Paper short abstract:

his paper examines chronic deprivation in the context of the U.K.’s labour market, using longitudinal data over a period of 20 years. Workers do indeed “get stuck” in poor-quality employment, and that they rotate between unemployment, inactivity, and poor quality jobs.

Paper long abstract:

The cost-of living crisis has highlighted stark social inequalities in the UK. Striking workers and union leaders have consistently complained about low pay and poor employment conditions. Future technologies, automation and AI will further impact not only the number of jobs but also employment conditions.

Yet poor-quality employment, a multidimensional concept that combines wages with other employment conditions that have a negative effect on well-being, has rarely commanded concerted attention from policy makers, who vaguely talk about “more and better” jobs without specifying what this means.

Several recent papers have used the Alkire Foster method to measure poor-quality employment from a multidimensional perspective incorporating dimensions such as income, job stability, and other working conditions (Sehnbruch et al., 2020; Havhannisyan, 2022; Stephens, 2023). However, this literature has not yet looked at chronic poor-quality employment in the same way that the literature on multidimensional poverty has looked at chronic poverty (Alkire et al., 2017).

This paper therefore uses these methodologies to examine chronic deprivation in the context of the U.K.’s labour market, using longitudinal data from Understanding Society over a period of 20 years. We assign an employment deprivation status to survey respondents based on the characteristics of the jobs they held at different points in time. In our poor-quality employment measure, low pay accounts for one third of the total score, but we also consider other aspects of the job, such as employment stability (as proxied by the type of contract and job tenure) and working conditions (among them autonomy, hours worked, and pension benefits). Our results show that workers do indeed “get stuck” in poor-quality employment, and that they rotate between unemployment, inactivity, and poor-quality jobs .

This situation is not only detrimental for the workers but also poses challenges for policymakers. Workers in deprived employment are more likely to rely on benefits. In addition, given the connection between employment deprivation and health outcomes, they might also require more support from health services such as the NHS. In all, this increases the financial burden on the state while hindering workers’ ability to develop their skills and capabilities.

Using sequencing analysis, this paper analyses employment trajectories over time as well as the characteristics of workers and other socio-economic information that contribute to these results.