Abstract
An expanded use of agency workers has followed a series of economic shocks in the UK since the 2008 financial crisis. Agency workers, unlike permanent workers, comprise a wide range of workers without regular, secure and long-term employment relations. In this article we examine the inherently contradictory employment relationship embodied by agency workers, namely employers’ wish to stabilise and make the workforce more predictable by bringing in agency workers under insecure and unstable employment terms. Based on a significant single case study of a distribution centre, the study compares two agency work regimes: one with systematic screening and employment of pre-formed workers, and the other with strong normative control over fragmented under-formed workers. The study details management strategies aimed to improve workforce stability in the more fragmented agency worker regime by bringing an employment intermediatory on-site, building coherency between the permanent and agency workers, and restraining the supervisor’s power of dismissal. These findings problematise framing agency employment based on an assumption of continuous and selective inflow of migrant workers. Rather, contrasting agency worker regimes demonstrates contested employment relations between an increasingly diverse group of agency workers and an employer seeking to instigate predictability and coherency in agency employment.
Introduction
As the UK economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, employers are confronted with rising competition for labour and decline in labour supplies (Casey and Murphy, 2021). One of the key factors contributing to labour shortages in the UK is the sharp fall of Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrant workers, who make up a significant proportion of agency worker supply (Sumption et al, 2022). Composition of agency workers is changing too, as the government adjusts immigration policies (Marino and Keizer, 2022) and the cost-of-living crisis drives new entrants and re-entrants into the labour market. These raise the question of whether employers will revert to less dependency on agency workers and if so, how employers manage the transition. This study aims to understand the ‘revaluing’ of agency workers in the light of the compositional shift in a post-Brexit, post-pandemic, and an increasingly competitive labour market environment.
Increased use of agency workers reflects the struggle over labour costs, screening and mobility. Employers can use agency worker as a demand buffer: they can be recruited when demand increases and laid off at limited statutory labour costs when demand weakens. Employing agency workers can also be part of the recruitment process to ensure a better match between worker and job. Typically, temp-to-perm schemes allows employers to select workers who have been tested through a three-month or longer working experience, serving the purposes of screening. Agency workers can also be used to manage labour mobility, being able to be quickly recruited through supply intermediaries, such as temporary employment agencies (TEAs).
Dependence on agency worker to perform regular work tasks is not without risks. Discussion of cost cutting often neglects the fact that agency workers have to perform at the same quality and productivity levels as regular workers, even though agency workers may not have continuity of employment with one employer and therefore have fewer opportunities to acquire firm-specific and product-specific knowledge about the operations of the firm. Firm-specific, line or area-specific knowledge that can only come through accumulated temporal experience, and guidance from internally grown labour, which may be resource intensive (using experienced workers to continually train and acclimatise new workers) and demoralising for established workers, who are perpetually training.
Risks associated with the use of agency workers are amplified by mobility of agency workers. Labour mobility translates into a retention issue for employers, especially where agency worker are migrants. Theunissen et al (2022: 2) note that the recent literature shows ‘how migrants’ higher (international) mobility compared to local workers may confront capital with unanticipated retention problems… and how outsourcing entails the client firm’s loss of control over workers due to the transfer to the subcontractor of the formal right and ability to steer the labour process.’ This study builds on such studies to further explore the process of reversing reliance on migrants for agency work.
There are different options with the decline in CEE migration. The government can seek to broaden the recruitment basis of migrant workers by issuing work visas to more countries (Åhlberg and Granada, 2022). In keeping with the rhetoric around Brexit, local workers can be recruited as agency workers, although reversing the dependency on CEE workers is not easy without increasing wages or the value or status of being an agency worker. Employers can move away from the use of agency workers and employ more regular or directly employed workers – this can be costly and compromise some of the demand flexibility. As we report here, another strategy is to ‘revalue’ – that is integrate, reward and better manage – agency workers alongside regular workers, and smooth the transition from one status to the other.
The empirical research is based on the logistics arm (referred to as Distribution-Co) of a large retailer (referred to as Cooperative-Co) located in an English South East new town that hosts the largest cluster of warehouse and distribution centres in the UK. Like many other firms in the sector, Distribution-Co has developed uncharacteristic dualities over the years – employing a small regular workforce and large agency workforce. The study presents a detailed portrait of management strategy to evolve new policies to accommodate the new labour market position of agency workers.
