̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - employment

Give more people with learning disabilities the chance to work, historian argues

ta385 — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 06:00:00 +0000

A new study by historian Professor Lucy Delap (Murray Edwards College) argues that loud voices in the 20th-century eugenics movement have hidden a much bigger picture of inclusion in British workplaces that puts today’s low rates to shame.

Professor Delap found that in some parts of Britain, up to 70% of people variously labelled ‘defective’, ‘slow’ and ‘odd’ at the time had paid jobs when demand for labour was high, including during and after the First World War. This proportion fell during recessions, but even then, 30% remained in work. By contrast, in the UK today less than 5% of adults with intellectual disabilities are employed.

“A recession now couldn’t make levels of employment of people with learning disabilities much worse, they are on the floor already,” Professor Delap says. Her study, published in the journal Social History of Medicine follows a decade of painstakingly piecing together evidence of people with learning disabilities in the British workforce in the first half of the 20th century.

Delap found no trace in employers’ records or in state archives which focused on segregation and detaining people. But she struck gold in ̽��ֱ��National Archives in Kew with a survey of ‘employment exchanges’ undertaken in 1955 to investigate how people then termed ‘subnormal’ or ‘mentally handicapped’ were being employed. She found further evidence in the inspection records of Trade Boards now held at Warwick ̽��ֱ��’s Modern Records Centre. In 1909, a complex system of rates and inspection emerged as part of an effort to set minimum wages. This led to the development of ‘exemption permits’ for a range of employees not considered to be worth ‘full’ payment.

Delap says: “Once I found these workers, they appeared everywhere and not just in stereotypical trades like shoe repair and basket-weaving. They were working in domestic service, all kinds of manufacturing, shops, coal mining, agriculture, and local authority jobs.”

Delap’s research goes against most previous writing about people with intellectual disabilities which has focused on eugenics and the idea that preindustrial community inclusion gave way to segregation and asylums in the nineteenth century. “We've been too ready to accept that narrative and haven’t gone looking for people in the archive,” Delap says. “Many weren’t swept up into institutions, they lived relatively independent lives, precarious lives, but often with the support of families, friends and co-workers.”

‘Wage age’ versus IQ

Previous studies have focused on the rise of IQ testing in this period, but the employment records that Delap studied showed something very different: a more positive sense of ability couched in terms of the wages someone was worth. This involved imagining a person’s ‘wage age’, meaning that an adult worker could begin with a starting age of 14 and advance in wage age through their working life. Not everyone did advance though.

Delap says “ ̽��ֱ��idea of ‘wage age’ was harsh in many ways but it was far less stigmatising than IQ which emphasised divisions between ‘normal’ and ‘defective’ and suggested people couldn’t advance beyond a certain point. By contrast, ideas of fairness, productivity and ‘the going rate’ were deployed to evaluate workers. When labour was in demand, workers had leverage to negotiate their wage age up. IQ didn't give people that power.”

Appeal to employers

Under the exemption system, employers saw the business case for employing – usually at a significantly lower rate of pay – loyal workers who could be trusted to carry out routine tasks.

Tailoring Trade Board application for permit of exemption relating to a 19-year-old 'unintelligent' woman employed to do various errands in Peterborough (1915). Courtesy of Modern Records Centre, Warwick ̽��ֱ��.

Delap says: “If anything, governments gave signals that these people shouldn't be employed, that they were better off under the care and control of the mental deficiency boards. But employers understood that they could be good workers.”

In 1918, an ‘odd job’ worker employed for 20 years at a London tin works was described as suffering from ‘mental deficiency’ and didn’t know the time of the year or who Britain was fighting. Nevertheless, in the inspector’s opinion, he was ‘little if at all inferior to an ordinary worker of full capacity’ on the hand press and ‘His speed at cutting out on an unguarded fly machine was noticeable.’ His employer agreed to a raise from 18 to 24 shillings a week, just below what a carter could earn.

Employer calculations, Delap emphasises, fluctuated with the state of the labour market. When workers were in short supply, those with learning disabilities became more attractive. When demand for labour fell these workers might be the first to lose their jobs.

Were employers just exploiting vulnerable workers?

Delap found clear evidence of some workers being exploited, being stuck on the same very low wage and the same monotonous task for years.

“We shouldn’t feel nostalgic, this wasn’t a ‘golden age’ of disability-friendly employment,” Delap says. And yet, the archive reveals a strong reciprocal sense of real work being done and wages being paid in exchange. “Many of these people would have considered themselves valued workers and not charity cases. Some were able to negotiate better conditions and many resisted being told to do boring, repetitive work.”

