Why government needs to address the march of the robots

The robots are coming to take your job - or maybe not quite yet.

As the recent ScotGov/ STUC paper puts it, there are two schools of thought. Those who believe we stand on the cusp of widespread technological unemployment to those who believe the labour market will prove, as it has in the past, much more resilient. It may simply be my age, but I tend to fall into the latter category.

I can recall futurologists telling us that we would all have portfolio careers, yet in practice the amount of time we work for the same employer has actually increased. Yes, automation has resulted in fewer jobs in some sectors, but it has created new ones that we would never have thought of twenty years ago. 

I was pleased to read that my ageing instinct is supported by Danish academic robotic experts who argue that there is still a long way to go before robots will be able to match a number of fundamental human skills. They give five reasons why robots aren’t about to take over the world. These include the abilities of the human hand and manipulation that robots are nowhere to replicating. Humans also have tactile perception through sensors in our magnificent skin. Finally, robots haven't got the human interaction and reasoning skills of humans.

So, robots are a reality today in industry and they will appear in public spaces in more complex shapes. But in the next two decades, robots will not be human-like, even if they might look like humans. Instead they will remain sophisticated machines.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't plan for the future. At the start of my career as a trade union official, we were busy negotiating 'new technology agreements'. They addressed the direct workforce implications of computerisation, but didn't always tackle the workforce planning and wider economic and social policy implications of automation.

As I said in Monday's Herald feature on the ARI report: "Proper planning and strategy is needed now, not further down the line. We should be anticipating where we are likely to see job losses and putting measures in place to ensure that we have a just transition to new types of jobs.  Industry will not do this, it's very hard to get companies to plan that far in advance, so government needs to step up to the plate."

The ARI report revealed the UK is lagging behind other countries when it comes to preparing for the changes - with education and training the main areas of concern. It lists the UK as number 8 in the world in preparing for the expected rise in robots. Education and training in schools and the workplace is a key concern. The report found that UK primary schools have not focused enough on developing critical thinking and problem solving skills.

That brings me back to the ScotGov/STUC report. It gives us a very balanced view of the evidence, without coming down on one side or the other. However, they highlight that researchers on both sides of the future of jobs debate share concerns over the potential distributional consequences of technological change. The OECD finds that; “low qualified workers are likely to bear the brunt of the adjustment costs... the likely challenge for the future lies in coping with rising inequality". There are also significant regional differences. For example, the OECD report says 33% of jobs in Slovakia are at risk, compared to only 6% in Norway.

The report points to labour market trends in Scotland, few of which have been driven by technology. The Scottish Government points to their labour market strategy and the Fair Work Convention. As well as their support for new industries and the planned Just Transition Commission.

These are all worthwhile initiatives, although they are often stronger on process than delivery. If we are to seriously address the challenges of automation it requires a radical industrial strategy coupled with much stronger Fair Work measures. We need to be more like Norway than Slovakia, otherwise automation will have significant job consequences and create an even more unequal society.

Public service workers in the front line of the attack on wages

Tomorrow, UNISON’s local government members in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be going on strike, joining with other public sector workers in their effort to secure a decent pay rise. In Scotland, local government workers have voted for industrial action by two to one in a consultative ballot and will be considering the next stage of their own pay campaign later this month.

Matt Sykes, at the Touchstone blog sets out why public service workers are taking action. He argues that it’s a wider manifestation of the anger and frustration felt by public sector workers over pay and living standards. Industrial action is the inevitable consequence when you have a government that makes announcements over pay, rather than engage in a meaningful dialogue. The declaration that pay restraint will continue until 2018 is another example of this.

UNISON’s Heather Wakefield sets out the local government case at the Public Finance blog with a damning set of statistics on pay and the long-term impact on pensions. Again, there have been no real talks and the employers have refused to join the trade unions in independent arbitration.

The TUC has published figures that show how the UK government has frozen or limited pay increases to well below the cost of living. This has left local government and other public service workers on average £2,245 worse off in real terms since this government came into office.

Concern about the standard of living stretches into retirement. Research published by Aviva indicates that a fifth of people in Britain believe they will have to “work until they drop” because they cannot afford to retire. Money worries mean millions of over-40s are expecting to carry on working until they cannot physically continue. Others are concerned about paying their day-to-day bills without the regular income from employment coming in.