Existing research tends to infer management strategy due to the problems with accessing employers rather than documenting the process of change in detail (Scott and Rye, 2021: 474). Inferred strategy examines labour market changes, such as the growth of migrant workers and their concentrations in certain industries and then hypothesises employer strategy or causation from these relationships. Strategy is also constructed out of how workers experience employment – with ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ HR or good and bad employers – see Smith and McBride (2022). Some good case studies exist. Baxter-Reid (2016; 2021), for example, uses three case studies to interrogate the evolving nature of employers’ recruitment preferences toward CEE workers. Addressing why ‘migrants do jobs and not locals’, MacKenzie and Forde’s (2009) single case study shows the context behind employers’ preferences for migrant workers. ‘The oft-repeated explanation for these outcomes is a labour market need for migrant workers to fill jobs that indigenous workers reject… However, this is not a spontaneous process, and it is important to recognize the role played by labour market actors, particularly employers (or their agents) and the state’ (Mackenzie and Forde, 2009: 144). Following Doellgast et al (2018a), who suggest that different institutional arrangements mediate the effects of migrant workers within countries, we examine the role of employer’s preferences or strategy as shaping the use of migrant and agency workers, and document the evolution of a new strategy in the light of a decline in the availability of CEE migrants.
The article is divided into six parts. Following the introduction, we review the literature around temporary, agency and peripheral workers. We then introduce the case study, the distribution centre of a large UK retail store, and our research methods. We then empirically chart the shift in the treatment of agency workers, from more coercive to more value-based forms of control and integration. We conclude with a reassessment of the terms used to characterise agency workers.
Literature review: constructed differences between international migrants and locals
In the UK, the accession of Central and East European (CEE) countries to the EU was quickly looked upon as a business opportunity. Fitzgerald and Smoczyński, (2017: 661) note that ‘employers have tended to view… CEE workers as strategically important for competitive success… [and] at a relatively early stage, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD, 2005, 2006) reported that 25 per cent of their employer respondents were actively seeking foreign workers, including those from CEE countries’. Mackenzie and Forde (2009: 149) noted that the shifts in recruitment practice by the case study company ‘had been facilitated by labour market changes brought about by broader political developments and social upheavals, including the UK miners’ strike, war in the Balkans and the enlargement of the EU’. Recruitment agencies were also active in bridging between Western European demand and East European supply, and agency work and migrant workers became synonymous (Ward et al, 2005; Forde, and MacKenzie, 2010; Currie, 2016). Over half the CEE migrants found work through agencies (Jones, 2014). Agencies played an active role in the total ‘management’ of CEE migration to the UK through the Worker Registration Scheme, boosting agency work and business, and facilitating a continuous migration loop from Eastern Europe to employment in the UK (Sporton, 2013; Findlay et al, 2013; McCollum and Findlay, 2015).
The conceptual terrain of agency worker is built on perpetuating irregularity in employment relations, with a focus on temporary and indirect employment of migrant workers. In explaining migrants’ prevalence in agency work, a discourse of polarities divides the ‘good’ (migrant) versus the ‘bad’ (local) worker. Such a discourse, informed by managerial ideology and politics of using migrants to undermine locals, decontextualises both migrant and local workers (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009; Thompson et al, 2013; Tannock, 2015).
Friberg and Midtbøen (2019) researching two traditional working-class occupations in Norway, hotel work and fish-processing, try and account for why they have become monopolised by migrant Swedes and Lithuanians respectively. Shifts in Norwegian society, growing affluence on the back of oil wealth, and rising GDP, created what the authors call two forces – the unwilling and unwanted natives. Norwegians moving into better paying jobs as the economy booms, and a productivity boost from employing non-locals, creating new conditions at work – greater intensity, worse conditions – led to institutional detachment to some extent, and meant that local workers were not welcome even if they wanted to enter these fields. The ‘native-born workers were lacking the work ethic required to handle the physically hard, manual, and routine job tasks involved in both industries’ (p. 336). What is important is that with growing diversity in previously ‘local’ jobs, stereotyping returns: ‘Group stereotypes about “lazy Norwegian youth,” [and] “hard-working Eastern Europeans,”… appeared to trump actual individual characteristics in hiring decisions and thus played a significant role in allocating certain groups to certain positions’ (Friberg and Midtbøen, 2019: 339).
Tannock (2015) notes a research gap in the work by MacKenzie and Forde (2009), Green et al, (2009) and Wills et al, (2009) on why locals are considered ‘bad workers’. Tannock (2015: 419) notes that MacKenzie and Forde (2009) are quiet on the management’s reasons for judging local workers ‘bad’ (the reverse of the ‘good worker’ thesis). Locals with welfare benefit rights may have alternatives that migrants cannot access; or experience irregular hours and get pushed into state support. However, for Tannock, the narrative of the ‘good worker’ migrant takes centre stage. But, this is only partially true, in that MacKenzie and Forde (2009) do mention labour turnover and low commitment of young local workers as reasons for the employer in their case study company choosing migrant workers (see also Elger and Smith, 2005).
Despite the title, MacKenzie and Forde (2009) data is more than just ‘all migrants’ are good. There is selection over time, and only those who remain are good – one narrative; with those who leave, or adapt to local practices, such as getting income support instead of demanding higher wages, judged to have transitioned from being good to being bad. The MD at the MacKenzie and Forde glass company case suggested both nationality ranking of good, and a cruder, stickers good, leavers bad, as the company always seeks the newest migrants as not inherently good, but exploitable, naïve and constrained. There is a denial of migrant worker volition and local worker volition here, but an assumption that migrants conform to local norms over time (Dawson et al, 2018), and hence the need to replace those that ‘normalise’ with fresh ‘naïve’ or disembedded workers. But of course, all workers are embedded, and employment relations are not dissolved through importing naïve workers.