Delap repeatedly encountered families policing the treatment of their relative. In 1922, the owner of a laundry in Lincolnshire considered sacking a 25-year-old ‘mentally deficient’ woman who starched collars because ‘trade is so bad’ but kept her on ‘at request of her parents’. “Workers who had families looking out for them were more able to ask for wage rises, refuse to do certain jobs and limit exploitation,” Delap says. “I found lots of evidence of love and you don't often see that in archives of intellectual disability.”

Parents or siblings sometimes worked on the same premises which, Delap argues, strengthened the bonds of moral obligation that existed between employers and families. In 1918, for instance, a 16-year-old who attached the bottoms of tin cans in Glamorgan was hired ‘for the sake of her sisters who are employed by the firm and are satisfactory workers’.

Lessons for today

Delap sees concerning similarities between the 1920s and the 2020s in terms of how British institutions manage, care for and educate people with learning disabilities.

Historically, Delap argues, institutions were just stop-gaps, places where people could be kept without onward pathways. People were often not trained at all or trained to do work that didn't really exist like basket-weaving. “This remains a problem today,” Delap says. “We have a fast-changing labour market and our special schools and other institutions aren’t equipping people well enough for viable paid opportunities.”

Delap argues that evidence of people with learning disabilities successfully working in many different roles and environments in the past undermines today’s focus on a very narrow range of job types and sectors. She highlights the fact that many workers with learning disabilities used to be involved in the service sector, including public facing roles, and not just working in factories. “They were doing roles which brought them into contact with the general public and being a service sector economy today, we have lots of those jobs.”

Delap also believes that structural factors continue to prevent people from accessing jobs. “Credentialism has made it very difficult for people don’t have qualifications to get jobs which they might actually be very good at,” she says. “We need to think much harder about how we make the system work for people with a range of abilities. I also think the rise of IT is a factor, we haven’t been training people with learning disabilities well enough in computer skills so it has become an obstacle.”

Delap believes that Britain’s ageing population and struggle to fill unskilled jobs means there is a growing economic as well as a moral case for employing more people with learning disabilities.

She points out that many people with intellectual disabilities used to work in agriculture, a sector now facing chronic labour shortages. Delap acknowledges that exploitation remains a problem in agriculture, so safeguarding would be paramount, as it would be in every sector.

“I think employers are recognising that they need active inclusion strategies to fill vacancies and that they need to cultivate loyalty,” Delap says. “Work remains a place where we find meaning in our lives and where we make social connections and that's why so many people with disabilities really want to work and why it deprives them of so much when they are excluded. We need to have more bold ambition and stop being content with really marginal forms of inclusion.”

Reference

L Delap, ‘Slow Workers: Labelling and Labouring in Britain, c. 1909–1955’, Social History of Medicine (2023). DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkad043

Employment levels for people with learning disabilities in the UK are 5 to 10 times lower than they were a hundred years ago. And the experiences of workers from the 1910s–50s offer inspiration as well as lessons about safeguarding.

We need to have more bold ambition and stop being content with really marginal forms of inclusion

Lucy Delap

Andrew Tanglao via Unsplash

A barista pouring milk into a coffee

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Claims AI can boost workplace diversity are ‘spurious and dangerous’, researchers argue

fpjl2 — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:18:21 +0000

Recent years have seen the emergence of AI tools marketed as an answer to lack of diversity in the workforce, from use of chatbots and CV scrapers to line up prospective candidates, through to analysis software for video interviews.

Those behind the technology claim it cancels out human biases against gender and ethnicity during recruitment, instead using algorithms that read vocabulary, speech patterns and even facial micro-expressions to assess huge pools of job applicants for the right personality type and 'culture fit'.

However, in a new report published in Philosophy and Technology, researchers from Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies argue these claims make some uses of AI in hiring little better than an 'automated pseudoscience' reminiscent of physiognomy or phrenology: the discredited beliefs that personality can be deduced from facial features or skull shape.

They say it is a dangerous example of 'technosolutionism': turning to technology to provide quick fixes for deep-rooted discrimination issues that require investment and changes to company culture.

In fact, the researchers have worked with a team of Cambridge computer science undergraduates to debunk these new hiring techniques by building an AI tool modelled on the technology, available online.

̽��ֱ��‘Personality Machine’ demonstrates how arbitrary changes in facial expression, clothing, lighting and background can give radically different personality readings – and so could make the difference between rejection and progression for a generation of job seekers vying for graduate positions.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge team say that use of AI to narrow candidate pools may ultimately increase uniformity rather than diversity in the workforce, as the technology is calibrated to search for the employer’s fantasy 'ideal candidate'.

This could see those with the right training and background "win over the algorithms" by replicating behaviours the AI is programmed to identify, and taking those attitudes into the workplace, say the researchers.

Additionally, as algorithms are honed using past data, they argue that candidates considered the best fit are likely to end up those that most closely resembling the current workforce.