An important element of current pay claims is the Living Wage. The final report of the independent Living Wage Commission, chaired by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu says that the number of people on low pay in the UK can be slashed by over 1 million by 2020. The Commission warns that, if the government does not support the voluntary extension of coverage of the Living Wage, some working families will continue to rely on emergency measures, such as food banks and unsustainable debt, to get by. Currently 5.2 million people earn less than the Living Wage in the UK and the majority of people in poverty are now in working households.

This message is reinforced in the largest study of poverty ever conducted in the UK. The Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE) project details how, over the last 30 years, the percentage of households living below society’s minimum standard of living has increased from 14% to 33% – despite the fact that the economy has doubled in size over the same period. These findings seriously undercut the UK government’s claim to be lifting people out of poverty through work. Cuts to welfare benefits add to the low pay misery.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s annual Minimum Income Standard report looks at how much people have to earn taking into account family circumstances, the cost of essentials and changes to benefits. This shows that a lone parent with one child now needs to earn more than £27,100, up from £12,000 in 2008. A couple with two children need to earn more than £20,200 each, compared to £13,900 each in 2008. Single working-age people must now earn more than £16,200, up from £13,500 in 2008.

Public service workers are at the front line of the attack on wages, while this government awards handouts to the super rich. Tomorrow is just the start of a fight back to keep workers out of poverty.

Developing a human rights culture in Scotland

Creating a human rights culture in Scotland is challenging in the current environment, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing more to embed them in public service delivery.

I was speaking at the Human Rights Consortium Scotland (HRCS) conference in Glasgow today, 'Delivering Human Rights - A Constitution for Scotland?'. My contribution was on the culture of human rights in Scotland.

Sadly, the short answer to the question posed is that we don't have an embedded human rights culture in Scotland. Most of the organisations our members work in have statutory responsibilities under the legislation, but most staff would have only a vague understanding of what this means. This understanding is stronger in professions like police, social work and nursing - but limited elsewhere. As the work of the HMRC has shown, this reflects a wider ambivalence and misunderstanding amongst the wider public. Daft media coverage doesn't help as evidenced in the 2012 study by the University of Glasgow.

Specific measures, awareness and capacity building are not widespread and in a recent consultation few members were aware of recent initiatives such as the SHRC National Action Plan on human rights. Our experience of impact assessments is that they have too often become tick box exercises, completed after the key decisions have been made. For example, there is some mitigation of the impact of cuts on disadvantaged groups, but limited measurement of outcomes.

We need to integrate human rights into the decision making process. Greater use of the FAIR approach would help:

●Facts – experience of the individual

●Analysis – of human rights at stake, absolute or restricted

●Identification – what changes and who has responsibility

●Review – Recorded & reviewed with individual affected

This also requires better training for staff and decision makers.

Another idea considered by the HMRC is that every public service worker should be required to take a human rights oath, modelled on the Scottish police constable oath. The primary aim was to provoke a debate on how we might embed a human rights culture. It certainly achieved that, but our members had some concerns. The logistics of swearing in 500,000 plus staff would be significant, including the time and cost to brief staff at a time when resources are stretched to breaking point. It would also need to include others in the private & voluntary sector who deliver public services. We would also be concerned about double or even triple jeopardy in disciplinary proceedings, with employers passing the buck for their own responsibilities to the workforce.

These concerns reflect the fact that the biggest barrier to human rights in Scotland is the cuts in public spending. With 50,000 jobs cut and many more to come, together with £6bn to be slashed from the Scottish Budget, human rights are coming under pressure like never before. UNISON's 'Time to Care' report into social care is a good example of how the human rights of service users and staff are being ignored in large parts of Scotland. Welfare cuts are another obvious example of how human rights are being sidelined.

The good news is that human rights is less of a political football in Scotland, avoiding the Tory ministers attacks at Westminster that portray human rights as an alien culture. The Deputy FM Nicola Sturgeon addressed today's conference and pointed to the Scottish Government's draft interim constitution that embeds human rights. While others would argue for a different constitutional approach, there is less difference over the principles. However, if we vote for independence in September, there will be a real debate about how interventionist the constitution should be on issues like human rights, as against a limited description of constitutional authority such as the USA.