Baxter-Reid (2016: 342) discusses the reverse journey to the one we report, namely the shift from a fragmented to a more integrated recruitment basis for agency workers in her three case studies. Prior to European Union (EU) enlargement from 2004, in each case study she reported a history of recruitment and retention problems. Managers said that in the past they had relied on: ‘young Irish girls, on their summer holidays, looking for a “jolly”’; and then ‘expensive Spanish agency workers who just wanted to learn English and move on’ (executive housekeeping manager, Hotel Co); ‘agency workers who were all ex-cons and they were a nightmare’ (plant manager, Laundry Co); and ‘skilled tradesmen who would float in and out of the bus industry’ (training manager, Bus Co). CEE workers were a fundamental element of each organisation’s more targeted recruitment strategy, creating a dominant core to their agency workers. Our case explores the ending of this dominant core, and a new pattern of recruitment fragmentation for agency workers.
case study of employment shift at a meat processing factory in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales,… demonstrates how the promotion and acceptance by employers and others of a discourse that constructs Merthyr locals as bad workers reframes a history of local labour conflict as a matter of endemic worker deficit, and shifts attention away from problems of poor job quality to alleged problems of poor local labour supply, thus legitimating the turn to employing migrant workers in the first place.
Tannock presents interesting data on the social construction of the ‘bad worker’ narrative – but it does not seem that he’s interviewed management in the case company, and strategic use of migrant workers from his single case study employer is inferred not documented through interviews. While developing a rich ‘local case study’ framework for why ‘migrants’ are favoured and local workers demonised, one might equally say, at a sector level, that the meat processing industry from which he takes a case, is dominated by migrant workers in Europe and the US (Kandel and Parrado, 2005; Lillie and Wagner, 2015; Lever and Milbourne, 2017; Voivozeanu, 2019; Centamore, 2020; Weltin, 2021). Therefore, this is a global, sector, multinational company strategy, and not a local story per se. No doubt in each case of migrants moving into space previously occupied by locals (if this is how it has been constructed), similar stories are enacted. But it’s a global story with local colour, and the global and macro-economic context remains important.
Regardless of the constructed differences in the work ethic of locals and migrants, overwhelmingly there is a cost and control case for employers using migrant workers (Anderson, 2010). Workers retain effort power and mobility power (Smith, 2006), as inherent freedoms over the effort they expend in the labour process or production and the decision on ‘where and to which employer’ (Thompson and Smith, 2009: 924) they sell their labour. The indeterminacy of labour power is a source of uncertainty for capital, which needs to be reduced by developing a managerial apparatus to ensure that labour power is delivered by workers (Smith, 2006).
Using recruitment and selection, of specifically migrant workers, to dissolve structural conflict within the labour process is a managerial fantasy. Nevertheless, there are constant attempts by management to follow this path. Management is a control function, and its raison d’être is to compete within the specialist functions that occupy the capital function, to provide control recipes (Zheng and Smith, 2019). Researchers are empirically required to uncover the way practices are employed and uncover the tensions between structure and agency. This cannot be read off from the functions of labour or capital, labour market patterns or institutionalisation, or other external determinants, as within each workplace there are nuances and creativity produced from the working out of conflicts, which are not simple outputs, or standard products, because competition between capitals, new technologies and innovations in labour process dynamics, make established labour regime settlements vulnerable to change.
Analytically, our case study examines the move away from casualisation of labour through use of CEE agency workers, which was dominant under certain macro-economic conditions which Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic have eroded, towards a strategy of re-integration of agency workers back into the firm as a new more regularised work force. The new strategy comes from different macro-economic conditions and is designed to produce a quicker route into the regular workforce for agency workers and a re-classification of agency workers as ‘agency partners’. Under casualisation there is the outsourcing of the management function to labour market intermediaries who are autonomous of the firm and committed to supply what we call pre-formed agency workers into the labour process. Under the emerging labour regime, there is an internalisation of the management function as a more diverse set of agency workers are introduced without prior or pre-forming in another society, rather they are locals or new temporary workers who require more management, more supervision and more engagement between the labour supplying employment agency and the employing firm.
