Individuals in Flexible Work in Britain in the 1990s

In this chapter we examine the extent to which individuals were in non-standard forms of work in Britain in 1994. We are interested to ascertain how many men and women were in flexible jobs of various kinds. Some estimates of the extent of flexible work have already been made by researchers and by the Employment Department (now Department for Education and Employment) and there is a body of literature which we review below. On the whole, each study has used a different set of categories to define ‘flexible work’ and they have used different data sets for different years. One recent estimate by the Employment Department using the Labour Force Survey for 1993 estimated that 38 per cent of all people in employment (27 per cent of men and 52 per cent of women) were in the flexible workforce. This constituted 9696 thousand people: 3730 thousand men and 5966 thousand women (Watson, 1994). The definition on which these figures is based includes as flexible work, full-time temporary, part-time permanent, part-time temporary, full-time and part-time, self-employed, on a government scheme and unpaid family workers. Robinson (1994) suggests that flexible work constituted 40 per cent of the workforce.1 Earlier figures for the 1980s calculated the extent of flexible work as in the region of 30–35 per cent of the workforce.2 This study will adopt its own definition of non-standard jobs, as outlined below.