Constitutions are fine, but as delegates at today's conference raised, there needs to be education, capacity building and effective legal remedies given the social class and attitudes of our judges. If we look at the use of judicial review in Scotland, it's rarely used outside of immigration and commercial planning challenges. Even when a case does get to the Scottish courts, 75% are unsuccessful.

For trade unionists human rights is at the core of what we stand for. Employment rights are very limited in the UK and charges for ET applications are removing access to justice. As a senior trade union official I am painfully aware that however robust my organising, bargaining and campaigning may be, I can go home at night in safety. There are many comrades across the world who don't operate in a human rights environment and have lost their lives doing what I do ever day. That is why we should view human rights as of international importance and not be sucked into the isolationist approach of a UK Bill of Rights.

Human rights are not an optional add on, it should be at the core of what we do. We need to do more to build awareness and develop practical measures to embed human rights in our decision making processes.

 

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Putting the people back into public service with a national workforce strategy

The human resource challenges facing Scotland's public sector are substantial, but a national workforce strategy could help transform public services in difficult times.

I was speaking at the annual Scottish Human Resources Conference in Edinburgh today on the challenges in creating an healthy workforce environment. I have a lot of slides on the challenges, but also offered a few solutions as well!

The long term shift from wages to profits is the main explanation for low staff morale, exacerbated by public sector pay cuts that have resulted in a £1600 a year cut in real wages since 2010. Next up is 50,000 public sector job cuts in Scotland since the crash with most of those in local government. That is also leaving an ageing workforce with a growing proportion of staff in their 50s and the number of young workers as a proportion of the workforce falling by 25%.

The impact of austerity economics is not simply the financial cuts, although a 9% real term cut in the Scottish Government budget is very challenging. The problem is that the cuts come at a time of increasing service demand caused by the recession and demographic change. Add to that the shift from capital to revenue spending and long term asset replacement costs, it all adds up to multiple overall pressures on public services. The remaining workforce is expected to cope through salami slicing of services, while big and difficult spending decisions are avoided.

There has been an reduction in overall employment standards with the use of zero or nominal hours contracts, weak health and safety, growing workplace stress and violence. Increasing work intensity is illustrated by the recent survey that found that only 17% of workers leave their workplace for break and 42% eat at their desks.

I illustrated some of these issues using UNISON's 'Time to Care' report into social care. The race to the bottom in this sector has resulted in low pay, zero hours contracts, minimal training and just not enough time to care properly. I also challenged the obsession with chasing sickness absence management on the back of dubious statistical comparisons with the private sector.

Given these challenges, it is hardly surprising that staff surveys show the public sector struggling behind the rest of the economy. The latest CIPD Survey showed that only a third of workers feel engaged. While generally positive about their line managers, senior manager trust and respect has fallen by 11%. Only a third believe their performance management systems are fair and 41% report excessive pressure at work weekly. These findings are replicated in UNISON surveys of occupational groups. These show a broadly negative view of future service cuts that put service standards at risk. Staff are being asked to cut corners, abandoning proactive preventative work in favour of reactive short term approaches.

The Christie Commission report was published three years ago this month. While there has been some progress, it's workforce vision has yet to be realised. Too many government reform initiatives largely ignore the staffing implications. Public services are delivered by people, not robots.

The Christie vision of a joined up workforce needs a national workforce strategy that stops us wasting effort reinventing the wheel on issues like staff transfer, pensions, secondment and common procedures. A staff governance framework across the public services that engages staff at all levels is an urgent priority. There are some positive initiatives, but they are disconnected and health and care integration in particular will be a huge challenge.

A national strategy should be a framework, not a top down prescription, to enable the bottom up service design envisaged by Christie. The joined up one public service worker approach recommended in that report won't happen without it.

 

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CIPD survey paints a bleak workplace picture, particularly in public sector.

The CIPD quarterly employee outlook survey offers an insight into employee attitudes in the workplace. The latest report highlights a marked increase in negative perceptions of senior managers, particularly in the public sector. It also reveals that almost a third of employees believe that their current performance management systems are unfair, again particularly in the public sector.

