 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the 18th meeting in 2015 of the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee. Can I welcome all members? Welcome our witnesses. I'll introduce them shortly and welcome visitors to the public gallery. Can I remind everyone please to turn off or at least turn to silent all mobile phones and other electronic devices so that they don't interfere with the committee's work? It's a small housekeeping issue. It's quite warm in here. People want to remove their jackets. Feel free to do that. Nobody will be reprimanded for inappropriate dress. Item 1 on the agenda. Can I ask if members are content that responsibility is delegated to the convener for arranging the SPCB to pay under rule 12.4.3 any expenses of witnesses to our inquiry? Item 2 on the agenda. Can I ask if the committee are content that we take item 4 in private? Can I also ask the committee whether they are content that in future all reviews of evidence heard at future meetings in connection with the work wages and wellbeing inquiry are taken in private? We now move to item 3, and we are starting to take evidence on our inquiry into work wages and wellbeing. I would like to welcome our first panel, Martin Talbot, who is the Public Health Information Manager of NHS Health Scotland. We are also joined by Lucy Stokes, who is a senior research fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Annie Lane-Drennan, head of employability skills and lifelong learning analysis at the Scottish Government. The way in which we are going to run this morning is that we have two presentations, one from NHS Scotland and then one from NIESR. I think that we are allowing roughly 15 minutes or so for each, starting with NHS Scotland. I think that what I would quite like to do if we can is just allow the presenter to run through the presentations without interruption. If there are points of clarification that you want to ask about, then by all means catch my eye and we will interrupt. I think that we can try and keep the substantive questions until we have seen both the presentations and then we can bring in the three witnesses that we have to answer any questions that you might have. We are allowing about 40 minutes, about 50 minutes for each presentation and then about 45 minutes for discussion after that. I will hand over to you, Martin Talbot. Thank you for coming. Thank you very much for the opportunity to come along this morning. What I am going to talk about in this first presentation is working health, why it matters for Scotland and what might be done. What I am going to cover in this presentation is the first point just to get across is that being out of work is bad for your health. That raises the risk of premature mortality and raises the risk of other illnesses, particularly mental health problems. That good quality work is better for health than bad work, and I will go on to define what would be meant by that later on. The importance of underpinning social security systems that can act to protect or destroy health. The substantial overlap between bad work and no work, where those people who are most exposed to the risk of being out of work are also those who are most likely to be looking for work, which is bad for your health. The final point, the bright spot in this, is to emphasise that none of this is inevitable and there is much that can be done about it. The slides behind me, in the written evidence that we submitted, we drew on a study that gathered together evidence from more than 40 international studies that showed that premature mortality among the unemployed was more than 60 per cent higher compared to those in work. That is some data specifically for Scotland, and what you see here is the risk of premature mortality for adults aged 35 to 64. It takes a sample of people in 1991, the 1991 census, and followed them up for seven years. What you see under the Y axis is the risk of premature mortality. The comparison here is being in work, so being in work is one. If the bar moves above one, the risk of premature mortality increases. You can see that, where you add in the compare the unemployed to the employed, you can see here that the risk of premature mortality increases to almost 60 per cent higher, which is in line again, as I have said with the international studies, and that this risk extends to the early retired and also the permanently sick. Well, not all jobs are equal, some jobs are better than others, but what makes a job good for health? Well, I think that we can draw on the evidence to at least get some clearer ideas about what that might involve. Ideally, what you would want is employment that reduces poverty and insecurity. You would also want an appropriate balance between the level of control and demand at work. What I mean by that is that there is some strong evidence, particularly initially from the Whitehall studies, but subsequently over the last 30 years we have accumulated quite a lot more evidence that if you have a fairly demanding job, a stressful job, that is not necessarily bad in itself. However, what seems particularly bad for your health is that if you have low control over the way, the discretion that you have about what you do at your job, how you go about it and even extending to things like, for example, how easy would it be, for example, a family emergency, could you take time off readily, would that be an issue? And where those things combine, where you have quite a demanding job and limited control, that is especially bad for your health. Things that can help, well, manager and colleague support, if there is a degree of manager and colleague support there, then that can help protect somewhat against the ill effects of employment. And also, finally, effort and reward, where those are out of counter. Again, from the Whitehall studies, but also from other research as well, where there is a perceived imbalance between the effort that people put in at work and the reward that they receive, then that has a detrimental effect both on increasing the risk of premature mortality, but also a risk of other illnesses as well. To illustrate that, I am using some data from the Scottish Health Survey. What you see here on the Y axis, the vertical axis, is a measure of mental health problems, the GHQ12. Higher proportions of having