God's Good Economy by Andrew Hartropp

Author:Andrew Hartropp
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783597659
Publisher: IVP
Published: 2019-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

3 Labour market flexibility

Another aspect of wages and salaries concerns the place of ‘flexibility’ with regard to the labour market: are ‘zero-hours’ contracts and other similar arrangements compatible or incompatible with economic justice? This has become quite a contentious area in recent years, not least in the UK, and much has been written about it.19 There is insufficient space to go into detail here. But there are two key factors to bear in mind. First, flexibility in the labour market – the ability of firms and workers to have a greater range of working arrangements, and for people to move between jobs more speedily – can help to bring a number of benefits in the efficiency of an economy, and hence in how much it can produce.

Here is a simple example. In events management some of the work comes at specific times – for example, setting up a stage in the afternoon before an evening concert, and then taking it down late at night. This is far from a regular nine-to-five job. So if there are workers who are willing to be paid for a few hours, at a rate of pay to which they agree without any force, then this is cheaper for the events management company than having to employ people in permanent nine-to-five jobs. The outcome is that concert prices should be cheaper than would otherwise be the case; and therefore there will probably be more concerts, and more attenders, than would otherwise be the case.

The second factor, however, is that the quality of relationships is still central, according to biblical economic justice. The danger with increased ‘flexibility’ is that it can give more scope for powerful companies to exploit people (workers) who are in a weak bargaining position. It is thus crucial to assess the details of how these two factors play out together in any given context: to some extent they are in tension with one another. In my view it is not reasonable to conclude with a general ‘Yes, it is fine’ or a general ‘No, it is bad’ regarding labour market flexibility, including zero-hours contracts. Certainly, it is crucial that the workers involved must agree to the arrangements: if there is oppressive conduct on the part of the employer, then that is clearly unjust.

In the light of the tension between these two factors it is important to keep under review what is happening on the ground regarding labour market flexibility.

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