“We are concerned that some vendors are wrapping ‘snake oil’ products in a shiny package and selling them to unsuspecting customers,” said co-author Dr Eleanor Drage.

“By claiming that racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination can be stripped away from the hiring process using artificial intelligence, these companies reduce race and gender down to insignificant data points, rather than systems of power that shape how we move through the world.”

̽��ֱ��researchers point out that these AI recruitment tools are often proprietary – or 'black box' – so how they work is a mystery.

“While companies may not be acting in bad faith, there is little accountability for how these products are built or tested,” said Drage. “As such, this technology, and the way it is marketed, could end up as dangerous sources of misinformation about how recruitment can be ‘de-biased’ and made fairer.”

Despite some pushback – the EU’s proposed AI Act classifies AI-powered hiring software as 'high risk', for example – researchers say that tools made by companies such as Retorio and myInterview are deployed with little regulation, and point to surveys suggesting use of AI in hiring is snowballing.

A 2020 study of 500 organisations across various industries in five countries found 24% of businesses have implemented AI for recruitment purposes and 56% of hiring managers planned to adopt it in the next year.

Another poll of 334 leaders in human resources, conducted in April 2020, as the pandemic took hold, found that 86% of organisations were incorporating new virtual technology into hiring practices.

“This trend was in already in place as the pandemic began, and the accelerated shift to online working caused by COVID-19 is likely to see greater deployment of AI tools by HR departments in future,” said co-author Dr Kerry Mackereth, who presents the Good Robot podcast with Drage, in which the duo explore the ethics of technology.

COVID-19 is not the only factor, according to HR operatives the researchers have interviewed. “Volume recruitment is increasingly untenable for human resources teams that are desperate for software to cut costs as well as numbers of applicants needing personal attention,” said Mackereth.

Drage and Mackereth say many companies now use AI to analyse videos of candidates, interpreting personality by assessing regions of a face – similar to lie-detection AI – and scoring for the 'big five' personality tropes: extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

̽��ֱ��undergraduates behind the ‘Personality Machine’, which uses a similar technique to expose its flaws, say that while their tool may not help users beat the algorithm, it will give job seekers a flavour of the kinds of AI scrutiny they might be under – perhaps even without their knowledge.

“All too often, the hiring process is oblique and confusing,” said Euan Ong, one of the student developers. “We want to give people a visceral demonstration of the sorts of judgements that are now being made about them automatically".

“These tools are trained to predict personality based on common patterns in images of people they’ve previously seen, and often end up finding spurious correlations between personality and apparently unrelated properties of the image, like brightness. We made a toy version of the sorts of models we believe are used in practice, in order to experiment with it ourselves,” Ong said.

Research highlights growing market in AI-powered recruitment tools that claim to bypass human bias to remove discrimination from hiring.

While companies may not be acting in bad faith, there is little accountability for how these products are built or tested

Eleanor Drage

Co-author Dr Eleanor Drage testing the 'personality machine' built by Cambridge undergraduates.

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‘Generation lockdown’ needs targeted help-to-work policies – global report

fpjl2 — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 09:54:57 +0000

Experts argue that many countries simply “repackaged” existing – and often already failing – policies without the necessary funding or retooling to benefit under 24-year-olds: the global demographic hit hardest by the economic consequences of COVID-19.

In the report commissioned by the UN’s International Labour Organization, the Cambridge team calls on countries to go beyond employment policies that “yo-yo” with each virus surge, and implement longer-term interventions aimed squarely at the young.

̽��ֱ��report suggests that, since the pandemic began, more than one in six young people globally were made redundant, with severe impacts on their mental health and wellbeing.

It is estimated that over 40% of all young people with a job pre-pandemic – some 178 million young workers – worked in the most affected sectors: tourism, services and retail. Tourism alone saw financial losses eleven times greater than the 2008 financial crash.

Global youth employment fell by more than double the rate of older adults in 2020 (8.7% compared to 3.7%), with loss of work particularly concentrated among young women in middle-income countries. Global female employment rates fell by 5% over the last year, compared to 3.9% for men.

In the 132 countries that adopted 580 fiscal and economic measures to support businesses during the Covid crisis, only 12% aimed to improve women’s economic security by ensuring that female-dominated sectors received financial support – mainly in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa.

In some lower-income countries, there are reports of more young women turning to sex work as a result, contributing to rising HIV cases as well as unintended pregnancies.

Even among high-income nations, the impact on young people’s livelihoods has varied dramatically. For example, between February and April 2020 – as the virus took hold – there was an 11.7 percentage point reduction in labour participation among Canada’s young people, a 7.5 point drop in the US, but just a 1.9 point drop in South Korea.

Many of those lucky enough to hold onto work saw their incomes fall substantially. By May last year, young people around the world still in work had almost a quarter of their hours cut on average (23%).