a high GHQ12 score would indicate a possible mental health problem. Along the bottom of the slide, what I have done is have split up the different categories of people in employment in the Scottish Health Survey, all of those people in employment and divided them into different groups by two characteristics, how much control they report having over their work and also whether they are in a low, mid or high income household. You can see right at the end there that the high proportion of people with a possible mental health problem are those with the low income group, low household income but also low control over their work. If you go right over to the left-hand side, you will see that those with the lowest proportion of people with possible mental health problems are those with medium or high incomes, household incomes but also with a high control over their work. You will notice too that this is not a simple distinction between one group being bad and everyone else, but there is also a gradient there. It is a reasonable argument to say that you have to do both. You have to look at the degree of control people have over their work but also the amount of income going on to people's households. I want to move on now and talk about the underpinning to that, social security and health. What I am going to show is that the type and design of the social security system does matter. This is some data from Frank Popham and colleagues published in 2013. What they did was to compare the inequalities in life expectancy between those with the highest, groups with the highest life expectancy, groups with the lowest life expectancy across a range of countries internationally. They grouped those countries into different categories depending on how they would describe their welfare states. You have the ex-Soviet welfare states, the Nordics, the Bismarckian systems, the more insurance-based systems that are used in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and the Anglo-Saxon systems. The point here that is probably relevant to Scotland is that it is around about the middle of the pack. We may not be the worst at protecting against inequalities but we are certainly not among the best. For men it is the Nordic welfare states that seem to be best at protecting against reducing inequalities and mortality. For women, the similar point can be made that the Anglo-Saxon states are not among the worst but they are certainly not among the best. It is the southern European and the Bismarckian systems, as I have said, that apply in the Germany, Netherlands and Belgium countries that are more effective at reducing health inequalities. The role of work in reducing inequalities is important to look at the quantity of work that is available and the quality of work that is available. This is some data that simply compares the number of vacancies reported through the employer skills survey in 2013 and shows it in comparison to the number of unemployed people using the survey-based measure in the annual population survey. In places such as Aberdeen City and Shire, in that region of Scotland, every 10 unemployed people in 2013 were around 10 jobs vacancies available. If everything was equal and everything is not equal, it might be relatively easier in that part of Scotland to secure employment. Everything is not equal, but let's move on to the next bit. However, in other parts of Scotland you have the situation where, in 2013, Glasgow in the Clyde valley, Tayside and the 4th valley, for every 10 unemployed people there were just two job vacancies in 2013. Again, all things being equal, it would be much harder for someone to seek work to secure employment there. In terms of the quality of work, the way in which I want to illustrate this is to return to our measure of the GHQ12, which, as I said, is a measure of possible mental health problems, on the y axis, the vertical axis, higher scores indicating an increased probable mental health problem. Along the horizontal axis, what I have shown is that the best and worst of occupations in terms of how they rank in terms of possible mental health problems are just results for men. They are preliminary, but they are illustrative of what's going on. You can see that, for example, the highest risk of mental health problems among men in employment is observed for customer service occupations. For example, that might include contact centre jobs, elementary trades, which is quite another big category there. That would include, for example, warehouses and labourers. Also, a smaller category for men, because it's more dominated by women, if you like, is caring personal services, but they also have a higher proportion of people at a greater risk of mental health problems. Down at the other side of the graph, you can see occupations with rather lower risk of mental health problems, including a number of professionals, but also, for example, skilled metal and electrical trades and protected services. In terms of the benefits of promoting good work and fair employment, I think that this can be illustrated through some work that was done by the Scottish Public Health Observatory, which was published at the end of last year. It was the informing investment to reduce health inequalities tool, or triple I for short. That looked at a range of different types of health interventions in terms of the contribution that they might make to improving population health and reducing health inequalities. In the charts, as you move along the right of that graph, you're seeing population health improving, so you start to accumulate lives being saved, potentially through particular interventions. As you move down the graph, below zero, you're seeing inequalities in health falling, so those that are most disadvantaged are gaining more and the health gap is narrowing. Thankfully, you'll see that a lot of the interventions models have that effect. They all sit in the bottom right-hand quadrant in that they both improve population health, so you're increasing the number of lives saved, and they also have an effect of reducing health inequalities. What you can also see there is that some of the most effective measures of reducing health inequalities are the living wage, which is quite effective in terms of its population health reach. It's modestly effective at reducing health