̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Adam Coutts

“It's not one single trauma, it’s hundreds of traumas”

cjb250 — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 08:00:45 +0000

Policies aimed at addressing the migrant crisis need to take into account the serious mental health issues faced by refugees and asylum seekers, say researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge as they launch two films highlighting the plight of migrants and possible policy options to support them.

‘Generation lockdown’ needs targeted help-to-work policies – global report

fpjl2 — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 09:54:57 +0000

Experts argue that many countries simply “repackaged” existing – and often already failing – policies without the necessary funding or retooling to benefit under 24-year-olds: the global demographic hit hardest by the economic consequences of COVID-19.

In the report commissioned by the UN’s International Labour Organization, the Cambridge team calls on countries to go beyond employment policies that “yo-yo” with each virus surge, and implement longer-term interventions aimed squarely at the young.

̽��ֱ��report suggests that, since the pandemic began, more than one in six young people globally were made redundant, with severe impacts on their mental health and wellbeing.

It is estimated that over 40% of all young people with a job pre-pandemic – some 178 million young workers – worked in the most affected sectors: tourism, services and retail. Tourism alone saw financial losses eleven times greater than the 2008 financial crash.

Global youth employment fell by more than double the rate of older adults in 2020 (8.7% compared to 3.7%), with loss of work particularly concentrated among young women in middle-income countries. Global female employment rates fell by 5% over the last year, compared to 3.9% for men.

In the 132 countries that adopted 580 fiscal and economic measures to support businesses during the Covid crisis, only 12% aimed to improve women’s economic security by ensuring that female-dominated sectors received financial support – mainly in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa.

In some lower-income countries, there are reports of more young women turning to sex work as a result, contributing to rising HIV cases as well as unintended pregnancies.

Even among high-income nations, the impact on young people’s livelihoods has varied dramatically. For example, between February and April 2020 – as the virus took hold – there was an 11.7 percentage point reduction in labour participation among Canada’s young people, a 7.5 point drop in the US, but just a 1.9 point drop in South Korea.

Many of those lucky enough to hold onto work saw their incomes fall substantially. By May last year, young people around the world still in work had almost a quarter of their hours cut on average (23%).

“Young people face distinct challenges which disadvantage them compared to older adults when it comes to finding work post-pandemic,” said report co-author Dr Adam Coutts, from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology.

“These include less work experience and financial capital, weaker social networks, and higher levels of in-work poverty. They are also much more likely to have to make ends meet via informal cash-in-hand work.

“Recent school leavers are often ineligible for unemployment benefits or furlough schemes. This left many young people falling through the cracks of policy interventions,” said Coutts.

Co-author Dr Garima Sahai from Cambridge's Department of Geography said: "Young women have been especially hit by the pandemic who have experienced higher job losses, increased unpaid care work, the shadow pandemic of gender-based violence to name only a few effects.”

Researchers argue that “generation lockdown” could face protracted periods of unemployment, making it hard to re-enter the labour market, and get overtaken by “younger and better qualified cohorts”.

“Young people have been forced to remain at home, stuck with their parents, cut off from friends and partners,” said ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge co-author Dr Anna Barford. “Anxiety, stress and depression skyrocketed among young people around the world.”

“For those without ready access to internet connections or laptops, finishing school or hunting for work has been almost impossible at times,” she said.

“Repeated outbreaks in areas from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America will deplete household savings, shrink opportunities and diminish the aspirations of generation lockdown.”

̽��ֱ��report highlights that fact that young people migrate to find work and their place in the world. ̽��ֱ��pandemic shut down long-established migratory patterns: from young Guatemalans heading north to Mexico, to young Zimbabweans moving to South Africa. Young immigrants were also much more likely to lose work as average incomes fell.

Most national governments have offered economy-wide fiscal stimulus as well as labour market interventions, from reduced working weeks to temporary furlough schemes and increased social protection.

Some governments offered lifelines directly to sectors that prop up the youth labour market, such as India’s emergency loan support, which focused on the wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, rental and business services (with some 100 million young people in the Asia and Pacific region estimated to be employed in these sectors).

However, the researchers say that only a few nations deployed policy responses tailored to the specific needs of young people affected by the economic fallout of COVID-19.