“Young people face distinct challenges which disadvantage them compared to older adults when it comes to finding work post-pandemic,” said report co-author Dr Adam Coutts, from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology.

“These include less work experience and financial capital, weaker social networks, and higher levels of in-work poverty. They are also much more likely to have to make ends meet via informal cash-in-hand work.

“Recent school leavers are often ineligible for unemployment benefits or furlough schemes. This left many young people falling through the cracks of policy interventions,” said Coutts.

Co-author Dr Garima Sahai from Cambridge's Department of Geography said: "Young women have been especially hit by the pandemic who have experienced higher job losses, increased unpaid care work, the shadow pandemic of gender-based violence to name only a few effects.”

Researchers argue that “generation lockdown” could face protracted periods of unemployment, making it hard to re-enter the labour market, and get overtaken by “younger and better qualified cohorts”.

“Young people have been forced to remain at home, stuck with their parents, cut off from friends and partners,” said ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge co-author Dr Anna Barford. “Anxiety, stress and depression skyrocketed among young people around the world.”

“For those without ready access to internet connections or laptops, finishing school or hunting for work has been almost impossible at times,” she said.

“Repeated outbreaks in areas from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America will deplete household savings, shrink opportunities and diminish the aspirations of generation lockdown.”

̽��ֱ��report highlights that fact that young people migrate to find work and their place in the world. ̽��ֱ��pandemic shut down long-established migratory patterns: from young Guatemalans heading north to Mexico, to young Zimbabweans moving to South Africa. Young immigrants were also much more likely to lose work as average incomes fell.

Most national governments have offered economy-wide fiscal stimulus as well as labour market interventions, from reduced working weeks to temporary furlough schemes and increased social protection.

Some governments offered lifelines directly to sectors that prop up the youth labour market, such as India’s emergency loan support, which focused on the wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, rental and business services (with some 100 million young people in the Asia and Pacific region estimated to be employed in these sectors).

However, the researchers say that only a few nations deployed policy responses tailored to the specific needs of young people affected by the economic fallout of COVID-19.

These included South Korea’s one-off cash transfers to young jobseekers and government-backed paid apprenticeships in Malaysia, while the EU reinforced its “Youth guarantee” scheme: with member states aiming to provide everyone under the age of 30 with education, traineeship or a job within four months of becoming unemployed.

̽��ֱ��researchers argue that, without “youth-sensitive” employment policies, intergenerational inequalities will be further exacerbated during the pandemic recovery period.

They call for more youth-targeted ALMPs – Active Labour Market Policies – that provide support to boost employability, from vocational training to one-on-one jobseeker counselling, alongside mental health and wellbeing assistance for young people.

One example highlighted by the report's authors is the Indonesian ‘pre-employment card’, the Kartu Pre-Kerja, with $1.3bn allocated to fund skills training for two million young workers. By contrast, Mexico reduced its ALMPs spending to move funding to other parts of the pandemic response.

“Holistic policy responses require health and non-health government departments and ministries to work together more effectively,” said Coutts. “ ̽��ֱ��pandemic forced them to work together. These new networks and cross-departmental links need to be maintained.”

“Coordination should extend outside government to NGOs, trade unions, employer organisations, policy makers and young people themselves, in order to design better quality and more effective post-pandemic support for young people who have faced 18 months of social and economic chaos,” he added.

Nations the world over are guilty of “policy inertia” when it comes to supporting young people who lost work or will struggle to enter the labour market as a result of the pandemic, according to new ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge research.

Repeated outbreaks... will deplete household savings, shrink opportunities and diminish the aspirations of generation lockdown

Anna Barford

International Labour Organization

A young casual worker in Zimbabwe during the pandemic

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One in twenty workers are in ‘useless’ jobs – far fewer than previously thought

cjb250 — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 09:31:10 +0000

Even so, writing in Work, Employment and Society, the academics applaud its proponent, American anthropologist David Graeber, who died in September 2020, for highlighting the link between a sense of purpose in one’s job and psychological wellbeing.

Graeber initially put forward the concept of ‘bullshit jobs’ – jobs that even those who do them view as worthless – in his 2013 essay ̽��ֱ��Democracy Project. He further expanded this theory in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, looking at possible reasons for the existence of such jobs.

Jobs that Graeber described as bullshit (BS) jobs range from doormen and receptionists to lobbyists and public relations specialists through to those in the legal profession, particularly corporate lawyers and legal consultants.

Dr Magdalena Soffia from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, one of the authors of the article, said: “There’s something appealing about the bullshit jobs theory. ̽��ֱ��fact that many people have worked in such jobs at some point may explain why Graeber’s work resonates with so many people who can relate to the accounts he gives. But his theory is not based on any reliable empirical data, even though he puts forward several propositions, all of which are testable.”

