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One In Five Take Work Home
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Technology enabling more people to work from home may be a valuable way of helping work-life balance, but is too often being used to add to work pressure, argues the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
"Employees in the UK already work the longest working hours in Europe. Now they are expected to take work home with them as well," says TUC deputy general secretary Brendan Barber.
The TUC's report, No Brave New World For Home Teleworking, found that one in five workers (21%) sometimes take work home in the UK, compared to one in 14 (7%) on average across all European Union countries.
Brendan Barber said: "It seems the countries known for their high trust relationships at work and good work-life balance are where employers are happy to let staff work from home. We seem to have some of the least trusting bosses in Europe. Of course teleworking does not suit everybody, but I am sure many would like more choice."
Recent government statistics indicated that public service employers are more likely than their private sector counterparts to offer employees the option of working from home. But, generally, home working has failed to take off in the way that many trend spotters predicted.
Brendan Barber, said: "It's a big mistake to say that work will change simply because it can and it looks like an attractive option for at least some employees.
"Employers have to be prepared to change too, and when UK employers talk about flexibility too often they simply mean their rights to hire and fire."
Public service employers are more likely than their private sector counterparts to offer staff the option of working from home.
This was one of several surprise findings in a new study that explodes some of the popular perceptions that home working can be all liberation or all drudgery.
The government-funded research also reveals that women working at home, and doing higher-grade work, are paid more on average than their equivalent office-bound colleagues.
With encouragement from politicians and some business leaders, the facility to work at home, at least for some of the working week, is increasingly viewed as a factor in promoting a more healthy work/life balance. Some employers see the granting of permission to work at home as an enlightened employment practice.
Dr Alan Felstead, from the Centre for Labour Market Studies at the University of Leicester, has identified some unexpected facts about who works at home, how much they earn, and which employers are most likely to allow their employees to work at home.
He shows that the public sector is more likely to offer the option of home working than private employers, as are larger employers against smaller companies. Employers in the utilities sector are most likely, among private sector companies, to offer the facility.
Working at home does not necessarily go alongside other family-friendly employment policies, however, with part-time working sometimes being offered instead of, and not in addition to, home working. But there is a close overlap between employees being allowed to do some work at home and other flexible working arrangements (like parental leave) part-time working and job sharing.
Sharp contrasts surface from the research which is based on analysis of data from the Workplace Employee Relations Survey, in the case of employers, and from the Labour Force Survey which asked respondents questions about the location of their workplace since 1992. For instance, far from working at home sitting uneasily with teamworking, the evidence from this survey suggests that there are instances to the contrary. Some of the stereotypes on homeworking, such as low pay, however, are upheld in the analysis of the Labour Force Survey . Among manual workers who work mainly at home, about three-quarters receive low pay compared to a fifth of their counterparts in more conventional locations.
Meanwhile, the supposed bias towards women outnumbering men working mainly at home is upheld, particularly among those working mainly at home (69% against 31%), but the opposite is true among those who work at home some of the time. The number of people working mainly at home has risen dramatically in the last two decades to 2.5% of the workforce, while those who said that they work at home 'sometimes' account for a further 22%.
Other findings include that of ethnic minorities, if anything, being under-represented among home workers, but also being the worst paid among homeworkers. Women who work mainly at home are more likely to have dependant children than peers who work elsewhere. People in higher occupations are over-represented in the categories of those 'mainly' and 'sometimes' working at home.
The study is part of the ?4m Future of Work programme from the Economic and Social Research Council, which is the UK's largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues.
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