inequalities. It's not the most poverty-reducing measure precisely because of the way that employment and those paid below the living wage are structured in the economy and the type of households that they live in, but it does have that relatively positive effect. The most effective measure of reducing health inequalities was an increase in the value of job seekers allowance and income support. Increased employment was also effective at improving population health and reducing health inequalities when it was targeted at the most deprived areas of Scotland. What might help? We've suggested a number of interventions in the written evidence, but I'm just going to try and summarise them briefly here if that's okay. First of all, looking at job creation, proportionate to need. Secondly, perhaps when we're a balanced approach to social security and also looking at personal circumstances in more detail, looking at issues like childcare and the health conditions of people in work. Also, when people move from out of work to in work, is there anything that we can do to support them better to remain in employment and therefore sustain those health gains there? Also, increasing wages and benefits. I think that it's important to underline that you have to look at increasing the income going into households as well as improving the quality of work. That, I think, is my second last point, which is about looking to improve job quality. The suggestion there is about improving the voice of workers. That could include things like improved collective bargaining, but you could also look at legislation that would give a stronger voice and perhaps greater enforcement that would improve the quality of employment there. I just want to finish. I will be very quick, sorry. This is just a e-quote from Robert Burns. I'm not going to do an extra accent. I'll count my health and my greatest wealth as long as I'll enjoy it. I'll fear and I'll scan it. I'll both know what, as long as I get employment. I just thought there was a wee word missing there, so I just thought I would add in as long as I get fair employment. Thank you very much for your time. I hope that's been useful, and I hope it's not in time as well. Exactly on time, Martin. Thank you very much. We're going to have a very brief suspension to allow that to endure. If we can reconvene, we now have Lucy Stokes, who is a senior research fellow at NIESR. Lucy, you have 15 minutes. First of all, thank you very much for inviting me to be here and for giving me the opportunity to talk about the Workplace Employment Relations Study. The remit for this presentation was to talk about the Workplace Employment Relations Study, or WERS, as it's known for short, and its findings in respect of job quality. WERS covers Great Britain, so I should say at the start that most of the findings I'm talking about today apply for Great Britain as a whole. What am I going to talk about in this presentation? First of all, I'm going to give you a very brief introduction to what WERS is to help place the findings in context. I'm going to talk about changes in various aspects of job quality in Britain between 2004 and 2011. Covering some of the aspects that Martin has just talked about, a look at changes in job security, work intensity and job autonomy. Some changes in the types of support that employers might provide in terms of training provision and arrangements for facilitating work-life balance. Move on to look at relations between managers and employees and other important aspects of job quality, and talk about some findings in respect of job satisfaction. I should note at the start that I'm not talking about information on wages today, which, as we've seen already, is one important aspect of job quality. Although WERS does collect some information on pay, there are perhaps some other data sources out there that are more placed to give you a more detailed and up-to-date reflection of trends in earnings. Although I've said that mainly I'm going to focus on findings for Great Britain as a whole, we do have some selected findings specifically for Scotland, and I will of course also be mentioning those. To give you a brief overview at the beginning of what the key findings are, we'll see that for Great Britain as a whole, some aspects of job quality have declined between 2004 and 2011. So we've seen falling job security and increasing work intensity, but other aspects have shown some improvement, for example improvements in the control that employees have over their jobs and in some aspects of support. But what we do see is some clear differences in trends between the public and private sector. We typically employ employees in the public sector faring worse over this period. The findings that we do have available for Scotland overall show some similarities to the patterns observed for Great Britain as a whole. So what is WERS? Well, WERS is a national survey that maps the state of employment relations and working life inside British workplaces with five or more employees. It's unique and comprehensive in that it collects information from managers, employees and workplace representatives, both union and non-union within the same workplaces. It's a well-established study, so it began in 1980 with the first survey. There have been six surveys in all, the most recent taking place in 2011. And today when I talk about change, I'm going to look predominantly at change between 2004 and 2011, so the most recent two surveys in the series. It's a large study, almost 2,700 workplaces were interviewed in 2011. We had also responses from around 1,000 employee representatives and almost 22,000 employees. It's an independent study, so the 2011 WERS had six sponsors, Department for Business Innovation and Skills, ACAS, the Economic and Social Research Council, UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the Health and Safety Executive and NISA, with NISA's involvement made possible through funding from the Nuffield Foundation. This mix of funders ensures that the study is independent and it's in all our interest that the study is impartial and rigorous. WERS has a good reputation for the quality of the data that it provides and it's endorsed by a range of employee and industry organisations. So to move on to the findings in terms of changes in job quality for Great Britain as a