Only a third of employees feel engaged in the business. Job satisfaction levels (+42) are slightly up with employees in the voluntary sector the most satisfied with their jobs (+48). Job satisfaction has decreased in this survey in the public sector (+37), although still up on 2013 levels (+25).

Attitudes towards line managers remain positive, with 64% of employees strongly satisfied or satisfied. However, this survey sees a fall in ratings for senior managers. Confidence in particular has fallen by 5% and trust in senior leaders and perceptions of consultation have fallen by 4% each. Employees in the public sector remain the most negative about their senior managers and there have been some substantial decreases in this survey. The biggest decreases are in relation to senior managers treating employees with respect (down 12%), trust in senior leaders (decrease of 11%).

More employees reported that they believe their organisation’s performance management process is fair (39%) rather than unfair (30%), but these are very low figures demonstrating little confidence in these systems anywhere. Employees in the public sector were even more likely to believe their performance management process is unfair (33%).

The proportion of employees reporting excessive pressure at work every day or once or twice a week in spring 2014 remains high at 41%. Employees’ satisfaction with their work–life balance has remained at the relatively high level of 58% in this survey. However, it is women (63%) who are significantly more likely than men (52%) to enjoy a better work–life balance. The public sector is now the least satisfied sector.

Spring 2014 sees a slight drop in the overall number of employees saying it is very likely or likely that they could lose their job as a result of the current economic context. Employees’ fears over losing their jobs are highest in the public sector (23%) and lowest in the private sector (13%). There is increasing concern in the voluntary sector over job losses. These numbers show that workers are not convinced by rhetoric around the economic ‘recovery’ and does not bode well for economic confidence in the longer term.

Overall this survey shows a pretty depressing picture of the UK workforce. The fact that the public sector comes off worse in almost every section is a reflection of the constant UK government attacks on workers in the sector.

Great workplaces address absence better than systems

The best approach to tackling absence is to create great workplaces to work in - not rigid management systems and targets.

Today, I was speaking at a MacKay Hannah conference on ‘Tackling Absenteeism in the Public Sector in Scotland: Prevention and Health Promotion’.

Angela Cullen from Audit Scotland set the scene from their published report on Scotland's public sector workforce. This showed that the workforce has been cut by 7% since the crash, down to around one in five of the total workforce. Council staff have taken the brunt of cuts. The workforce is ageing significantly with young people the biggest losers, down by 25%. Over one third of staff are over 50 and that is the biggest growth area with potential skill and knowledge risks for public services as they come closer to retirement. They have extracted data on sickness absence from their recent report into a useful new publication on their website

Fred Best from Work 4 Wellbeing made the business case for taking measures to improve wellbeing at work. More than a glossy document and a bowl of fruit! Poor data is a problem with 18% of sickness absence reported as 'other' due to IT system limitations. A key message was the cost of presenteeism that can cost 50% more than absence - £105bn in 2010. Workplace conflict costs UK business £33bn per year, taking 20% of leadership time and losing 370m working days. Investment in wellbeing can save £4 for every £1 spent. Behind these statistics is the real human cost of ill health.

Roddy Duncan from the office of the Chief Medical Officer outlined Scottish Government initiatives to create healthy working lives in a very challenging environment - ageing workforce and austerity cuts. Long term absence is a particular issue with 51% of long term absentees in Scotland being disabled. The healthy work strategy is based on premise that work is good for health and workplaces should promote health and wellbeing of the workforce.

Dame Carol Black's independent review of sickness absence was referenced by several speakers. That emphasises that worklessness is harmful for most people. Equally useful is the work of The Scottish Centre for Healthy Working Lives.

My presentation was on the reality of the ‘sickie culture’ in the Public Sector: policies, support and management. I started by debunking some of the myths about sickness absence in the public sector. It may be cliché that the only certainties in life are death and taxes, but there are others. For me, one is the Daily Mail asking me to respond to the latest CBI claim that public sector workers have a 'sickie culture'.