To test Graeber’s propositions, the researchers turned to the 2005–2015 European Working Conditions Surveys (EWCS), examining reasons that led to respondents answering ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ to the statement: ‘I have the feeling of doing useful work’. ̽��ֱ��surveys – taken in 2005, 2010 and 2015 – gather measures on the usefulness of the job, workers’ wellbeing and objective data on the quality of work. ̽��ֱ��number of respondents grew from over 21,000 in 2005 to almost 30,000 in 2015.

According to Graeber, somewhere between 20% and 50% of the workforce – possibly as many as 60% - are employed in BS jobs. Yet the EWCS found that just 4.8% of EU workers said they did not feel they were doing useful work. ̽��ֱ��figure was slightly higher in the UK and Ireland, but still only 5.6% of workers.

Graeber also claimed that the number of BS jobs has been ‘increasing rapidly in recent years’, despite presenting no empirical evidence. Again the researchers found no evidence to support this conjecture – in fact, the percentage of people in BS jobs fell from 7.8% in 2005 to just 4.8% in 2015 – exactly the opposite of Graeber’s prediction.

His next hypothesis was that BS jobs are concentrated in particular professions, such as finance, law, administration and marketing, and largely absent in others, such as those linked to public services and manual labour. “Many service workers hate their jobs; but even those who do are aware that what they do does make some sort of meaningful difference in the world . . . [Whereas] we can only assume that any office worker who one might suspect secretly believes themselves to have a bullshit job does, indeed, believe this,” he wrote.

When the researchers ranked the occupations by the proportion of people who rated their job as rarely or never useful, they found no evidence for the existence of occupations in which the majority of workers feel their work is not useful.

̽��ֱ��authors found that workers in some occupations, such as teachers and nurses, generally see themselves as doing useful jobs, while sales workers are above average in the proportion rating their job as not useful (7.7%). Even so, most of the results contradict Graeber’s assertion. For example, legal professionals and administration professionals are all low on this ranking, and jobs that Graeber rates as being examples of essential non-BS jobs, such as refuse collectors (9.7%) and cleaners and helpers (8.1%), are high on this scale.

Not everything that Graeber suggested was wrong, however. He argued, for example, that BS jobs are a form of ‘spiritual violence’ that lead to anxiety, depression and misery among workers. ̽��ֱ��team found strong evidence between the perception of one’s job as useless and an individual’s psychological wellbeing, albeit a correlation rather than necessarily a causal link. In the UK in 2015, workers who felt their job was not useful scored significantly lower on the World Health Organisation Well-Being Index than those who felt they were doing useful work (a mean average of 49.3 compared with 64.5). There was a similar gap across other EU nations.

Dr Alex Wood from the ̽��ֱ�� of Birmingham said: “When we looked at readily-available data from a large cohort of people across Europe, it quickly became apparent to us that very few of the key propositions in Graeber’s theory can be sustained – and this is the case in every country we looked at, to varying degrees. But one of his most important propositions – that BS jobs are a form of ‘spiritual violence’ – does seem to be supported by the data.”

Given that, in absolute terms, a substantial number of people do not view their jobs as useful, what then leads to this feeling? ̽��ֱ��team found that those individuals who felt respected and encouraged by management were less likely to report their work as useless. Conversely, when employees experience management that is disrespectful, inefficient or poor at giving feedback, they were less likely to perceive their work as useful.

Similarly, individuals who saw their job as useful tended to be able to use their own ideas at work – an important element for feeling that your job provides you with the ability to make the most of your skills – was correlated with a perception of usefulness. There was a clear relationship between the extent to which people felt that they had enough time to do their job well and their rating of the usefulness of their job, suggesting that one source of feeling a job to be useless is the pace at which one is working, affecting the ability to realise one’s potential and capabilities. Other factors correlated with feeling that a job was worthwhile included support by managers and colleagues and the ability to influence important decisions and the direction of an organization.

Professor Brendan Burchell from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge said: “Although the data doesn’t always support David Graeber’s claims, his insightful and imaginative work played an important role in raising awareness of the harms of useless jobs. He may have been way off the mark with regards how common BS jobs are, but he was right to link people’s attitudes towards their jobs to their psychological wellbeing, and this is something that employers – and society as a whole – should take seriously.

“Most importantly, employees need to be respected and valued if they in turn are to value – and benefit psychologically as well as financially from – their jobs.”

Reference
Soffia, M, Wood, AJ and Burchell, B. Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs. WES; 3 June 2021; DOI: 10.1177/09500170211015067

̽��ֱ��so-called ‘bullshit jobs theory’ – which argues that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value – contains several major flaws, argue researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham.