whole, one of the most notable changes that we see in WERS over this period is a decline in job security. This decline has been driven particularly by what's happened in the public sector. So in 2004, in both the public and private sector, around two-thirds of employees agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, I feel my job is secure in this workplace. In 2011, in the public sector, this proportion had fallen to just below half, so falling from 66% to 47% of employees feeling their job was secure. In the private sector, we see a slight but much more of a fault. In terms of work intensity, we look at that in a few different ways. So overall, the percentage of employees that agreed that my job requires that I work very hard increased rising from 76% in 2004 to 83% in 2011. Here we see an increase in work intensity on this measure in both the private and public sectors. We also ask employees whether they feel they have enough time to get their work done, and the proportion of employees that felt this was the case remain fairly stable in the two surveys, standing around two-fifths of employees in each survey. We do see a small but statistically significant increase from 36% of employees feeling they never had enough time to get their work done in 2004 to 38% in 2011. However, overall, the proportion feeling this way remained higher in the public sector. We also asked a new question in the 2011 words about whether people felt long hours were necessary in order to progress at their workplace. Overall, around two-fifths of employees agreed with that statement, higher in the private than in the public sector. We also see that that's more common in particular industries such as finance, education, hotels and restaurants. It's also more commonly reported by men than by women. As Marty mentioned in the presentation before, the autonomy or control that people have over their jobs forms an important part of theories about what contributes to employee well-being in the workplace. So, words ask employees how they feel about their level of control over five different aspects of their job. How the work is done, the order in which tasks are carried out, the pace with which they have to do the work, the tasks done in the job and start and finish times. In the private sector between 2004 and 2011, we've seen some small but statistically significant improvements on all of those measures. In contrast, in the public sector, we see increases only in autonomy over the pace of work and autonomy over the tasks that are done in the job. So far, we've seen a bit of a mixed picture with falls in job security and what rises in work intensity but some improvements in job autonomy. So, in the next part of the presentation, I'm going to move on to talk about what might be thought of as job support, the first of which is training. So, we might well have expected in a period that's effectively covered the recession and downturn that employers may well have cut back on training in this period. And indeed, in separate findings not reported on the study, we do find that around 1.6 of employers say they reduced expenditure on training in response to the recession. But if we look at the proportion of workplaces that we're providing, at least sum off the job the training for at least 80% of their experienced employees in their biggest occupational group, we see that this has risen over the period 2004 to 2011. If we look within sector, overall the public sector is still more likely to provide training on this basis. However, there's been no improvement between the two surveys. It's the private sector where we've seen a rise from 31% to 40% of workplaces in the private sector doing so over this period. Employees themselves are also asked whether they feel that managers in their workplace encourage them to develop their skills. And here we see no change-release stability in the private sector. So, around 3.5 of employees felt that they were encouraged to develop their skills in the private sector. However, in the public sector we've seen a fall from 61% to 55% in 2011. So, the provision of flexible working arrangements can play an important role in helping employees to balance their work with their lives outside. We see a mixed picture in terms of changes in the prevalence of flexible working arrangements from WERS. So, employers were asked whether they provided a set of specified arrangements for any employees at their workplace. And here we see a bit of a mixed picture. So, we see that there was an increase in workplaces that offered working from home for at least some of their employees rising from 26% to 30% over this period. We see an increase in those that offered compressed hours rising from 11% to 19%. At the same time, we see a reduction in those that offered the opportunity to reduce your working hours from 62% to 56% in 2011, and also a decline in the prevalence of job sharing. If we look within the public and private sectors, we see that fall overall in the percentage of workplaces that provided arrangements to reduce your working hours was driven largely by what had happened in the private sector in terms of changes otherwise the sectors ffaird fairly similarly. Whether employees decide to take up flexible working arrangements may feel on whether they feel employers look favourably upon them doing so. The survey also asks employees whether they feel that managers understand about employees having to meet responsibilities outside of work. We see an increase in the percentage of employees in the private sector that feel this way rising from 59% to 63%, but a fall in the public sector from 61% to 58%. At the same time, we see a rise in the percentage of managers who agreed with the statement it's up to individual employees to balance their work and family responsibilities. That increase has occurred in both the public and private sectors, although it is larger within the public sector. Nevertheless, the fair amount of work-life conflict remains evident. With around one quarter of employees agreeing with the statement, I often find it difficult to fulfil my commitments outside of work because of the amount of time I spend on my job. The relations between managers and employees forms another important aspect of job quality. One way in which managers can provide support to their employees is