The main response to the headline data is that the two sectors are not comparable workforces. The public sector is an older workforce with more women and with major occupational differences. For example, staff in the care sector are 45% more likely to be sick. Public sector staff also tend to work in larger organisations with sick pay agreements and better recording systems. One consequence is that public sector staff have more long term sickness absence but less short term absence than in the private sector. Overall, public v private is simply irrelevant to the debate, you need to look at other factors.

We do know that there is greater and growing presenteeism in public sector. A CIPD survey showed 39% in the public sector compared to 26% in the private sector. Unpaid overtime is also more common in the public sector - 1 in 4 compared to 1 in 6 workers in the private sector. All of this is reinforced in a UNISON Scotland survey we published last year.

Instead of a puerile public v private debate we need to focus on positive absence management. This is my list of measures:

• Agreed absence management policies with proper training
• Regular reviews of data at safety Committees
• Less reliance on formulas and triggers
• Measures to facilitate and promote employee health
• Involvement of quality, independent, occupational health professionals
• Minimise workplace stress
• Employee assistance programmes for personal or workplace problems.
• Maintain contact during long-term sickness absence
• Structured return-to-work plan with adequate adjustments and support.

There was some discussion about the new government occupational health assessment scheme. This is right in principle, but I suspect it will become an ATOS style tick box exercise. Sickness absence rules and targets in the public sector can be very similar - chasing short term solutions at the expense of more sustainable long-term solutions. We also need to recognise the impact of later retirement ages on particular occupational groups.

My main message was that if you are serious about tackling absence you need to focus on making workplaces great places to work in. The speaker from Investors in People described this as the soft stuff, but in their view still absolutely vital. A friendly, varied, fair and supportive working environment is more effective than any set of absence management rules.

Scotland - It's Time to Care!

The care of older people in Scotland is a national disgrace. Fairly paid, well-trained staff on proper contracts with time to care is the very least older people in our communities have a right to expect.

Today, I was speaking in a panel debate at Scotland’s voluntary sector event ‘The Gathering’, on this issue. UNISON Scotland has also today published a new survey of care staff, ‘Scotland – It’s Time to Care’.

Like others in the sector I have written reports highlighting staffing levels, budgets, structures and care strategies. Words have been written and numbers crunched – but that doesn’t tell the whole story. I participated in a couple of focus groups made up of care workers last year and the messages from the workers who provide care were deeply disturbing. They painted a picture of care in Scotland that nobody would want for their elderly relatives, including my own.

I summarised a key impact of poor employment standards when giving evidence to a Scottish Parliament Committee considering the Procurement Bill:

“The other day, I was doing a focus group with a group of care workers and I said to those who were on zero-hours or nominal-hours contracts, “Would you raise health and safety issues with your employer?” They said, “We’re on these contracts. If we raise health and safety issues, we will not be asked back.” That is exactly the position that colleagues were in with blacklisting. Sadly, when I then asked them, “What if you saw care abuse?”, they said, “We’d be pretty reluctant to raise that as well, to be honest, for the same reason.” People on zero-hours or nominal-hours contracts who raise difficult questions do not get asked back, and people are concerned about that.”

Having experienced those messages first hand I decided we would ask a much larger group of care workers and the outcome of that work is in today’s report. This report gives staff at the front line of care delivery the chance to tell their story about care in Scotland and it doesn’t make comfortable reading.

The majority of workers believe the service is not sufficient to meet the needs of the elderly and vulnerable people they care for – both from the time they can spend and the quality of care they can provide. Almost half of carers (44%) said they were limited to specific times to spend with their clients. One in two workers are not reimbursed for travelling between client visits, while three in four said they expected the situation to get worse over the coming year. They also revealed that one in ten are on zero hours contracts.

Time to do more than just deliver a few manual tasks was important to staff and the people they care for. As one worker put it, “By doing the best that we can with the time given. I'll admit I sometimes miss out a job so that I can sit for two minutes with the person receiving care. That means more to them than the dishes needing dried.”

Adequate training is another concern, particularly for newly appointed younger staff. One said: “Staff are not receiving the training they need to carry out their roles, only the training which is low cost or has been identified as core.”

The isolating impact of personalisation was often mentioned and the threat of losing contracts if they make a fuss. One worker said: “Stop threatening charities indirectly that you will take the SDS contracts away from them and move to another provider if workers challenge decisions...Being told by management this is the case and we all must be quiet even though the workers sole concern is for the service user they care for and want the best for them.”