These included South Korea’s one-off cash transfers to young jobseekers and government-backed paid apprenticeships in Malaysia, while the EU reinforced its “Youth guarantee” scheme: with member states aiming to provide everyone under the age of 30 with education, traineeship or a job within four months of becoming unemployed.

̽��ֱ��researchers argue that, without “youth-sensitive” employment policies, intergenerational inequalities will be further exacerbated during the pandemic recovery period.

They call for more youth-targeted ALMPs – Active Labour Market Policies – that provide support to boost employability, from vocational training to one-on-one jobseeker counselling, alongside mental health and wellbeing assistance for young people.

One example highlighted by the report's authors is the Indonesian ‘pre-employment card’, the Kartu Pre-Kerja, with $1.3bn allocated to fund skills training for two million young workers. By contrast, Mexico reduced its ALMPs spending to move funding to other parts of the pandemic response.

“Holistic policy responses require health and non-health government departments and ministries to work together more effectively,” said Coutts. “ ̽��ֱ��pandemic forced them to work together. These new networks and cross-departmental links need to be maintained.”

“Coordination should extend outside government to NGOs, trade unions, employer organisations, policy makers and young people themselves, in order to design better quality and more effective post-pandemic support for young people who have faced 18 months of social and economic chaos,” he added.

Nations the world over are guilty of “policy inertia” when it comes to supporting young people who lost work or will struggle to enter the labour market as a result of the pandemic, according to new ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge research.

Repeated outbreaks... will deplete household savings, shrink opportunities and diminish the aspirations of generation lockdown

Anna Barford

International Labour Organization

A young casual worker in Zimbabwe during the pandemic

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Beyond the pandemic: overhaul back-to-work policies to protect mental health

fpjl2 — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 13:18:19 +0000

Dr Adam Coutts, an expert in labour market interventions, discusses three policy options for responding to the unemployment crisis caused by the pandemic.

Syrian refugee health workers can help Europe cope with COVID-19

fpjl2 — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 11:35:56 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers argue that investing in the training of refugee doctors is a very effective way to help fill gaps in care provision left exposed by the COVID-19 crisis – taking far less time and money than it does to train a doctor from scratch.

By converting already-skilled people to medical work in the areas where they now live – often regions of European countries in short supply of doctors, nurses, dentists, and so on – it will help move the refugees out of poverty while bolstering the local health services of their adopted homes.

A new short film made by Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement and the Syria Public Health Network (SPHN) follows three refugees in the UK, Germany and Turkey as they set about retraining while discussing their lives new and old, and experiences of escaping war-torn Syria.

̽��ֱ��film was produced by Dr Adam Coutts from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology, a cofounder of SPHN, which aims to address policy challenges arising in the humanitarian health response. SPHN provides advocacy, policy briefs and evidence reviews to donors, NGOs and UN agencies.

“Syrian healthcare workers, as with many other displaced professionals, are a well-educated and highly skilled workforce. Their experiences have important policy, economic, humanitarian and academic implications,” said Coutts.

“Thousands of qualified health professionals in Syria have left the country since 2011 due to military attacks on clinics and hospitals. These essential workers now find themselves excluded from formal job opportunities and sliding into poverty in host communities in the Middle East and Europe.”

“They have already been through enough trauma in escaping a war zone. In the policy to build, build, build it is a great waste to not use their skills!” Coutts said.

One of the refugee medics featured in the film, Ba’raa Krebeh, who fled Homs, Syria in 2019, but now lives in Grimsby, UK. “After I got my status I started to look for any opportunity or organisation that could help refugee doctors,” said Krebeh.

He has been assisted by the Lincolnshire Refugee Doctor Project, who helped the 29-year-old medic with housing and support for courses and exams. Krebeh is now working to pass his English test, which he hopes to do in the next couple of months, then will aim to take medical exams and get a hospital placement.

When asked about his future, Krebeh said: “I think I will be here, practising in a hospital in Grimsby.” He hopes to be working as a surgeon in five years’ time.

“Much more investment and policy attention needs to be given for services such as the Lincolnshire NGO that support refugee doctors and speed up the process of recertification and recruitment,” said Dr Aula Abbara a consultant in infectious diseases at Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust who also co-chairs the Syria Public Health Network.

“These doctors are usually among the top academic achievers in their cohorts. They may be able to work in specialties where we have shortage in the UK. It’s the same in countries like Germany, where there is a shortfall of thousands of doctors and nurses at present – one expected to become even greater as the population ages,” said Abbara.