Although the data doesn’t always support David Graeber’s claims, his insightful and imaginative work played an important role in raising awareness of the harms of useless jobs

Brendan Burchell

Bermix Studio

Man working at a laptop

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Furlough ‘stemmed the tide’ of poor mental health during UK lockdown, study suggests

fpjl2 — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 06:27:19 +0000

Furloughing workers, as well as reducing worker hours, has helped to stem the tide of mental health problems expected to result from the coronavirus crisis, according to a team of sociologists led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

A new study suggests that UK workers who were furloughed or moved from full- to part-time hours during April and May had around the same risk for poor mental health as those who kept working full-time.

However, people who lost all paid work were twice as likely to fall into an “at risk” category for poor mental health, compared to those furloughed or still working any number of hours.

In fact, data from May suggests that well over half of those who lost all work during the Covid-19 crisis are at risk of mental health problems.

Researchers led by the Cambridge-based Employment Dosage Project say the UK government must encourage employers to “cut hours not people” as furlough schemes wrap up, or face significantly worse levels of mental health across the population as unemployment soars.

They argue that the UK should emulate ‘short-time working’ schemes used by many European nations. These schemes reduce and share out working hours to keep far more people in some kind of employment during a crisis.

“Holding on to some paid work is vital to wellbeing during the pandemic,” said Prof Brendan Burchell from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology. “We can see that both short working hours and furlough job retention schemes have helped protect against the deterioration of mental health.”

“Labour market interventions such as short-time working are more affordable than furloughing, and much less likely to cause lasting damage to the UK’s mental health than the all-or-nothing job shedding currently taking place,” Burchell said.

“As well as the individual misery caused, the costs of poor mental health to the UK’s productivity and health service are vast, and cannot be afforded at this critical time. We urge the Chancellor to tell employers to cut hours not people.”

̽��ֱ��latest research involved academics from the universities of Cambridge, Salford, Leeds and Manchester, and is now online as a working paper from Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research.

̽��ֱ��team analysed data from the Understanding Society COVID-19 Study, looking at the relation between changes in employment status and work hours, furlough scheme involvement, and the likelihood of mental health problems as measured by a 12-item questionnaire.

̽��ֱ��study questions covered symptoms of depression and anxiety, such as sleeping problems, and used a point-based scale that enabled researchers to create a “score” for the risk of suffering with mental health problems. A sample of 7,149 people from across the UK featured in the research.

̽��ֱ��researchers used statistical models to take into account factors such as household income, allowing them to see just the effects of employment and work on mental health during lockdown, regardless of wealth or status.

Using the latest data covering May 2020, the team found that 28% of those who remained in fulltime employment returned scores suggesting they might be at risk of poor mental health. Equally, 27% of those on furlough returned “at risk” scores, and 30% of those whose hours had been reduced from full to part time.

But for those who lost their jobs during the coronavirus crisis some 58% returned scores suggesting they were in the “at risk” category for mental health problems. ̽��ֱ��May data has now been added to the working paper along with an initial analysis of data from April, which showed a similar effect.

“ ̽��ֱ��furlough schemes are largely aimed at the financial fallout of the pandemic, but they also appear to have stemmed the tide of mental health problems many experts are anticipating,” said Burchell.

Loss of earnings only explains a small part of the large mental health deficit associated with unemployment, say the researchers. They argue that “incidental” aspects of employment – social connection, structure, shared goals, and so on – are just as important for wellbeing.

Last year, the Employment Dosage Project published a study showing that just one day of paid work a week is all people need to get a major boost to their mental health (with little psychological benefit to working further hours).

“ ̽��ֱ��lesson for government strategy is clear,” added Burchell. “Keep everyone in some paid work where possible, with population health as the priority. Even one day a week will keep more of us psychologically healthier in these volatile times.”

Researchers say the UK government should ask employers to share out reduced hours rather than lose workers, in order to mitigate a looming mental health crisis as furlough is rolled back.

We urge the Chancellor to tell employers to cut hours not people

Brendan Burchell

Number 10

UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak at a Covid-19 press conference. Sunak is credited with instigating the UK's 'furlough' job retention scheme.

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Opinion: Employers should cut hours not people during the pandemic

fpjl2 — Wed, 13 May 2020 08:25:43 +0000

Millions of UK lives have been changed significantly in the last few weeks, even those who have not been infected by the virus. Three of the most widespread changes for many working age adults have been:

1. ̽��ֱ��loss of a job or a large reduction in working hours
2. A shift in the place of work from the employer’s premises to homeworking
3. Living in social isolation alone or with other members of one’s household (adults and children) who are also spending more time at home.

We know from past research that any one of these can have negative mental health consequences, but the combined effects of these changes is unprecedented and unexplored. There are already media reports of the strain that this is putting on individuals and families. It is likely that many of these problems will be exacerbated over the coming months.