We capture these differences by proposing two agency labour regimes: one that is dependent predominantly on pre-formed workers (PFWs) and the other built on under-formed workers (UFWs). PFWs are trained with experience of waged labour, and social reproduction of migrant labour happened elsewhere, therefore the costs of human capital formation and social reproduction come ‘free’ to the UK employers and state (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009: 144). They appear as ‘ideal’ workers when they enter new labour markets as ‘outsiders’ (typically through a migrant or immigrant route) as they have a deinstitutionalising impact by presenting something ‘new’ in the country or regional or local context. UFWs require more management investment to form them into a useful agency workforce; they are not a unified group, as are the CEE workers, but more diverse, consisting of those new to the labour market – students, and long-term carers, sick workers or unemployed. They include those made redundant through COVID-19, retirees, and labour market returners, who have not experienced modern production processes characterised by the logistics sector, the empirical site for this research.
With the heavy dependence on under-formed agency workers, new challenges to management arise. In this emergent regime, supervisors are trained to respect both agency and permanent workers, who should enjoy an equal work status. Moreover, senior management delegate experienced workers to motivate co-workers, thus establishing a peer-to-peer system of control. Interviewed workers shared a sense of greater autonomy at work. Furthermore, management mobilise the more integrated single TEA to coordinate organisational tasks such as initial training and work-shift scheduling, with varying degrees of success.
Methodology: a significant case study informed by mixed qualitative data
The case is significant in two aspects. The case is typical in the sense that the company had a split workforce – locals were largely on direct regular contracts, and agency staff indirect contracts. The company was heavily dependent on agency workers from CCE countries until Brexit made this recruitment strategy untenable. It is widely reported that workforce segmentation is the norm in logistics and distribution, and ‘globally, warehouses tend to reproduce superior “hegemonic” labour conditions for permanent workers and inferior “despotic” conditions for workers on short-term contracts or workers employed through temping agencies’ (Barnes and Ali, 2021: 2). The case company is constrained by the ‘employment model’ of relying on a relatively small core regular workforce and a large group of indirectly employed workers commonly found in logistic warehouses and distribution centres (Bonacich and De Lara, 2009; Newsome, 2010; 2015; Boewe and Schulten, 2017; Briken and Taylor, 2018; Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2020; Dörflinger et al, 2021; Vallas et al, 2022).
Doellgast et al (2018) have argued that precarious work could be contained through the ‘virtuous’ interaction of inclusive institutions, union strategies, workers solidarity and voice-oriented employers’ practices. The interdependence between employment law, national industrial relations systems and union power at the sectoral level is considered necessary to maintain collective protection (Doellgast et al, 2009). (Marino and Keizer, 2022: 3)
Our case company has special ‘voice-oriented employers’ practices’ as a cooperative or partnership ownership structure.
The site we researched consists of two distribution centres (DCs) which are linked to each other. But there is a third DC on the same ‘park’ and another part of the company partnership was in a separate DC – making four DCs in total. During the early phase of the lockdowns there was some sharing of staff, as the grocery DC came under enormous pressure as households switched to home consumption and demand for groceries rocketed. Further, the city where the DCs are located has zero unemployment, a cluster of over 25 DCs and growing. Anecdotally, we were told that each worker has a choice of four employers. In summary, the context of the research is one of changing supply, increasing demand and enormous pressure on operational workloads.
The first site visit was in March 2020. We maintained regular contact with the key informant before resuming on-site fieldwork in October 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions to site visits were lifted. A second round of fieldwork was done in March 2022, when most of our interviews took place. Over the course of the research, Cooperative-Co closed retail stores, most closed temporarily during the pandemic lockdown but 16 were permanently shut. During the same period, online business grew rapidly in an environment where securing labour supply became more of a struggle. Our initial focus was on whether technology was replacing missing migrant workers. We were informed, however, that suddenness of COVID-19 pressures meant longer-term technology replacement was put on hold (online interview, Operational Manager, March 2021). Our research focus, therefore changed to management strategies in response to labour shortage.
During the three rounds of site visits, we collected mixed qualitative data, including company documents and reports, surveys, and in-person interviews with individuals and focus groups. The researchers conducted interviews off the job. In total, 43 permanent and agency workers took part in the interviews. Interviewees came from all three shifts, five departments, and included entry-level workers, team leaders and managers. We interviewed ten managers. We also interviewed two staff members from the TEA, which provides on-site support. Documentations included a report on agency workers’ experiences before 2018, findings from a recent survey conducted among the regular workforces, and information shared at a communication meeting which we attended.
Findings
Revaluing agency work in tighter labour markets
Cooperative-Co’s on-line business has grown rapidly in recent years and accounted for over 60 per cent of sales turnover by the end of March 2022. Consequently, Distribution-Co faced increased demands for workers. The retail stores use more direct employment. Workers with permanent employment were called ‘partners’ with a stake in the ownership structure of the company. Unlike the retail stores, Distribution-Co’s employment structure is typical in the logistic sector: a small regular workforce supported by agency workers, many of whom are male workers (Newsome, 2010; 2015). The ratio of agency workers is normally 50 per cent, surging to 75 per cent during peak times such as Black Friday or Christmas.
