Work in the 21st century?

Disentangling fact from fiction

Predicting the future of work is now an industry in its own right. Hardly a day goes by without the appearance of another report forecasting rapidly changing employment trends and the end of work as we now know it.

However, many of these forecasts are highly speculative and often tend to go for the high-publicity angle with little evidence to back up their assertions. For example, many of these forecasts suggest that today’s normal employee job will disappear in the coming years because we are destined to become a nation of freelance portfolio workers.

Predictions of this kind are completely out of line with recent trends and official Government employment forecasts up to the end of this decade (see box below).

The rise of flexibility

Employment forecasts that ignore the fact that employee-based jobs will remain the bedrock of the labour market in the 21st Century consequently misinterpret how the rise of flexible working will develop in the future.

We already know that the rise of flexibility in working patterns in recent years has been fuelled by a demand from both workers and employers.

• employees want greater work-like balance and increasingly this is across-the-board rather than just limited to those needing to choose flexibility to accommodate caring responsibilities
• social research suggests that this trend will intensify in the coming years and that employee demand for work-life balance will expand rapidly
• in recent years employers have been under increasing pressure to implement flexible working patterns both to meet employee demand and in order to enhance competitiveness and productivity and to deliver high quality services and products to their customers and clients.
• forecasts of employment growth (e.g. the rapid increase in service sector jobs) means that there will be an increasing emphasis on delivering timely services to individuals in the future
• developments in manufacturing around “just in time” production techniques will increasingly become a fact of working life

Flexible working in the future?

There are a number of key conclusions that we can draw from current trends and the most reliable employment projections that we have to hand.

• the demand for flexible working patters by both workers and employers is set to gather pace in the coming years and will play a greater role in the employment relationship
• the predominant employment relationship of the future will be the same as now, between employers and employees,
• consequently, negotiating flexible working patterns will become a key collective bargaining issue for trade unions
• while part-time working will continue to grow, the relatively stable trends in full-time employment will demand even more innovative approaches to achieving flexibility in the workplace.