“It really is in our interest that we support refugee doctors to enter our workforce. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis we are in desperate need of their knowledge and skills.”

Coutts points out that the ongoing exodus of highly skilled workers from Syria, Iraq and North Africa – characteristic of protracted crises in middle-income, largely urban settings – affects the ability of aid organisations and governments to deliver humanitarian assistance.

“Available evidence on post-conflict reconstruction shows that rebuilding the health workforce is one of the top priorities,” said Coutts. “Employing refugee health workers can help to provide a foundation for the rebuilding of a destroyed health system’.

̽��ֱ��World Health Organisation estimates a shortfall of 18 million health workers to accelerate universal health coverage by 2030, particularly in low to middle income countries.

Coutts and colleagues argue that displaced healthcare professionals present major opportunities for host communities in the Middle East and the economies of Europe, by strengthening health and welfare systems in the Middle East, Europe and the UK.

Added Coutts: “Our film shows success stories, but these are few. With more support like the Lincolnshire programme many others could return to their vocations quickly and effectively. We think the integration of refugee doctors should be a political priority in countries such as the UK. Health services in the UK and across Europe needs these people.”

Employing displaced Syrian healthcare workers is a 'win-win' for both host communities and refugees as it would strengthen national health services and allow highly-skilled medics to “get on with their lives, rather than just get by”, according to a network of UK academics.

We think the integration of refugee doctors should be a political priority in countries such as the UK. Health services in the UK and across Europe needs these people

Adam Coutts

UC Syrian doctors V9 6

Adam Coutts

A still from the film of Syrian doctors at work

Yes

One day of paid work a week is all we need to get mental health benefits of employment

fpjl2 — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 09:23:35 +0000

Latest research finds up to eight hours of paid work a week significantly boosts mental health and life satisfaction. However, researchers found little evidence that any more hours – including a full five-day week – provide further increases in wellbeing.

Military spending did not 'crowd out' welfare in Middle East prior to Arab Spring

fpjl2 — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 11:00:34 +0000

Research casts doubt on the widely-held view that spiralling military expenditure across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 'crowded out' investment in healthcare and public services, leading to civil unrest that eventually exploded in the Arab Spring revolutions.

̽��ֱ��so-called 'guns versus butter' or 'welfare versus warfare' hypothesis – that prioritised military spending resulted in neglect of health and education, thereby creating conditions that fomented public rebellion – is considered by many experts to be a root cause of the uprisings that gripped the region during 2011.

However, a team of researchers who analysed economic and security data from MENA nations in the 16 years leading up to the Arab Spring found no evidence of a trade-off between spending on the military and public services, specifically healthcare.

̽��ֱ��researchers from Cambridge and the Lebanese American ̽��ֱ�� argue that much of the evidence for the ‘guns versus butter’ causal link come from analyses of wealthy European nations, which has then been assumed to hold true for the Middle East.

They say the study’s findings, published today in the journal Defence and Peace Economics, provide a “cautionary note” against a reliance on simplistic correlations based on data from OECD nations to draw important policy conclusions about the causes of turmoil in the Middle East.

“Our research finds reports of this apparent spending trade-off prior to the Arab Spring to be somewhat spurious,” said Dr Adam Coutts, based at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Sociology.

“Academics and policy-makers should be careful in assuming that models and results from studies of other regions can be transplanted onto the Middle East and North Africa,” he said.

“Determining the cause of unrest is a rather more complex task than some experts may suggest. Historical experiences and political economy factors need to be considered.”

While only Saudi Arabia is in the top ten global nations for military spending in terms of hard cash, when calculated as a share of GDP six of the top ten military spenders are MENA nations.

Coutts and colleagues ran World Bank data through detailed statistical models to explore the trade-off between spending on military and on welfare – health, in this case – of 18 different MENA nations from 1995 up to the start of the Arab Spring in 2011.

̽��ֱ��team also looked at casualties resulting from domestic terror attacks in an attempt to estimate security needs that might have helped drive military spending in a region plagued by terrorism.

They found no statistically significant evidence that increased military spending had an impact on health investment. “Contrary to existing evidence from many European nations, we found that levels of military expenditure do not induce or affect cuts to healthcare in the Middle East and North Africa,” said co-author Dr Adel Daoud from Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research.

