congestion on the rail, underground and road networks and as a consequence increase stress for commuters.

The knock-on effect of reducing overall traffic congestion and public transport overcrowding by extending the rush hour and reducing peak demand through smarter commuting will make the daily commute more bearable for those workers that have no choice when and how to travel.

In these cost conscious times, employees and employers are looking at the cost of travel and realising the absurd waste of time and resources, especially of one person commuting by car. Smarter commuting, making more use of walking, cycling and car sharing, combined with reducing the overall number or journeys through more remote working and more flexible working, leads to better productivity and cuts business costs. There are not only direct savings, such as mileage allowances, but also hidden costs such as parking provisions, staff retention and employee health issues that can be addressed through travel planning.

Work Wise UK has produced some useful guidance for employers and employees on commuting smarter this winter, which you can find at the Work Wise UK site. So, my advice for the months ahead is, why travel in the dark – when you can commute smart?

We have now truly bid farewell to summertime. The clocks have changed, the nights are drawing in and the leaves are starting to fall. Wouldn’t it be great if we had another bank holiday today to cheer us all up?

The TUC has joined together with the main voluntary organisations to call for a new bank holiday called ‘Community Day’, on the last Monday in October (i.e. it would be today if we had it this year) to celebrate volunteering and encourage people to take part in community events.

We think the new holiday should be introduced in 2012 to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the London Olympics and Paralympics with a fanfare to seal a triumphant year for volunteers across the UK. Here’s a joint letter we’ve sent to the press:

Monday (26^th October) marks the halfway point between the August and Christmas bank holidays. We would like this four month gap to be broken with a new Community Day bank holiday in late October.

Over the last two years the recession has hit communities across the UK. When times are tough people look to friends, families and their local community for support.

Community spirit is a long standing and unsung British tradition. Millions of people across the UK volunteer and take part in community activities every week. Surveys show that volunteering contributes significantly to the UK economy, boosts people’s wellbeing, prevents isolation and makes them happy too.

We believe these efforts should be recognised, encouraged and celebrated. 2012 marks the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the London Olympics and Paralympics – events only possible thanks to volunteers. This would be the perfect year to introduce a new Community Day bank holiday.

Yours,

Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary
Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, Executive Director, Community Service Volunteers
Kevin Curley, Chief Executive, National Association for Voluntary and Community Action
Justin Davis Smith, Chief Executive, Volunteering England
Stuart Etherington, Chief Executive, The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)

The TUC’s Brendan Barber said:

“Communities across the UK have been hit hard by the recession. When times are tough, people look to their friends, family and local communities for support. Millions of people support their local communities every week in some way or other and this work should be properly recognised and encouraged.

“With the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics to look forward to, 2012 is set to be a vintage year for volunteering. A new Community Day bank holiday would be the perfect way to celebrate the nation’s achievements and encourage more people to volunteer.”

Dame Elisabeth Hoodless of UK volunteering charity CSV said:

“Volunteers raise reading levels, help patients to eat, tackle child abuse by supporting families and reduce levels of crime. We know that two thirds of the thousands of people who volunteer every October for Make a Difference Day have never volunteered before and that two thirds of those who try it out go on to volunteer again. It’s clear there is untapped energy out there.”

“Eleven million people tell researchers they would volunteer if somebody asked them.  A Community Day bank holiday would help to attract even more people to give time to benefit others.”

Dragons’ Den’s judge and Chairman of Ryman stationers Theo Paphitis has a big piece in the Daily Mail today: “Why ALL bosses should copy me and ban Facebook from the workplace“. He laments that every technological revolution has a downside, and that the internet’s wonders in the field of stationery retail have been accompanied by “an orgy of self-indulgence and exhibitionism”. The only way for employers to protect themselves from staff writing about their cats during the working day is apparently a blanket ban on using Facebook at work.

I’m guessing this ban doesn’t extend to the “back room team” who maintain Theo’s own neatly manicured Facebook profile, fan page, group and so on, but even then I can’t help thinking Theo’s in need of a bit of a poke over this one.

He suggests the answer might be to allow employees to access only certain sites that could conceivably be useful to their work, “such as business information or news services”, banning the rest of the nasty, habit forming internet entirely.