One of the attractions we put to the agency [workers] is, you know, you come and join us as an agency, you can become partner. Actually, we don’t have a true path at all. My theory was that there was somebody in the middle of our organisation, who are saying, ‘Well, that isn’t how we do things, and you cannot do it.’ Now, one day, NAME and I were involved in a wider network meeting where various heads of the business were in on an online conversation, and the subject was resources. So that’s why NAME and I got involved in. We quite quickly jumped in and said, ‘Actually, you know, we have this very inadequate system. We’ve got a lot of agency [workers] that we couldn’t make partners. It takes months to convert an applicant to a partner.’ Although I say it was not very successful, 5 per cent of the people that became partners, were ex-agency. So, we said, what would be ideal is, if we could carry on. We get the whole ‘we need to recruit external talent’, because they do bring some other business. But, if we could carry on in a way that we could recruit 75 per cent for 2022, straight from the agency, without any interview, without any of the other processes in place, that will be fantastic. So, [the site manager] then went and took that away. And he spoke to his counterparts everywhere [in the company]. And we’ve agreed it can be done but there is a price. The workday personnel system we have isn’t set up for it. But they found a workaround which can make it work. And in January, [we went] forward with this temp-to-perm process. (Resource manager, male, 52)
It’s all about how we treated agency [workers]. So, one of the big things for me was to give people a chance to improve… [When a manager says to me that] ‘I want to get rid of them’, what I would say is ‘what have you done to let them improve?’ Okay. Fine. Have it your way. I’m going to buddy this person up with somebody, and I’m going to train them again. And we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. And from that we had a 50 per cent success rate of actually investing some time in somebody and them becoming either what they wanted or even better. The other 50 per cent must have done this as well. I am happy to say, well, if they’re not successful, and you still want to get rid of them, then that sounds fair enough to me… We started to see a change in momentum. This made me feel that we were finally treating them as equal. And giving them the opportunity to improve and a lot of these people are now partners, some of them became managers. (Resource manager, male, 52)
These changes were needed given Distribution-Co now faces more fragmented sources of labour, following Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and the decline CEE migrants in the supplies of agency workforce.
An established agency labour regime dependent on a pre-formed workforce
Dependence on PFWs for agency work was built on the back of EU enlargement, which enabled employers to target migrants from new member states. At the workplace level, many employers such as Distribution-Co, were able to maintain a core supply of migrants as agency workers. These migrants are often target earners, and therefore are willing to work overtime. They are also more likely to cover all forms of flexible working arrangements, working unsocial hours, accepting irregular contract terms, and putting up with performance pressure at work. They face extra demands to show their work effort, reinforced by stereotyping of CCE migrants (Meardi, 2007; Samaluk, 2014). Many PFWs are technically overqualified for their jobs, which echoes existing literature on CCE migrant workers in Western Europe (that is, Leschke and Weiss, 2020; Kracke and Klug, 2021). This is partly due to their lack of social networks in the host society, and migrants working outside the institutional framework of the host society.
TEAs played a central role in maintaining a core group of migrants as agency workers. Employers’ preferences were mediated by outsourcing recruitment to third-party employment firms. TEAs find it easier to locate labour supplies through one dominant group, which has been reported in existing literature (Sporton, 2013; McCollum and Findlay, 2015; Baxter-Reid, 2016; Samaluk, 2014; 2016). Specialised in labour supply, TEAs compete in a fragmented market for labour, promising a steady supply of well-trained workers to get contracts, and often scrambling to source workers by expanding into segments of the labour markets. The diverse nature of current agency partners – there is a mixture of student workers (international, local and in-college and in-university); older workers; retirees; those displaced by COVID-19; those who have been out of the labour market for a long time; aspirant migrant workers; and those experiencing downward mobility. As agency workers, their agency company treats the diversity, according to one of our informants, as simply ‘labour’: ‘at the end of the day, the agency (which I work for) just wants to put bodies in this warehouse, period. They don’t care whether you like where you work or whether you don’t’ (Agency worker, male, 50, replenishment).
[B]efore Brexit, we used to have a lot of Eastern Europeans. They used to work, like 5, 6, 7 days a week, doing all sorts of extra hours, overtime, and so on. (On-site TEA, female, 26)
I probably shouldn’t say this. If things are not right, you can of course complain. But complaining just makes you trouble. I came here to improve and learn, not just complain. (Permanent workers, garment, female, 38)
An emergent agency labour regime built on an under-formed workforce (UFWs)
I mean, we’ve heard that people are not willing to work, or it’s become more complex. People want to work; it is just their hours are distributed. There wasn’t a kind of a tap, which you could turn on and the supply came out. It became very difficult finding your source. There are different types of workers who are out there. So, we’ve obviously interviewed some people, who maybe have a second job somewhere else, or people carrying responsibilities, or they’re looking after their kids. And they just only want a few hours. (On-site TEA office worker, female, 26)
This interviewee is thinking through the differences in the two regimes. These elements emerge: workers have different motivations (‘willingness to work’) and distinct availability (from workers being ‘on tap’ to the difficulty of ‘finding your source’) and divergent types of worker (those focused only on work and those with ‘a second job’ or other ‘responsibilities’ or ‘looking after their kids’). Finally, the two regimes are fed with different volumes of workers – one reliant on fewer workers working more hours; the other, more workers with ‘hours distributed’ more thinly. As this quote makes clear, supply of labour is not the issue: ‘it’s not necessary [just] that if we have big numbers, it didn’t work for the business very well’. This quote describes two agency worker regimes well.