by acting in a trustworthy manner and seeking to understand their views. We ask employees a set of questions in an attempt to gauge changes here. The percentage of employees within the private sector that felt that their managers were sincere in attempting to understand their views showed a small rise between 2004 and 2011 from 56% to 59%. We also see a similar small rise in the percentage that felt managers dealt with employees, honestly. In contrast, in the public sector, we see no change on these measures. As the private sector was already faring better in these regards in 2004, these changes have served to further widen the gap between the two sectors between 2004 and 2011. Managers and employees and indeed employee representatives are also asked to rate relations between managers and employees at the workplace. There's always a gap here between perspectives from managers and employees, with managers being more likely, of course, to rate relationships with their employees as better. So we do see some increase from 50% to 55% of managers rating relations as very good between 2004 and 2011. However, overall, we do see some small but significant increase among employees as well. So 62% of employees in 2004 rated relations at their workplace as good or very good, rising to 64% in 2011. In terms of job satisfaction, so where's our employees about their satisfaction with their job on a number of aspects? And our analysis here uses the eight aspects of job satisfaction that were consistent between the 2004 and 2011 surveys. So specifically, those are satisfaction with pay, satisfaction with the sense of achievement you get from your work, your scope for using your initiative, influence, training, job security, the work itself and your involvement in decision making. So we combine all of those different aspects into an overall job satisfaction scale. Employees are asked to rate their satisfaction effectively on a five point scale. We also separate out satisfaction with pay from satisfaction with the non-pecuniary aspects of the job, so all the other aspects that I've just mentioned. In the private sector, we see an increase in employee satisfaction with pay over the period from 2004 to 2011. We also see an increase in their satisfaction on all other aspects of their job with the exception of satisfaction with job security. In the public sector, however, while we also see an increase in satisfaction with pay, we do not see any improvement on most aspects of job satisfaction except for scope for using initiative and we see a big decline in satisfaction with job security reflecting the fall in perceptions of job security that we've seen earlier. Okay, so all the findings that I've talked about so far have been for Great Britain as a whole. But last year, one of my colleagues, John Forth at Nesa, was commissioned by ACAS to undertake a study of selected employment relations measures by the ACAS region. So that includes some findings for Scotland that cover some of the measures I've talked about today. In terms of what that finds, it shows many similarities to the picture for Great Britain as a whole. So if I move on to the next slide, we see figures for Scotland show, again, a fall in the percentage of employees feeling their job was securing their workplace from 68% in 2004 to 62% in 2011. We see a rise in the percentage of employees agreeing their job requires them to work very hard from 74% to 81% similar, again, to the position we saw for the rest of Great Britain. We've also seen a rise in the percentage of employees reporting that they have a lot of influence over three specific aspects of their jobs. Also, indeed, there's also been an improvement in employees feeling their managers understanding of employees' responsibilities outside of work. Overall, in 2011, levels of job satisfaction in Scotland looked similar to those observed in the rest of Great Britain. So to give you a summary of the main points, we've seen decline in some aspects of job quality between 2000 and 2011 in Britain with a fall in job security and a rise in work intensity. But other aspects have improved with improvements in job autonomy and other aspects of support. However, there are some clear differences between the public and private sectors with the private sector faring better in terms of improvements in job autonomy and supportive management and showing less of a decline in job security. However, both sectors have seen an increase in work intensity. The findings just presented many of those factors seem to apply for Scotland as well as for Great Britain as a whole. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lucy. That was fascinating. Again, we'll have a very short suspension to allow a change of work. I reconvene, I'd like to introduce Elaine Drennan this time and Elaine doesn't have a PowerPoint presentation for us but it's going to talk to her paper. Elaine. Thank you for introducing me here today. The Employability Skills and Lifelong Learning analytical team within the Scottish Government. What I'm going to talk to you today about is the change in the labour market since 2008. What do we think is the term job quality? What does that mean? Talk a bit about what data is available. Despite the challenges and circumstances since 2007, Scotland's economic performance has improved relative to the UK. Long-standing gaps between Scotland and the UK in terms of productivity, labour market participations and earnings have reduced. Following the end of the recession, although Scotland's labour market has strengthened significantly, there's been a rise in employment, risen to a level of 2.6 million of people in work and a consistent fall in the headline rates that are now approaching recent recession levels. However, the legacy of the recession remains evident, particularly on youth unemployment. It remains high, more than double the overall unemployment rate. It's still not at the level that was pre-recession. The recession has also led to an increase in levels of underemployment and part-time working. Although it's falling, it currently stands at 38 per cent higher than in 2008. Part-time employment is also up 11 per cent since 2008, while full-time employment has only just started to come back to close to pre-recession levels. Real wages also remain substantially below pre-recession levels