̽��ֱ��researchers also found no evidence for casualties from terrorism affecting either health or military spending – perhaps a result of the routine nature of such occurrences in the region.

“There may have been a policy adaptation in which regional conflicts and security threats are no longer the main influence on government security and military spending decisions,” said Daoud.

Adam Coutts added: “It has been argued that Arab populations accepted an ‘authoritarian bargain’ over the last forty years – one of societal militarisation in return for domestic security – and that this came at the expense of their welfare and social mobility.

“However, health and military spending cannot be predicted by each other in this troubled region. Policy analysts should not single out military spending as a main culprit for the lack of investment in public goods.

“Once again we find that straightforward explanations for unrest in the Middle East and North Africa are tenuous on close analysis.”

Findings dispute 'guns versus butter' narrative as a major factor behind the Arab Spring. Researchers caution against uncritically applying lessons from Western nations to interpret public policy decisions in the Middle East.

Policy analysts should not single out military spending as a main culprit for the lack of investment in public goods

Adam Coutts

Hossam el-Hamalawy

Medics transferring injured protesters in Abbassiya Square, Egypt

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

̽��ֱ��stresses and strains of work and unemployment

cjb250 — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 07:45:07 +0000

When I ask Dr Adam Coutts what we know about the impact of unemployment on health, his response is blunt and to the point: “It’s very bad.”

There’s a pause before he goes on to say that we’ve known for more than half a century that unemployment is bad for mental health and wellbeing, and that this has a knock-on effect on our physical health. Where there is debate, though, is over why it is so bad. Studies suggest that work provides what he describes as “psychological vitamins or functions”, such as structure, routine, a sense of identity and the opportunity to meet people and socialise. “It’s not all about a wage,” he says.

Coutts has been on research placement from the Department of Sociology to the UK government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) Work and Health Unit since June 2016. There, he has been looking to better understand the link between unemployment and mental health, particularly in the context of today’s Britain, and how policy can intervene to help.

He is studying an intervention that aims to get people back to work and to support their mental health needs. ̽��ֱ��programme is adapted from one developed by the Institute of Social Research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Michigan and now being trialled by the DWP. Participants take part in a voluntary five-day course, during which they receive help with CV writing, social support, interview techniques and how to search for a job, including how to see the process from the viewpoint of an employer.

Coutts has been conducting an ethnographic study across five areas of England since the trial started in January 2017 to complement a large-scale randomised control trial evaluation. He has what he describes as “a ringside seat” of the policy process and has seen how the intervention has been designed, implemented and evaluated: a privileged point of access for any academic researcher. He observes course participants and facilitators, and staff at job centres – “everyone from the unemployed to senior civil servants” – to see how these policies actually work on the ground.

“We know these types of interventions have an effect on job search behaviours and a person’s health, but we don’t really know why and who is most responsive. I’m trying to tell a story of what it’s like to go through these programmes, be unemployed and cope with mental health issues in Britain today.”

If the evidence from previous trials in the USA is anything to go by, then the benefits from such an intervention would reach beyond the individual: as well as helping people get back to work, improving their mental health and wellbeing could save money for the NHS, as a result of less reliance on GP or mental health services.

But mental health issues are not just associated with unemployment. There is a growing recognition of the link between employment and our health and wellbeing, too. A recent report for government, entitled ‘Thriving at Work’, included some startling statistics for the UK: 15% of workers have a mental health condition and 300,000 people with long-term mental health problems lose their jobs each year. Mental health costs employers over £33 billion per year, the state over £24 billion and the whole economy over £73 billion.

“Employers need to understand that stress and anxiety, and mental ill health, is a large problem in terms of people not being at work, or being at work and not performing well,” says Professor Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College, and author of several influential reports for government about work and health.

Black believes that training at line management level to identify and support workers with mental health issues is essential to tackling this problem; without this, measures to create healthier workplaces will amount to little more than papering over the cracks, Black says.

However, she has seen enough examples of good practice in companies such as BT, Unilever and Anglian Water to be optimistic that we can tackle this problem. “What you see are pockets of good practice, but I think we need a campaign to really get it out there and say we know this is what we all should be doing – it isn’t that difficult to do.”

Business leaders are beginning to pay attention. In an article earlier this year following the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Clifton Leaf, Editor-in-Chief at the influential business magazine Fortune, chose as number one of ‘7 Takeaways From Davos’: ‘ ̽��ֱ��mental health disorder time bomb is upon us’.