Deteriorating levels of mental health in the population will not just cause individual misery - for instance through increased symptoms of anxiety and depression - but the research to date on unemployment suggests that this will likely lead to knock on effects on the family, particularly a spouse. It may also lead to increased breaches of social distancing rules or civil unrest.

̽��ֱ��Chancellor’s plans to save jobs through the furlough scheme are largely aimed at the financial fallout of the pandemic: the desire to avoid widespread hunger, destitution and financial insecurity, while also recognising the importance to society’s overall wellbeing of the ability for businesses to recover quickly.

Why employment matters beyond income

As social scientists have found repeatedly, in different countries and different demographic groups, the loss of the wage only explains a small fraction of the very large mental health deficit associated with unemployment and economic inactivity.

We now know that the ‘incidental’ aspects of having a job – e.g. time structure, social contact, shared goals, sense of achievement, enforced activity – are hugely important for our wellbeing. In our new short video, Lil Woods, a freelance arts charity worker, discusses how the lockdown has left her missing a sense of purpose: “When my work disappeared, I felt like part of my identity, my place in the world, went with it.”

It has proven almost impossible to find substitutes for jobs that fulfil the same functions: leisure activities, voluntary work or workfare just don’t provide us with the same levels of wellbeing through feeling valued. While some post-work utopians dream of a world where work is largely eliminated, there is little evidence that it could exist as a reality. In fact, recent ONS data shows work has become a coping mechanism in this crisis.

So, it seems, we have an impossible situation – for most people good mental health requires a job, but there simply aren’t enough jobs in the right sectors or with the right skill sets to go around, and this situation is likely to last for many more months of the current pandemic.

A possible solution: short-time working

Fortunately there’s a solution to this paradox, and one that’s being taken seriously in other countries: short-time working. ̽��ֱ��hastily-introduced measures to protect jobs in the UK encourage employers to retain some or all staff where:

• there is essential work to be done, for example health and emergency workers
• the work can be done at home, as with many office workers
• the work can be done while maintaining safe distancing, such as some agricultural jobs.

Other employees and self-employed workers will be stopped from working, and either be paid to stay at home or lose their wage too. How does it work? Other European countries, such as Germany and Austria, have traditionally used short-time work programmes to deal with economic crises. Employers can reduce the hours of employees, typically with some compensation from public funds to mitigate some of the loss of hours. This has several benefits over the all-or-nothing job shedding being used in the UK.

• Employees retain their attachment to an employer and have more certainty over their future.
• It is easier for employers to vary their volume and type of labour power as the pandemic peaks and then we start an exit strategy.
• Employees can be redeployed depending on their skills, adaptability of the job to homeworking or safe-distancing, or the pre-existing health conditions of the employee.

Recent research by economists from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Zurich suggest that, by early April 2020, 15% of people in the UK had lost their jobs due to the coronavirus outbreak compared to only 5% in Germany.

Turning back to the psychological functions of paid work, just how much employment is needed each week to preserve the mental health of employees, and at what point does their wellbeing drop to be closer to those who are unemployed?

Could it work in the UK?

̽��ֱ��surprising finding from our research using UK and EU datasets is that increasing individuals’ hours of work from zero to just eight hours a week provides a large boost to their mental health, and there is little or no further psychological benefit as weekly hours are increased from eight to 40. ̽��ֱ��lesson for government strategy is clear: where possible (and with population health being the priority) keep everyone in paid work; even one day a week will keep more of us sane in these volatile times.

̽��ֱ��Employment Dosage research team is led by Dr Brendan Burchell from the Department of Sociology, with co-investigators Dr Daiga Kamerade, Dr Adam Coutts, Dr Ursula Balderson and Dr Senhu Wang.

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If the UK emulated short-time working programmes in countries like Germany it would help mitigate the mental health as well as economic crises caused by the coronavirus, argue researchers from the Employment Dosage project.

When my work disappeared, I felt like part of my identity, my place in the world, went with it

Lil Woods

‘Cut hours not people’: some paid work is vital for wellbeing during the pandemic

Tim Dennell

Sheffield's Women of Steel statue during the pandemic

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Younger workers hit harder by coronavirus economic shock in UK and US

fpjl2 — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 09:53:09 +0000

Workers under the age of thirty, as well as those on lower incomes, on both sides of the Atlantic are already bearing the brunt of the economic shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, latest research finds.

Data collected by economists towards the end of March shows younger workers in the UK and US were more likely to have either recently lost their job or seen a drop in hours and earnings compared to workers in middle age.

Researchers from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Zurich also found that those under 30 and still in employment believed they were much more likely to lose their job by August, compared to those aged 40-55.

̽��ֱ��research suggests that in the UK, 8% of all workers employed in February had already lost their jobs. A third of all those still in work expected to lose their jobs within the next four months.