and employment among disabled people, ethnic minority groups and older workers also remain well below the national average. Job insecurity has been a feature of the recession and with a number of people employed on zero-hours contracts and I also pose real questions for the individual about the reliability of their income, security of employment and the balance of power between employer and worker. How do we define job quality? I think that there are a number of areas to consider the impact job quality has on the individual level such as health and wellbeing on the firm level which has an impact on absenteeism, motivation and employment and also about the impact on the overall economy where the aggregate impacts can affect overall input productivity and economic growth. Although there is no single definition we can think of it in terms of task factors, employment factors and workplace factors. The task factors in particular focus on the level of opportunity an employee has to influence the work that they do, how they organise their work their working conditions and level of job intensity access to opportunities for training and development. Employment factors include pay, job insecurity hours of work, flexible working arrangements clarity around the terms and conditions of their employment. Among those factors is also low pay and the low pay associated with some negative outcomes for individuals including poor health diminished life chances and higher risk of being in poverty. The resolution foundation also has researched saying low pay means you are also at a higher list of becoming unemployed and also less likely to progress in the workplace. Workplace factors broadly fall into the relationships and governance at work including the perception of fairness trust and respect confidence in the ability and integrity of colleagues and managers and access to employee representation and also in matters relating to grievance, discipline and dismissal policies. What data is available at a Scottish level Lucy just covered in quite detail about the Workplace Employee Relation Survey which presents a lot of information on job quality but again the last data was in 2001 so what else can we look at that's more recent the annual population survey provides information on training and development, hours of work and we've also got the UK Employer Skills Survey which provides some more information on training and development the other source is the annual survey of hours and earnings as the main source of information on pay in terms of disaggregation by sector and geography most of the main surveys provide some level of disaggregation with the exception of the workplace and Employee Employment Relation Survey Thank you very much Elaine for that summary of your paper now we've got about 35 minutes or so for questions and discussion which is not a lot of time to discuss all the very broad range of topics that are available to us I would just say both to witnesses and your mind members I think the purpose of today's sessions really is a scene setting so we're not here to conduct the whole inquiry we're not here to get to the bottom of every single issue it's more just to understand the headline issues and the members would bear that in mind when they're asking their questions that would be helpful I wanted to pick up a couple of things that are not very interesting first of all going on the message that came to me through Martin Talbot's presentation was the importance of control in terms of job quality how control is such an important factor and then the presentation of Lucy Stokes which developed some of that and said actually there have been some developments in the period you identified 2014 to 2011 where many employees are reporting better control but that was more prevalent in the private sector than the public sector I thought that was quite an interesting development the other issue I just wanted to pick up it was in your written submission Martin Talbot from NHS Scotland talking about low quality work there is a comment you make that the prevalence of low quality work in the United Kingdom is not high compared to other European countries although lower rates are observed for the Netherlands and Denmark although that was an interesting comment because it seems counter cultural in terms of some of the chatter we hear around the nature of the employment market in the UK where there is a lot of suggestion that we are a low pay low productivity economy but you seem to be saying here that we are not as bad as some of our European competitors Well I did actually do a wee bit of working on it and again this is based on other peoples analysis ok so what I have looked at was the European countries and these figures are from 2010 and I looked at kind of four different ways of looking at the labour market one of which is the proportion of bad jobs now you can describe that in various ways and you can define it in various ways the data comes from the European working conditions sorry and right at the bottom in terms of the best the lowest proportion of bad jobs if you like are Netherlands Denmark Sweden and Luxembourg are there as well the UK is round about a third of jobs and some very preliminary analysis I have to go back and look at this in more detail suggests that Scotland is not that different in terms of bad jobs however it's also within the context of if you look at other things like in work poverty the UK sits among the middle of the pack out of work poverty it's towards the bottom of the pack employment rates it's not bad either so it's relatively high employment rates although Netherlands and Denmark in other countries also do better as well so in the very different countries from the UK and Scotland and very different countries from each other but I think it's just to illustrate the point that none of this is inevitable to achieve the quadruple I shouldn't do any sporting analogies at all but you can achieve low levels of poverty in and out work and you can achieve a low proportion of bad jobs and you can achieve a high employment rate so that is possible to achieve that I suppose was my point is that all right? yes thank you there may well be issues that the committee decides to come back to when we get into the full enquiry but that's very interesting just to set the scene I've