Summary

There is a growing ‘two-tier’ workforce, with workers in frontline roles such as medical staff, transport workers, nurses, cleaners, retail assistants and construction workers, at a clear disadvantage compared to better paid office-based and managerial workers. 

• Making up just under a third of the UK workforce, 10.5 million employees, frontline workers too often miss out on the control, dignity, and benefits for health and work-life balance offered by predictable and flexible work. 
• The government’s ‘Make Work Pay’ agenda and Employment Rights Bill aim to tilt the balance of power in the workplace more towards employees. Our research and consultation with key frontline sector business leaders and workers highlights the risks in expecting that the new legislation alone will achieve the changes in the workplace needed to allow millions of workers to benefit.
• Timewise has established a coalition of employers, sector bodies and union representatives across the retail, health and social care, construction and transport and logistics sectors. These industry leaders are calling for government to go beyond the legislative proposals in the Employment Rights Bill and work in partnership with industry to create the right conditions for employers to make life-changing improvements to work-life balance for millions of workers.
• These improvements are urgently needed to give workers in the ‘everyday economy’ greater control and predictability at work and to achieve the government’s wider goals on workforce participation, reducing economic inactivity and achieving inclusive economic growth

Recommendations

Timewise calls on the government to:

• Ensure effective implementation of the Employment Rights Bill by establishing new industrial forums which bring together employers, sector bodies and unions, to resolve sector-specific challenges. 
• Model the forums on Scottish Industry Leadership groups (with appropriate lessons learned), based on a social partnership model and aimed at increasing engagement with labour market and skills policies in England.
• The transport & logistics sector should be considered as a priority for this approach, based on low levels of existing coordination in the sector, clear sector-specific barriers and employer demand for collaboration identified by Timewise. 
• This should be followed by the construction sector which is similarly lacking sector-wide initiatives to improve job quality. These forums could be established informally during the consultation period for the Employment Rights Bill and formalised afterwards, taking into account lessons learnt.
• In the absence of Department for Business and Trade funding, investment could come from ringfencing just 1.5 per cent of the new skills and growth levy to create a £50m fund to strengthen sector bodies, or UK Research and Innovation (Innovate UK) could consider an investment fund for sector and trade bodies to support national tripartism and new ways of working.
• Responsibility for negotiating pay and non-wage terms and conditions sits with a social partnership body for health, social care, and teaching support staff. To ensure greater parity across the care workforce, this approach should be extended to all education and early years professionals, starting with a ‘fair pay agreement’ negotiated with social partners in the early years and childcare sector.

SPECIFICALLY, THE DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS AND TRADE (DBT) SHOULD:
• Support the development of industry-wide sector-specific guidance and best practice models across all low-paying industries and occupation groups (based on the Low Pay Commission definition) to accompany the legislation and code of practice. The department should develop this guidance in partnership with leading employers and sector bodies in each sector and experts in predictable and flexible work. 
• Draw on Timewise’s sector plans, accompanying this report, for each of the four industries we worked with: retail, construction, health & social care, transport & logistics, which can inform the development of guidance for these sectors.
• Give oversight for these reforms to a new Modern Working Lives Taskforce, replacing the existing Flexible Working Taskforce. The Taskforce, which should be chaired by a minister, should have responsibility for ensuring legislation is fit for the workplace. 
• Charge this new taskforce with ensuring that reforms for more flexible and predictable work can be successfully implemented in low-paying sectors, narrowing the widening gap in the two-tier workforce.
• The Modern Working Lives Taskforce should examine options to strengthen ‘flexibility by default’ through the code of practice accompanying the legislation, including, for example by: 
• Explore a legal duty on employers to consider which flexible working arrangements are available in a role and to publish these in job advertisements, with the new postholder having a day one right to take up the flexible working arrangements that have been advertised. 
• Strengthen consultation requirements, based on the process for Statutory Sick Pay processes. 
• Require internal reporting by employers on the types of flexible working and contracts they have to help inform employees and demonstrate what is possible. 
• Measure the success of workers’ rights legislation, by re-commissioning the Workplace Employment Relations Study 
(WERS):
• Make narrowing the gap between site- and shift-based workers and others when it comes to flexible and predictable work an explicit objective of the government’s Make Work Pay agenda and a key focus for a new WERS. 
• WERS provided valuable information on employee influence at work, access to flexible working, job satisfaction and individual and collective representation at work. 
The new independent review into the role of UK to promote healthy and inclusive workplaces, led by the former Chair of John Lewis, Sir Charlie Mayfield, should include the role of better work design in supporting employers in preventing ill health.

IN ADDITION, THE DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONS (DWP) SHOULD:
• End the 35-hour job search requirement for unemployed claimants. Alongside tailored action plans, this will help replace the current ‘work first’ model with a focus on securing the right job, allowing job coaches to more easily take into account personal health, caring and parental responsibilities when identifying work and training opportunities, thereby helping people to find jobs they are more likely to keep and thrive in.
• Commit to introducing training for job coaches to work with employers to broker more flexible and secure jobs, as part of its Back to Work agenda. 
• Train job coaches in supporting Universal Credit claimants to secure a job that allows more flexibility to manage a health condition, disability or caring responsibilities and provide training for over-50s.
• Introduce in-work progression champions to help workers identify opportunities for part-time or flexible work. 

After the two-year consultation period, the responsibilities of the Modern Working Lives Taskforce should transition to become part of an industrial strategy for good work in the everyday economy. The DBT Green Paper on the UK’s Modern Industrial strategy identifies the ‘foundational sectors’ as providing critical infrastructure for our ‘growth-driving’ sectors. Given their importance for the quality of life of millions of workers and their role in boosting productivity, job quality in the everyday economy should also be the focus of industrial strategy & innovation in the UK.