This reminds me of a radio interview I did a couple of years ago for BBC Scotland, debating an employment lawyer who actually used the classic comedy boss phrase “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” to describe the average UK office employee online. Theo himself admits “I do not want to appear like some modern Mr Gradgrind”, before coming out with this one:

“The internet wasters will always try to stay one step ahead. The next big technological development is already underway, in the transfer of online activity from computers to mobile phones. In that case, restrictions on usage of workplace computers will not work on their own. So employers will have to be even tougher in future, instituting bans on the use of mobiles during working hours.”

Horrors! Has anyone told Theo that people can actually look out of windows when they could be working? Better order some blackout blinds. Might I humbly suggest there’s another way? One involving a bit of trust going both ways in the employment relationship.

Sit down with your staff or their representatives and work out a policy with them. It’s no skin off most employers’ noses to let staff use social networks to organise their personal lives during their lunch break or break times, and it’s a valuable benefit to office staff who’re likely putting in a few hours unpaid overtime anyway. Make it clear what they can access during work time and what they can’t, and you should get over the problem in an adult way.

The alternative, to tell staff you simply don’t trust them not to slack off when you’re not standing over them, is hardly going to be the best motivator in business.

And doesn’t he know the hip employees are all on Twitter now (along with his with-it co-dragon Duncan Bannatyne)? Or does he recommend managers spend their day glued to Mashable, working out which of the million and one up and coming social media tools they really need to ban next?

And this is all before wondering whether an employer who doesn’t want their staff using Facebook in the office is really positioning themselves to make the most of the opportunities for business in having a staff able to use social media effectively for their work.

The Mail are running a poll on Theo’s behalf. If you’re amused by the prospect of a Dragons’ Den rent-a-celeb banging on about putting a stop to others’ “meaningless babble and egomaniacal drivel”, why not go let them know what you think? (in your break time of course!)

UPDATE 25 Sep: Clifford Singer has the logical follow-up to this story – ban the Daily Mail at work now!

There’s a brilliant short new video on the Unions Together website which sets out three of the key workers’ rights delivered through the European Union, and which David Cameron wants to scrap by withdrawing from the Social Chapter. Parental leave, equal treatment for atypical workers (like agency workers) and annual holidays are the examples picked. Does David Cameron really think it’s popular politics, or even sensible for the economy, to want to scrap these rights? If you’re worried that he will do it anyway, just to satisfy his euro-sceptic wing, sign the Unions Together petition on workers’ rights.

The TUC supports the idea of a new Bank Holiday in the holiday-free zone of October, and we’re involved with an alliance called “Community Day” because we want the day to be a focus for voluntary work to strengthen local communities. In the USA, trade unionists have just put that idea into practice by getting their sleeves rolled up and getting stuck in, as the AFLCIO blog describes:

“Responding to President-elect Barack Obama’s call to pay tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. by giving back to their communities, more than 20,000 AFL-CIO union volunteers in 41 cities will provide services to those in need this weekend and on Jan. 19—the official King holiday.”

Something we could emulate with a new Bank Holiday?

The Government will not be withdrawing or postponing proposals to introduce new flexible working rights for parents from April 2009. This is good news. Government have listened to the evidence, which shows that flexible working is good for employees and for business, during recession or periods of growth, and for small as well as large organisations.  The Federation of Small Businesses are simply wrong.

I was saddened to read the FT story that shows that the Government still does not quite “get” the case for the Working Time Directive.

The Employment Committee of the European Parliament is meeting today to discuss a report that includes the end of the so-called individual opt-outs from the 48 hour limit on average weekly working time. If the EP supports this view, and the TUC hopes that they will do, then we can expect votes in the European Parliament in December and a process of consultation between the EP and the Social affairs Council of Ministers in late January 2009.

The UK Government has tried to portray the opt-outs as being about the right to work. In my view this position ignores the facts, which are that:

• excessive working time is a serious risk to health in all occupations, and also a risk to safety in some occupations;
• most long hours workers want to reduce their working time;
• most long hours are not paid for their overtime hours; and
• many workers say that they were put under pressure to sign away their rights by their employers.