got a list of members who want to come in I'll start off with Lewis Macdonald following up precisely on that point first of all with Martin Talbot very interesting to explore that a little further because clearly some of what you described were types of work and types of sectors of the economy which will exist in every country customer relations and low-skilled jobs do exist in every economy but it's how you make those jobs good for people or bad for people that seems to be the key issue now I think in your presentation you said that depending on the definition used you could deduce that anything from 10% to 30% of jobs in the Scottish economy are bad for your health and you fleshed that out a bit in your presentation I wonder if you'd like to say a little bit more about that issue of how you define those jobs that are bad for your health and because the difference between 10% and 30% is clearly a very significant one and I wonder if you'd like to say a little bit more about that and what what influences that range of definitions well yes I mean this is again taken from work from the European Work and Condition Survey and it's again really just how you package together what kind of questions you use, what kind of questions you want to include so it can be quite I appreciate that it's quite a big range the pattern is the pattern of the types of jobs are similar how you get from that 10% to the 30% is you have jobs which are bad on almost everything if you want to put it as crudleys although what I would say is that the European service are quite good on this and saying that even within jobs of the same type and industries of the same type there's quite a lot of room for manoeuvre there you have jobs that are bad on almost everything and you have jobs which are poorly balanced perhaps poorer on some aspects but not on others so that explains that kind of range so how tightly you want to draw that boundary whether you want to go for do we look at the jobs which are worst or potentially the worst because as I've said individual jobs and individual employers is a lot of spectrum or do you want to do some sort of combination there and also you might want to say well there are jobs which are sort of industries and occupations which are sort of middling if you like where there may even be more scope to improve things do you want to look at those kinds of jobs and occupations as well I hope that's a wee bit clearer I think one of the things we're keen to understand is first of all what jobs are bad for people and second how to make them better and I think you've indicated that there is a range already I wonder if I could ask Lucy Stokes a little bit about on the same territory some of what you said in presenting your research implied that public sector workers have particularly seen their job quality going down largely but not entirely because of issues of job security in the last number of years I wonder if you'd like to expand on that of the impact of reduced job security on public sector workers how many people or how far are people in jobs in the public sector finding themselves having started a job at a point at which it was relatively secure and gave them a relatively decent degree of control now finding themselves in a job that's not good for them you're absolutely right we see some clear patterns that the public sector employees seem to have fed worse in terms of job quality over this period particularly in terms of job security although they're not solely aware of the other aspects the private sector seems to have moved ahead when the public sector hasn't we looked particularly of course at the relationship between all of these aspects and recessions so rather than in the findings that I've talked about I've sort of compared 2004 and 2011 of course we all know that's a period where the economy has seen a big change and I haven't explicitly said is this about recession or not so whereas included some other questions that were about looking at the extent to which the workplace was affected by the recession and you see job security is particularly cyclical so you can see that the job security really took most of a hit in those workplaces where managers said that workplace was particularly harshly affected you do see if you look at what's quite interesting is if you look at perceptions of job security and redundancies that had taken place in the workplace it's not as closely related with redundancies as you might expect so in some cases employees might have been looking at what was to come, perhaps fearing austerity in the public sector, perhaps fearing more what was to come rather than what they had seen already happen as such and I know if that answers your question It does certainly in part I think one of the things and you mentioned that it's not your study or the comparison of the two dates don't quite match the period of the recession but they clearly cover it and some of what you described around for example reduced job sharing but increased flexibility in other ways may well be impacts of employer decisions during the recession I wonder how many of those you think are changes that have become permanent or are emergency responses to emergency circumstances that will correct themselves again so I had to be selective in what I presented in today's presentation there are a number of findings in words that you may find relevant that I couldn't cover today but if you look specifically at changes that employees did experience in response to recession we asked them that so the employees that were at the workplace at the point that they deemed there to be a recession and the biggest reported changes were that they experienced that their wages were frozen or cut that they experienced an increase in their workload they were the most common and again continuing the theme these were more commonly reported in the public sector than they were in the private sector again considerable proportions reporting that work was reorganised in terms of flexibility sizeable proportions saying access to paid overtime was restricted and some about changes to organisation of work but that of course is a broad term and might cover some changes in terms of flexible working arrangements but may almost also be seen in a broader sense of reorganising how work is done within the work in place a