In the US, 11% of all workers had already lost their jobs due to COVID-19, and 40% of all those still working expected job loss by August.

Workers on lower incomes – those earning below 20,000 pounds or dollars a year – across all age groups in both countries were more likely to have lost their job in the preceding four weeks than workers earning over £40k in the UK or $50k in the States.

Those still employed on lower incomes in the UK and US could conduct a much smaller percentage of their normal working tasks from the safety of home.

Data was collected from “a large geographically representative sample” in each country say researchers. A total of 3,974 people in the UK were surveyed on March 25, two days into the government-imposed lockdown. ̽��ֱ��US data came from 4,003 people on March 24.

“Our findings suggest that the immediate impact of the coronavirus downturn on workers has been large and unequal, with younger workers and those at the bottom of the income distribution hit hardest,” said Dr Christopher Rauh from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics, who led the research.

“In the short term, there is a need to provide quick assistance to help those hit hardest to cover their bills in the coming weeks. Around half of all workers on both sides of the Atlantic expect to have difficulty paying their usual bills,” Rauh said.

“In the long term, the economic shock caused by the pandemic is highly likely to increase inequality between young and old, between higher and lower earners, and between those on secure and insecure contracts.”

̽��ֱ��survey found that workers on UK statutory sick pay, and those without paid sick leave in the US, were more likely to say they would to go into work with a cold or light fever. Researchers say that “paid sick leave policies should be rethought not only in light of workers’ welfare but public health as a whole”.

In both countries, far more self-employed people earned less than usual the week prior to the survey compared with those on permanent contracts.

̽��ֱ��research was done before the UK Chancellor announced new measures for the self-employed, beginning in June. However, the researchers caution that it “might be too late to prevent severe economic hardship”.

Added Rauh: “Preventing this shock from scarring the employment progression of the younger generation and the less-economically advantaged is vital if we are to avoid permanent damage to economies and individual welfare.”

̽��ֱ��findings have just been published as two working papers through the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Institute for New Economic Thinking: Working paper, UK; Working paper, US.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge-INET Institute has now launched a dedicated website for all their coronavirus-related research: http://covid.econ.cam.ac.uk.

Key UK findings:

On average across all UK workers, people expect to earn 35% less in the next four months compared to usual.
69% of workers under 30 reported working fewer hours the previous week compared to usual and 58% reported earning less, compared to 49% and 36% of workers aged 40-55 respectively.
10% of workers under 30 are now unemployed because of COVID-19, compared to 6% of workers aged 40-55.
On average, those under 30 and still employed believe they have a 39% chance of job loss by August, compared to 27% for 40-55 year olds.
Workers earning under £20,000 can do 30% of the tasks in their main job from home compared to 55% for those earning more than £40,000.
12% of low-income workers earnings are now unemployed because of COVID-19 compared to 5% of higher earners.
Workers earning less than £20,000 expect to earn just 58% of their usual income between now and August. Those earning more than £40,000 expect to make 69% of their usual income on average.
43% of workers with just statutory sick pay said they usually go to work with a cold or light fever, compared to 31% of workers with additional paid sick leave.

Key US findings:

On average across all US workers, people expect to earn 39% less in the next four months compared to usual.
72% of workers under 30 reported working fewer hours the previous week compared to usual and 61% reported earning less, compared to 62% and 55% of workers aged 40-55 respectively.
On average, those under 30 and still employed believe they have a 43% chance of job loss by August, compared to 40% for 40-55 year olds.
Workers earning under $20,000 can do 42% of the tasks in their main job from home compared to 57% for those earning more than $50,000.
16% of low-income workers earnings are now unemployed because of COVID-19 compared to 7% of higher earners.
Workers earning less than $20,000 expect to earn just 48% of their usual income between now and August. Those earning more than $50,000 expect to make 69% of their usual income on average.
26% of workers without paid sick leave report they would go to work with a cold or light fever, compared to 24% of those with paid sick leave.

Listen to Dr Chris Rauh and Dr Meredith Crowley from the Faculty of Economics discuss the economic implications of COVID-19 with Dr Rob Doubleday from the ̽��ֱ��'s Centre for Science and Policy.

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Those on low incomes are also more likely to have lost jobs or pay, and less able to complete work tasks from home. Researchers warn the COVID-19 downturn is likely to “increase inequality between young and old”.

̽��ֱ��immediate impact of the coronavirus downturn on workers has been large and unequal

Christopher Rauh

Ken Fager

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One day of paid work a week is all we need to get mental health benefits of employment

fpjl2 — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 09:23:35 +0000

Latest research finds up to eight hours of paid work a week significantly boosts mental health and life satisfaction. However, researchers found little evidence that any more hours – including a full five-day week – provide further increases in wellbeing.