Information technology and the push from in-house employees to agency temps

Information technology (IT) does not erode job quality. But it doesn’t make jobs better either. Managers do. As Adam Seth Litwin and Sherry M. Tanious write, employers can manage relationally or contractually, and that determines whether or not IT facilitates the destruction of conventional employment relationships.

 
Employers have, since the 1970s and 80s, deployed information technology (IT) to fundamentally restructure the employment relationship. Employers, now seeking flexibility rather than stability in a globalised, highly competitive market, have used IT to replace full-time employees with temporary workers employed by third-party staffing agencies, independent contractors, freelancers, or even machines—a phenomenon known as the “externalisation” of work.

IT facilitates the externalisation of work by permitting employers to (1) supervise and monitor the productivity of employees around the globe in real-time, (2) segment work into simpler discrete tasks, and (3) coordinate work. Labour relations scholars have theorised that employers have adopted IT to reduce labour costs, with the end result being the erosion of the traditional employment relationship in favour of more flexible alternative employment arrangements that do not provide employees with the same pay, benefits, job security, discretion, or long-term opportunities that traditional employment has historically provided. In a recent journal article, we undertake to quantify how the adoption of IT enables, drives, or constrains the reassignment of work from in-house employees to temporary workers, or “agency temps” who are employed by third-party staffing agencies and are hired out to traditional employers.

We rely on data from the Workplace Employment Relations Study (WERS), a representative sample of more than 2,500 UK firms administered by the British government. Using linear probability models, we find, consistent with the existing literature, that IT adoption is positively correlated with work reassignment, both before and after controlling for firm size, industry, and other factors. Some firms are more likely than others to reassign work—for example, larger firms are more likely to reassign work to agency temps, and those workplaces with at least one union bargaining on behalf of at least some workers are more likely to have reassigned work to an employment agency than are non-unionised workplaces.

While neither foreign ownership of the firm nor the independence of the firm appear to drive work reassignment in the UK, workplaces with concentrated ownership are less likely to report the reassignment of work. This implies that employment ties are perhaps more relational than contractual—bosses who actually know and work with their employees are less likely to reassign their work to temps. Finally, we find a positive relationship between downsizing and work reassignment after controlling for IT adoption—managers who have reduced employment in the preceding year were 5% more likely to have outsourced work once done in-house.

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Πηγή: blogs.lse.ac.uk