One of the problems, however, is the lack of concrete evidence about what works. “People often ask ‘where’s the Cochrane-type evidence?’” says Black, referring to the ‘gold standard’ of evidence reviews in research. “It’s not easy to collect data in the workplace, but we would only have better evidence if more organisations collected data and were willing to share it.”

Dr Tine Van Bortel from the Cambridge Institute of Public Health is helping to build this evidence base. In fact, she was namechecked in Leaf’s article after he attended a mental health event at Davos that she co-presented with the international care consortium Kaiser Permanente.

As part of her mandate with the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Mental Health, Van Bortel has been leading a study looking at policies used by major corporations aimed at improving the health and wellbeing of their workforce. “A lot of these corporations say that a combination of integrated and targeted approaches are really important,” she says.

An integrated approach might consist of providing access to a gym. Targeted interventions might include a willingness to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ such as moving an employee to less strenuous work or allowing
them to work part time.

While Van Bortel believes employers should take responsibility for ensuring the health and wellbeing of their employees, she is a passionate believer that government can – and should – think about our mental health.

“I firmly believe that government should ensure our workplaces are healthy and that we’re not being confronted with some of the stressful, unjust and – quite frankly – inhumane situations that we’re currently seeing.

“Think about zero-hours contracts, or people having to work three jobs to make ends meet, or wage discrepancies and other structural inequalities. This puts a lot of stress on persons, families and ultimately society, and can reflect on work and productivity. More can and should be done. After all, healthy and all-inclusive workforces make excellent business sense.”

Inset image: read more about our research on the topic of work in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

A stressful workplace can damage your health. But so too can being out of work. Cambridge researchers are trying to understand why both situations can be detrimental to our health and wellbeing – and help employers and government provide solutions.

Employers need to understand that stress and anxiety, and mental ill health, is a large problem in terms of people not being at work, or being at work and not performing well

Carol Black

Pixabay

Meeting

Yes

Licence type:

Public Domain

̽��ֱ��boss of me: myths and truths of self-employment

fpjl2 — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 10:05:45 +0000

There is a recurring political reverie familiar to many nations: that the right policies can conjure an entrepreneurial class of the self-employed who will pull the economy up by the bootstraps of their start-ups.

When he was UK Prime Minister, David Cameron described admiring the “bravery of those who turn their back on the security of a regular wage” more than almost anything else. This was swiftly followed by the obligatory reference to creating the “next Google or Facebook”.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of self-employed people do not “wind up a billionaire” as Cameron put it. They are the window cleaners and web designers. ̽��ֱ��hairdressers and home-school tutors. And in the UK their number has grown in recent years to almost five million people – over 15% of the workforce.

Dr Brendan Burchell, an expert on work and wellbeing from Cambridge's Department of Sociology, and a Fellow of Magdalene College, talks of a disjunction between the perceived desirability of self-employment and the lived reality for millions.

“There’s long been this idea that policy mechanisms promoting self-employment have the potential to significantly reduce youth unemployment,” says Burchell, who has conducted research on everything from gender pay gaps to zero-hours contracts.

“However, while we’ve got quite good at turning unemployed people into employees, schemes to encourage self-employment – often couched in glamorous language of entrepreneurship and fronted by self-made millionaires – rarely seem to actually work.”

Burchell points out that self-employment is often politically convenient: it shifts the onus from governments to individuals, and can help with the ‘statistical impression’ of unemployment. Plus, there are always a tiny number of stellar success stories.

“Media and politicians cherry-pick aspirational accounts of self-employed people building businesses and making fortunes. Yet the available evidence from a number of economic contexts suggests that, particularly for young people, self-employment is often a highly vulnerable labour market status in terms of the levels of pay and job security it offers.”

In 2015, Burchell was commissioned by the International Labour Organization (ILO) to conduct research into patterns of self-employment in young people. Together with his Cambridge colleague Dr Adam Coutts, Burchell dug into huge datasets on the labour market experiences of 15–24-year-olds the world over – from Asia to developing nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

They found that rates of self-employment ebb and flow over the decades. In the EU, rates have been hovering around 10–15% of the workforce in most countries in the past couple of decades. But, in some of the least developed nations, up to 70% of the labour market consists of self-employed people. In many rural areas, “pretty much everyone” is self-employed says Burchell.