As much as we have a lot of resources, under-18s or those on student visas, this year we have found that under 30 years old is more difficult to manage, regarding attendance. It seems like they don’t really care. They just come in here, not to worry about work, [but to] have fun, chat with friends, and so on. So, it’s not necessary that if we have big numbers, it didn’t work for the business very well. So, this year we will look closely to progress on how to better manage them. Because obviously we can’t afford not to take under-18s or student visas. We will need to leave this for a few years probably. So yeah, it was harder to manage those who are younger. (On-site TEA office worker, female, 24)
In contrast to younger students, those at university we interviewed were more flexible, had a different attitude to work, and were looked on positively by the TEA as a workforce that was familiar with waged work, was functionally flexible, motivated and found tasks relatively easy and were willing to learn and do different tasks. None of them felt attached to one task or department, all felt the jobs were relatively easy to pick up, some said the length of time set aside for training/induction was too long, that they picked up the task quickly (a few hours) and nothing was too challenging. They were not so numerically flexible – limited to 20 or 16 hours per week; but they could fit in with demand – one student was working Saturdays and Sundays; the others used the app to book work as it fitted with their studies. All were older than UK students, with an average age of 27.
I’ve never had a problem with getting shifts. I’ve never had a problem. Just dealing with them [TEAs]. They need some adult supervision. When I get a reply from them, I feel I’m talking to a teenager. You understand what I’m saying? You know, when you get a message or an email, you get an idea who’s talking to you and the people who’s talking. They tend to be very, very young people. I’m not being prejudiced here. And they need someone that actually knows what they’re doing. (Agency worker, P2P, male, 50)
Facing more fragmented and diverse agency workforces, Distribution-Co was no longer able to achieve multiple flexibility by targeting a single source of labour. International students offered numerical, but not functional flexibility. The UK’s immigration rules restricted working hours to a maximum of 20 hours per week during term time for those on a student visa. The mature local workers offer more functional flexibility, but not numerical.
It’s just training in different departments. You know, if you are assigned to one department, you are just a piece of the jigsaw. They’ve sent you to a department to learn that job and then you’ll come back. This is not really for me. It’s just that I’m doing them a favour of becoming multi-skilled. Being multi-skilled means when they are short staffed in one hour, they could send me there. It is not a benefit to me, but to the company. So, the training really doesn’t benefit me. (Male, agency partner, 45)
I will not consider a permanent position because I need to take 2-month leave every year to see my family in XXXX. (Female, agency partner)
I’ve been approached for the second round of partnership. So, they may contact me in the next month, offering me something. But, if they offered me something outside this department, I would refuse. (Agency partner)
Every peak time, we have a big percent of people who come back year after year to us. But it’s [only during the] Christmas period, which will be super busy. They will earn all of money they can. And later, it will be a bit quiet, and they will get one or two days, or maybe several hours of work, or maybe no work at all. And they keep coming back. I noticed that the same names are going around all warehouses nearby as well, because I used to work in another supplier, and I see the same names. Of course, I don’t remember all of them. But because it’s local and people just going around. (On-site TEA office worker, female, 24)
Higher numbers and more diverse agency workers pushed up administrative costs of using agency workers: more search costs, more training time, and less chance for specialisation among the agency workers. The estimate is that the numbers of agency workers has doubled to cover the same hours of work provided under the previous agency regime. ‘Two years ago, the shift average was 4.3. This year, it was only 2.5. So obviously, we had to recruit almost double the amount of people to cover the same amount of work’ (On-site TEA office worker, female, 26).
Managing UFWs required management to undertake ‘post-entry forming’ – a conscious and expensive investment in management time and effort to shape these workers to fit company needs. This emergent agency labour regime built on UFWs was generated against a political back story of Brexit, reduced European migration (especially CEE), and ambiguity in the UK government’s drive for a ‘high wage, local labour’ economy.
Management tactics in the agency labour regime shift
The two regimes are connected: the decline of one has left a gap for the emergence of the other. Given the contrast in workforce composition and direct and indirect administrative costs, there has been a strategic shift to instigate more coherence and stability into the overall workforce. The strategic shift is reflected in redrawing boundaries between agency and permanent workers, adopting more distributed and peer-to-peer effort control over productivity and performance, added administrative roles played by the TEA in attendance and working hours monitoring (see Figure 1 for an illustration).