The TUC’s case is very strong. The Working Time Directive was introduced to protect workers from the health and safety hazards of excessive working time. Sadly, the opt-out has effectively neutered the directive in the UK, leaving us with 3.3 million employees (12.9%) regularly working more than 48 hours [1]. A further sign that the directive is not currently working as it should do is the fact that the number of long hours workers increased by 150,000 last year. As a result, excessive working time remains a serious problem, with far too many UK workers still falling prey to heart disease, stress related illness and unnecessary accidents [2]. It is therefore vital that the 48 hour limit is fully applied as quickly as possible.

It will certainly not be enough just to add more legal conditions to the use of the opt-out because the UK’s enforcement regime is very weak. Workers seeking to enforce their rights must make a complaint to one of a number of government agencies, depending on which industry they work in. However, the government has told these agencies that working time complaints must be a low priority and that there must be no proactive enforcement. In some cases, local enforcement agencies do not even know that they are responsible for enforcing the regulations, whilst the main Health and Safety Executive has been reported to turn down working time complaints unless workers have been injured or killed [3]. Since the Government agencies are the only way to enforce the 48 hour week, the net result is that workers often cannot enforce their rights even when their case is supported by a trade union.

It is also the case those most long hours workers want to reduce their hours [4]. Indeed, most of those who work excessive hours do not get paid for their extra time and so have nothing to lose from a more robust limit on working time. There is also a body of evidence that shows that many employers put pressure on their workers to sign the opt-out [5].

Notes:

[5] Abuse is documented in official studies as well the evidence provided by trade unions. Cases of abuse are reported in Barnard, Deakin and Hobbs, Ibid; Neathy F and Arrowsmith J, ‘Implementation of the Working Time Regulations’, Employment Research Series 11, DTI 2001; and Neathy, ERRS 19, ‘Implementation of the Working Time Regulations: follow up study’, DTI, 2003. The incidence of abuse is measured in a UK Government sponsored study carried out by BRMB Social Research, ‘A survey of workers’ experiences of the Working Time Regulations’, DTI Employment Relations Research Series No.31, November 2004, pps 25-29. The latter report found that just 28 per cent of UK long hours workers (eg those working more than 48 hours per week) know that there is a 48-hour limit; 23 per-cent of long hours workers who have not signed an opt-out say that they have experienced employer pressure to work long hours; and 50% of issues raised about the 48 hour week by workers are not resolved

The debate on flexible working and homeworking has been hotting up this week. The CBI’s Autumn Economic Statement, which was published on Monday, argues that there has been a huge increase in homeworking in recent years. However, according to the official Labour Force Survey, there has been some increase in the number of employees who can work from home but it has been relatively modest.

why the discrepancy? It looks like the CBI survey simply asked whether employers offer homeworking to any of their staff. So any company that lets its senior managers work from home answered “yes”. Unfortunately this doesn’t really tell us much about the reality of access to homeworking.

Why has the CBI over-claimed? Probably because it wants to argue against the extension of the “right to request flexible working” on the grounds that good employers are already doing the right thing.

The problem is that this would leave those who are employed by old-fashioned, inflexible companies with no way of improving their working lives except by  looking for another job.

This matters, because there is still a big mismatch between what workers want and what they actually get. Another government survey shows that18 per cent of employees would like to work from home some of the time, but cannot do so at the moment. In addition, a further 20 per cent want to work flexi-time.

I should say here that employers’ organisations deserve real credit for actively promoting flexible working and homeworking. Indeed, both the CBI and the British Chambers of Commerce are working with the TUC in WorkWiseUK – http://www.workwiseuk.org/- which is promoting the mutual benefits of smarter, more flexible working.

The trouble is that you can’t do everything through education and spreading best practice. There are quite a lot of employers bumping along on the bottom when it comes to employment practices. Some simply don’t know any better, but far too many are determined to get as much work as possible from their workers for as little as they can get away with.

It follows that we have to legislate to ensure that workers are fairly treated even if they are working for a complete bonehead - and there really is no other way of flexibilising completely inflexible bosses. But legislation does not need to be “red tape”. I believe that if we do it right then the law will have no impact at all on the majority of firms who are already doing the right thing.