“Self-employment in the developing world isn’t the bold decision it’s framed as in Western economies – for many people there simply isn’t any other choice. Formal sector jobs are scarce and almost all are located in cities, so everyone else sells tasks or finite stock as individuals, with limited success.

“These are not scalable businesses that will, for example, help get Africa on the digital economy bandwagon. But many governments continue to take cues from the West, and push the idea of self-employment as a route to economic success.”

Big data approaches to analysing self-employment can be problematic, says Burchell. Wages are irregular and not always declared, and many individuals flit between the reported and ‘shadow’ economies in both high- and low-income countries.

He describes the project as having “the advantages but also frustrations of someone else’s datasets”, and a lot of time spent staring at spreadsheets. “I began itching to get out there and do my own, more ethnographic, data collection – to get people’s stories about their own businesses. So I began travelling around asking questions.”

As well as interviewing and observing in the UK, Burchell has spent time in South Africa, the US state of Nevada, and has just come back from Ghana, where his former PhD student is now researching informal employment and work–life balance.

One of the more intriguing patterns he has begun to notice in both the observational research and the big data analyses is that self-employment often tends to be a family affair.

While the traditional approach of passing a small business between generations (“Smith and son butchers, etc.”) may be in decline, Burchell is finding that self-employment still has a significant yet underreported dynastic dimension.

“ ̽��ֱ��majority of self-employed people have parents or siblings who are also self-employed – they are rooted in families where self-employment is the default, and getting a qualification to become a professional worker is quite a foreign notion.

“People from such families are perhaps more likely to grow up around discussion of profit margins and self-reliance, and feel more confident with these ideas as a result,” suggests Burchell.

“For those with a family background in it, self-employment does appear to be less risky. In fact, many self-employed people describe receiving regular help, both on and off the books, from family members.”

Burchell found many examples of this during recent research trips to South Africa – particularly for self-employed women. ̽��ֱ��sisters who operate a hair-braiding business with help from their mother. Or Joy, who runs a childcare centre developed by her aunt in premises built by her father, a self-employed construction worker.

Sometimes family members support each other’s businesses, such as Patience (pictured right) and her mother, who work separately as self-employed seamstresses but have pitches three metres apart and swap offcuts. “ ̽��ֱ��more I look, the more I think family is fundamental to understanding why some people are successfully self-employed,” says Burchell.

For many of those lucky enough to have the choice, the insecurities of self-employment are the stuff of nightmares. People tend to crave stability when making big life decisions such as having children, says Burchell.

Other benefits to being an employee include access to training and apprenticeships, meaning that – for all the entrepreneurial talk – the risks of stagnating are perhaps even greater for the self-employed.

Nevertheless, the ILO data and Burchell’s own interviews show that self-employed people are either as satisfied or, in many parts of the world (including the UK), even more satisfied with working life than their formally employed counterparts.

“ ̽��ֱ��perception of autonomy, perhaps of freedom from the tyranny of a micromanaging boss, comes up when talking to self-employed people. Also, while often working longer hours than employees, many self-employed people value the flexibility they feel their work affords them.”

Burchell argues that, up until relatively recently in the broad sweep of history, people were rewarded per task, instead of an allotted amount of hours now familiar through nine-to-five work. “There is a pride that comes with the interaction, task completion and immediate feedback that is inherent in many classic forms of self-employed work.

“Taxi drivers like chatting to passengers and dropping them off safely. Hairdressers like making customers feel better than they did when they walked in. Maintaining a sense of achievement is vital for people’s wellbeing.”

Burchell is now embarking on a large research project to explore how labour markets might change if machine learning and robots take over many of the jobs being done by people.

“As automation starts taking effect, we need to make sure that human labour is valued for the benefits it provides each of us in terms of structure and goals. What is the minimum amount of work people need to feel valued? We may see a wider return to the more task-oriented work currently familiar to many self-employed people.”

Upper inset image: read more about our research on the topic of work in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

While self-employment may not be the labour market remedy some want to believe, new research is revealing its global prevalence and intergenerational roots.

̽��ֱ��majority of self-employed people have parents or siblings who are also self-employed – they are rooted in families where self-employment is the default

Brendan Burchell

Ryoji Iwata

Unsplash

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution