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SLASH WORKERS in a EUROPEAN CONTEXT Labour Identities

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SLASH WORKERS in a EUROPEAN CONTEXT Labour Identities WP3 - SLASH WORKERS IN A EUROPEAN CONTEXT Labour identities, working and living conditions, social protection and collective representation University of Cádiz – UCA Team May 2021 SWIRL– Slash Workers and Industrial ReLations Project funded by the DG Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion of the EC Agreement No. VP/2018/0004/0041 Pérez De Guzmán Sofía, Iglesias Onofrio Marcela Yasmin, Ulloa Unanue Ester, Del Moral Espìn Lucia, Del Carmen Ferrada, 2021, “Slash workers in a European Context. Labour identities, working and living conditions, social protection and collective representation”, Working Paper SWIRL PROJECT, https://www.swirlproject.eu/2021/05/wp3-slash-workers/ WP3 - Slash workers in a European Context Table of Contents Section 1 ................................................................................................................................... 5 1. Models of collective protection and representation of slash workers (edited by UCSC) ....................................................................................................................................... 5 1.1. The four models ...................................................................................................... 5 Type 1 – Trade union initiatives ........................................................................................... 7 Type 2 – Workers’ collective ............................................................................................. 10 Type 3 – New forms of matching ....................................................................................... 12 Type 4 – New forms of governance (cooperatives) ........................................................... 14 1.2. The local workshops ............................................................................................. 18 1.3. Annexes. Guidelines for the local workshop ........................................................ 30 Section 2 ................................................................................................................................. 33 2. Policy recommendations (by Acta) ............................................................................. 33 2.1. The main problems arising from the SWIRL project ........................................... 33 2.2. How industrial relations have dealt with these problems. .................................... 36 2.3. The current system of labour protection ............................................................... 38 2.4. What solutions for the future?............................................................................... 39 2.4.1. Working conditions ....................................................................................... 40 2.4.2. Social protection ............................................................................................ 42 2.4.3. Welfare enlargement...................................................................................... 43 2.4.4. Continuity of services .................................................................................... 44 1 1. Introduction Slash workers against the backdrop of current job trends For the SWIRL project, slash workers are defined as people who are engaged in multiple paid activities that require different skills and are likely to be developed in various sectors. Holding more than one job is a growing phenomenon in many European countries, which expansion has been linked to the decline of the "standard" employment relationship (Piasna et al. 2020). This decisive shift of the normative model of work, characterised by the fading away of many of the parameters that defined a "job" in the past (Huws, 2013), has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years. There is a considerable consensus among researchers to attribute this trend to the combined effect of a set of economic (economic globalisation, company policies such as increased flexibility in the use of labour, downsizing or outsourcing), political (deregulation and increasing flexibility of the labour market, changes in policies and values promoted by the European Social Model) and technological developments (extension of the use of advanced information and communication technologies), and in placing the turning point around the 1980s (Neff et al., 2005; Vallas and Christin, 2018; Taylor, 2018; Palier, 2018; Serrano and Jepsen, 2019; Eurofound, 2020a). There is also a remarkable consensus on the consequences of these processes on 21st-century labour markets: the “fissuring” of the workplace (Weil, 2014), the fragmentation of work, the spread of non-standard forms of employment, and the growing exposure of workers to labour market uncertainty (De Stefano, 2016; Vallas, 2019). The Great Recession further accentuated these effects (Taylor, 2018; Katz and Krueger, 2019). While "standard" employment (permanent, full-time, based on labour law) remains dominant, labour markets in the global north are increasingly characterised by a diversity of employment forms. Business practices ranging from firing and then rehiring employees as independent contractors or retaining "permatemps" (Neff et al. 2005) to the rising use of contingent and part- time work (Barley et al., 2017; Crouch, 2018; Mandl, 2020), and also phenomena such as the growth of underemployment (Palier, 2018) or the so-called "renaissance of self-employment" (Conen, 2020), have become a reality for an increasing portion of the workforce. Evidence from Eurofound (2020a) shows that most of these new forms of employment have grown over the last few years and are likely to continue their expansion in the future. This means that more and more workers are -and will be- falling into the cracks between the categories (active or not, employed or unemployed, salaried or self-employed, regular or irregular) that just a few years ago clearly defined the position of workers in the labour market (Huws et al. 2018). In this scenario, new essential challenges to traditional forms of collective representation and social protection systems have emerged (Bureau and Corsani, 2018; Doellgast, 2018; Jolly, 2018; Brodersen and Martínez, 2020). Instability and contingency have ceased to constitute unwanted effects; they have become central elements in the current stage of capitalism; they are "the nucleus on which the organisation of work and ideological adherence to the system are based" (Alonso y Fernández, 2009:250). This shift in the normative model of work has been accompanied by policies (promoted, among others, by European institutions) oriented towards the production of the 1 2 subjects and work identities that are more adjusted to the new game rules of the productive model and the labour market (Serrano et al., 2012). Our study of the profiles, labour identities, living and working conditions, and representation needs of slash workers must be situated against this backdrop. Slash workers can be conceptualised as one of the forms of non-standard employment since the decision to combine several jobs is interrelated with features such as the growth of part-time jobs, the spread of contingent work, increased underemployment (Bamberry and Campbell, 2012), the "renaissance" of self-employment (Conen, 2020) and the reshaping of work identities (Huws, 2013; Taylor and Luckman, 2018). Even though holding more than one job is not a new phenomenon -moonlighting has been an overall survival strategy for many workers in the past- all these trends place pluriactivity in a renewed context (Conen, 2020). In particular, there are two recent developments that, from our point of view, justify approaching the upsurge of multiple jobs holding from a differentiated analytical perspective. These developments are the rise of the gig economy and the spread of new values and expectations attached to work. Concerning the first of these developments, different studies have suggested that the growth of slash work can be linked to expanding the platform economy (Casilli et al., 2019; Brodersen and Martínez, 2020; Eurofound, 2020c; Piasna et al. 2020). Indeed, according to Taylor and Luckman (2018), most of the literature finds that a majority of platform workers use their earnings to supplement other sources of income. While it has been demonstrated that digital platforms increase casualisation and help undermine the standard employment relationship (Huws, 2013; Wood et al. 2019), it can also be argued that in a labour context such as the current one, they facilitate many workers to seek alternative work arrangements when traditional employment is not available. By acting as intermediaries for the supply and demand of fragmented work (Valenduc, 2019), offering a high degree of spatial and temporal flexibility (Wood et al., 2019), and applying relaxed personnel selection criteria (Vallas and Schor, 2020), platforms generate job opportunities that ease -and even encourage- workers to diversify and multiply their paid activities. Therefore, regardless of whether labour platforms are considered as the continuation of structural trends towards the casualisation of work that has long been underway (De Stefano, 2016; Crouch, 2018; Palier, 2018) or it is argued that they represent a distinctively new form of economic activity (Taylor and Luckman, 2018), the analysis of slash workers has to be contextualised in relation to the digitalisation of the economy. The second development that gives slash work a differentiated character with respect to other forms of moonlighting or multiple jobs holding is the emergence
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