Shift in agency worker regimes
Citation: Work in the Global Economy 2, 2; 10.1332/273241721X16669607557238
Shift in agency worker regimes
Citation: Work in the Global Economy 2, 2; 10.1332/273241721X16669607557238
Shift in agency worker regimes
Citation: Work in the Global Economy 2, 2; 10.1332/273241721X16669607557238
Redrawing boundaries between agency and permanent workers
I had a perception that agencies felt part of the team, because within the department I worked, my DM [Department Manager] at the time made sure that they were included in all meetings. It was easier to achieve because we had a small group of agencies. So, to make them feel part of the team was very easy. So, I had this illusion that the rest of site was like the same. That wasn’t necessarily the case. In other departments, it’s very much like, a meeting took place, ‘No, you are agency, you stay out there. We’re going to go and have our meetings.’ Events took place, ‘You are agency, you can’t be involved’… I do get how it was more difficult to achieve in the larger departments, where in peak, on any shift, they could have 100 agency workers and, in our department, we had 10 agency workers in peak – completely different setup. So that was the mission: to start sort of changing how the other departments may notice how agency workers feel. When we call them an ‘agency partner’, they had to feel like an agency partner. (Resource manager, male, 52)
I tried a different tactic. And I said, ‘Look, you do realise, legally agency workers can take you personally to a tribunal? Would you like there to be a record of the conversation you had with them in 10-month time from now? And if they tried to claim that you’re being prejudiced towards them, we got this record of conversations.’ So, I managed to get a little bit more buy-in from that. And that gave us the structure, which we could then work with managers and had some wins. (Resource manager, male, 52)
Line managers were given more autonomy in choosing agency workers to become permanent on their teams. The trade-off for this was the loss of their power of dismissal, as retaining workers and avoiding mass quitting became a management priority in the post-Brexit situation. Blurring boundaries between agency and permanent workers did have some positive effect, especially among those who had recently made the transfer from agency to permanent contract. Being able to secure fixed days of work and hence more security in income was cited as the main reason for people who made the transfer. However, many said that their terms of employment were ‘diluted’ or became ‘an illusion’. Some agency workers also refused to identify with the ‘partner’ title, concerned with more time and efforts being attached to the title despite their agency status, as noted by the interviewee quoted earlier who was critical of training.
Distributed peer-to-peer effort control
Even when we had less people, but they could work more to help business needs, we are ok. Now we have people who just don’t want to work any more. Three days’ pay is good as well. Working three or four days, they can earn as much as working five or six days. So why would they do extra days if they can survive [on] those days, especially now when everything is kind of closed [referring to the pandemic closures]? (On-site TEA office worker, female, 24)
We leave you to do [the packing] independently at the station, and then we just shadow you. If you need help from us, we will come to you. Otherwise, we give you that space. What we are looking for, is quality, always quality, not making too many mistakes or a single mistake, especially in this department. Packages go directly to the customer. So, you will be picking an item, no one else is going to see it, and the next person seeing it is the customer. So, we try to make sure that people are not pressurised to pick fast and make mistakes, which affects the customers. When you are relaxed, the [target] number will be met. (Peer trainer, D2C, male, 51)
The operational costs of the peer-trainer system are high – each trainer commits four hours per week to be away from their daily job to provide peer-to-peer training. According to the training manager, 200 people are qualified peer trainers in 2021, which is approximately one fifth of the total workforce. The same training manager also estimated that the ideal level of peer trainers would be one in four to reach the target of 99.6 per cent accuracy in fulfilling the orders.
Added on-site administrative roles of the TEA
So, [Distribution-Co] plans the numbers they need in each department, and they provide us [with] the numbers. This is when we start recruiting. And [the] recruitment team recruits based on those numbers. We do fulfilling once candidates come over here on site, we do inductions. [Distribution-Co] arranges training teams and team leaders. But our team work closely with the candidates to help them understand the experiences, [assess] if they will pass, and so on. After they passed training, we plan shifts by giving people their work. We also help check performances of the people and identify where they need help or a coach. If there are any behaviour issues, we conduct a couple of discussions. Actually a few years ago, we became a managed service provider. (On-site TEA office worker, female, 24)
Organisational integration between Distribution-Co and TEAs also created conflicts and problems. Over-dependence on one TEA led to a clash between the needs for efficiency and social or cultural values of the company. For example, the technical fix to bring in workers in a timely manner can over-promise and cause problems. The on-site TEA adopted a booking app designed to map weekly schedules and respond to changing demands swiftly. However, both managers and workers reported that additional paperwork was required to keep an accurate record of workers, schedules and pay. Technical glitches caused delayed payment, which left more grief among older workers. Distribution-Co’s preference for being viewed by the workers as a caring employer requires the technical systems to work. However, the stress on care was harder to realise when technical and operational inefficiencies forced workers to spend extra time to correct administrative or technical errors.