All of this adds up to staff stress and higher turnover that results in limited continuity of care. As another worker put it: “I feel the staff in our organisation are paid pretty poorly for the standard of work they are expected to provide. This means we often have difficulty in recruitment and cannot attract a quantity and more importantly a 'quality' of staff. It can be hard to keep experienced, well trained staff as staff shortages and low wages lead to overwork, stress and dissatisfaction to a point were employees resign.”

These are the stories of front line workers that illustrate, all to clearly, what we guessed from the hard evidence. This report should be a wake-up call for the Scottish Government and commissioning bodies to take action to end the race to the bottom in care provision. Procurement action should include a requirement that all care provision should mandate:

• The Scottish Living Wage: this will help the recruitment and retention of staff and support continuity of care;
• Improved training: to ensure that care is delivered by properly qualified staff;
• Proper employment standards: ending the abuse of zero and nominal hour contracts;
• Adequate time to care in every care visit.

Scotland’s older people and others, who rely on our care services, deserve better.

Making work better

The Smith Institute is undertaking an independent inquiry to identify what government, employers, employees (and those that represent them) can do to improve working life in Britain. The focus is on what makes for a better workplace and better employment. What government policies and actions by employers, management and unions would make a difference; and how can we aspire to a high-skills, high-productivity, high-wage economy where more people are satisfied with their work and have greater opportunities and more control over what they do?

Amongst the topics for consideration are:

 Productivity and performance: Both employers and employees should be the beneficiaries of rising productivity. Which workplace practices are associated with high productivity? How widespread are these practices in the UK? To what extent is productivity related to voice and industrial citizenship? Are highly productive workplaces necessarily good workplaces? What steps are needed to ensure that wages rise in line with productivity?
 Making a living: What can be done to tackle in-work poverty and improve pay for those on low to middle incomes? How can the National Minimum Wage and other employment rights (equal pay) be enforced more effectively? What other measures might be taken, such as extending the Living Wage to more low paid workers? Is there a case for a new and systematic approach to standard setting in public procurement (“Fair Wages”)? What can be done to secure more ‘passporting’ or rights and benefits at work?
 Opportunity and progression: What can be done to enhance the quality and value of employment and improve personal development at work? How can we get more young people into (suitable) work and what should be done about volunteering and unpaid internships? How can we improve opportunities for promotion and career advancement? What can we learn from training systems in other countries; what can be done to ensure that employers fully utilise the skills of all their staff? How can we best combat discrimination at work?
 Getting people back to work: As we move out of recession how can we get more people back to work and combat under-employment? At the bottom of the labour market there seems to be a revolving door from unemployment, to bad work, to unemployment. Do other countries achieve better results through their unemployment insurance systems and active labour market programmes? How can we improve the apprenticeships system and graduate employment?
 Security at work and work-life balance: How can policy tackle long-hours cultures and the lack of good quality part time jobs? How big a problem is casualisation of work and what can be done to combat zero-hours contracts? Is poor corporate governance and boardroom culture at the root of the problem, and if so what should change? What can be done to ensure that men and women share paid and unpaid work more equitably? How can we ensure that workers are offered a range of working patterns consistent with their caring and other domestic responsibilities?
 Working in the public services: What should be done to improve the quality of work across the public services so that job quality and organisational performance are enhanced at a time of public expenditure constraints? How can frontline professionals be empowered to innovate and be given an effective voice; how can the public sector be a leader on standards of employment?
 Employment relations: What are the barriers to employee engagement? How can policy support innovative trade union approaches to the modern workplace? What can we learn from good practice in the UK and Europe? Is there a case for developing a robust works council system in the UK?
 Machinery of government: is there a case for reforming and streamlining the different institutions, agencies and regulatory bodies involved with the world of work? Is there a need for a tougher (co-ordinated) approach to enforcement and compliance?

Comments to:

Making Work Better Inquiry
C/O The Smith Institute
Somerset House, South Wing
Strand, London, WC2R 1LA
Tel: 020 7845 5845
Email: makingworkbetter@smith-institute.org.uk
Web: www.smith-institute.org.uk