Discussion and conclusion
We argue that the meaning of temporary or agency workers is not given by the technical terms or definition of the employment contract. Rather we need to bring in the social relations that form these categories. Here we suggest that agency worker regimes are constructed into two different forms: systemic and integrated, and fragmented and diverse. We discuss this in two forms or conditions of the workforces: PFWs and UFWs. PFWs are ‘made elsewhere’ and enter local labour markets not requiring additional and conscious management input. Pre-forming creates an abstract aura around such workers, hence, in the case of migrant workers, they are idealised within a rhetoric of the ‘good worker’ debate, cooperating with management wishes and seemingly above the norms of employment relations conflict. Equally, pre-forming can mean these workers are not institutionally embedded and are more vulnerable to super exploitation compared with local workers. Workers formed elsewhere enter a new territory with racialised bodies, which can exclude them from sectors, and limit opportunities. For example, only Southern Italians or non-Italian migrant labour embodies working in slaughter houses; the idea that ‘dirty work’ is linked to certain bodies; but also the less exclusive idea that migrants have choices and can monopolise certain areas and exclude locals through the motivations they bring – the need to earn as target-earners (Piro and Sacchetto, 2021).
UFWs comprise a more diverse and internally incoherent set of actors, with different motivations, attitudes towards work and life activities, and lacking the singularity of the CEE migrant base of the PFWs. Faced with UFWs, management agency is to the fore, not simply in terms of ‘choice’ of workers, but what they are required to do to create a stable workforce, secure working hours, maintain productivity, as well as accommodate flexible working – all of which could be taken for granted under PFWs. Workers’ ‘mobility power’ is magnified among UFWs.
Findings of this study show a reverse or counter process to the existing literature that documented the transition from local to migrant workforces (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009; Thompson et al, 2013; Tannock, 2015; Baxter-Reid, 2016). We offer a critique to the structural model and rationales around the employment of migrant labour, which have the tendency to deny the agency of migrant workers and overstate constraints and employer power. Transition in agency labour regimes involves internal politics and struggles around changing the orientation of managers away from CEE migrants under the external pressures of Brexit and later the COVID-19 pandemic, and towards locals and diverse sets of migrants. The case reveals in detail the precise way broad labour market shifts are mediated in management politics and strategic practice. Stressing ‘context’ (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009: 143), our case study considered both local economy effects and organisational effects. Located in a concentrated and expanding hub/cluster of distribution centres in a low unemployment region in the UK, management were under pressure to improve internal offers and strengthen the social values of the firm to manage the labour market (see Elger and Smith, 2005). At workplace level, restructuring the allocation and distribution of agency workers gave rise to an emergent agency labour regime.
Schematically, we chart a movement in agency labour regimes. Around the systematic and integrated agency labour regime, there is a ‘dominant’ narrative that informs discussion of migrant workers, especially CEE workers, in the UK labour market. Discussions focus on sudden increase in CEE workers, a polarised debate about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ workers as noted in the literature review, the impact migrants have on local jobs and wages, and the broader political debate around Brexit fuelled by anti-CEE sentiments. Around the fragmented and diverse agency labour regime, there is a ‘fragmented’ narrative: no single group dominates agency workers, each group has its own interests and needs. As shown in our case study, management are forced to reduce coercive control performance management, and move towards more indulgent, indirect and value-based control models. The internal shift in the management of agency workers reflects changing dynamics of mobility bargaining and effort bargaining at the workplace level, in a labour market environment where workers have a greater choice of jobs as well as different commitments to hours of working.
Interpretation of the wider implications of findings from this study needs to consider the specificities of the research context. Our case study company is located in the affluent southeast of England, and not in other regions that have experienced post-industrial decline and new industries, such as DCs, that have grown out of the ashes of older, unionised, community-based, white, male industries. Location of migrants and research on migrants, including the framing paper for the ‘good worker’ thesis MacKenzie and Forde (2009) (Barnsley), tended to be on post-industrial or declining industrial regions of the Midlands and North (or Wales, Tannock, 2015), also colliery towns, such as Pattison’s (2022) work on Shirebrook in Derbyshire, home to Amazon – though workers for the company are bussed in from other cities. Location or specificity of regional labour markets matters. Histories of older industries create lasting legacies – often industries are more homogeneous (white and male) and industries were strongly community based, such as the mining industry in Shirebrook (Pattison, 2020). Our case is in a new town with low unemployment.
Further comparative studies exploring the effects of regional labour markets will be useful to evaluate our propositions. Timing of the research is in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic following Brexit, when companies had to look for alternative sources of labour. Longitudinal research will help further investigate the dynamic social relations that underpin agency labour regimes.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the company in the paper for giving us access and to all those who gave their time during the research process. We thank Chris Forde and Bob MacKenzie for an email discussion on their work. An early version of the paper was presented to the 40th International Labour Process Conference in Padua, Italy, and we thank those that attended and debated our presentation. Finally, the paper greatly benefitted from the reviewers and thanks for their thoughtful observations and comments.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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