relatively smaller proportion I think 5% of all employees had their contracted working hours reduced in response to recession Thank you very much Dennis Robertson Good morning and thank you all for your presentations Perhaps it's really to all the witnesses in respect maybe start with Martin but it's the methodologies around the collection of data and the various service and the analysis of them all that there's quite a myriad of information out there and I'm just wondering at the end of the day how closely do you think that the information that is being collated is all is much and much the same or is there significant differences because what we need to try and do is to establish whether or not the variations if they exist are significant enough to actually question the data being collected Mr Talbot First Okay well there's a lot of surveys I'm sure I've gone in here about them as well they do collect information on aspects that are important to health we have now some questions in the Scottish Health Survey that we've been in for a number of years aspects of psychosocial health at work so control demand workplace stress and so on there's also in labour market type surveys the annual population survey the labour force survey asks some questions that are more perhaps related to physical risks to health at work sorry I think what I'm trying to get at is the methodology used in all the different surveys if we then take them and look at the comparisons how definite can we be when we're looking at this in terms of moving forward to help us understand the impacts of some of the inequalities that are around in terms of the mental health within the workforce the questions that are available in most of the surveys on control which is a very important aspect for mental health they differ slightly but I think they tell us a consistent picture the questions on demand at work they differ a wee bit more so I think more work might be needed in that area to maybe look at just purely from a health perspective that's all to look at what precisely we're looking at there and there may also be scope to look at whether, for example could you include measures of mental health in some of the big labour market surveys but that's supposed to be just a suggestion Lucy I think you raised a really important point and I would definitely stress that that where any information comes from it's really important to look at the methods that have been used in collecting that one of the advantages of where I would say is that because it collects information from different perspectives from managers and employees I quite like that dual aspect on things but definitely I think different surveys of course have all come about with different intentions and histories which lead them to ask things in slightly different ways and so on and they can sometimes point to slightly different pictures so the findings that I've talked about in respect of employees in Wales and reporting improvements in job control over that period if you look at the responses from managers which are asked a slightly different question about autonomy in their largest occupational group you see there that the picture looks a bit more stable you will see if you look at the skills in the employment survey again there you see a bit more stability so I think that there are slightly different questions and of course there are different ways in which the information is collected and so for those very reasons I think it's very important that any information you do have looks at the questions that have been asked and the way in which those data have been collected I don't think there's an easy answer saying which are valid and which are not understanding when someone says okay so this has improved job control well job control in terms of what was the question they actually asked Eileen I think it's important to remember that the surveys are asking different things some of them like the words really go into the depths of the topic whereas the labour force survey and the annual population survey is more about the timeliness of data although it captures activity we want the data to have a lot more timely there's also the methods in which people the information is gathered a lot of it is self reported as well so it's people's perception of what they think their position is but we also have surveys like the annual survey of hours and earnings it's an employer survey so that's getting information from their administrative records as well which is considered a bit more than some of the self reporting aspects of it so I think it's important that we take all these things into account to understand the strengths and the limitations of some of the data that we're using but also when it's the story it's telling is maybe not as consistent as we would want it to be okay maybe stay with yourself just a little later I know we're short on time stay with yourself at the moment Eileen are we able to manage the impact on some external factors for instance the work that Sam H has been doing in the workplace to enable people to understand better mental health issues and the reporting of and managers are maybe more equipped to understand the impact for the employees and employees are more able to understand some of the issues around mental health and reporting are we able to take those into consideration what in terms of the information that we provide to a certain extent again it's bringing the information together we tend to provide the results of the surveys and sort of isolation from each other but again Martin's talked about the results of the Scottish health survey and perhaps we don't make better use of the information that's in other surveys where the information and mental health is much better than it is in the annual population survey so that is certainly something that we could possibly explore mental health because it seems to be one that obviously has a significant impact and obviously how we do work in many ways Lucy are you aware of any external factors that we take into account the impact of people becoming more aware more aware of sorry if people becoming more aware more aware of their mental health and how they can report it and how managers maybe acknowledge where doesn't ask specifically about mental health about some measures of broader wellbeing in terms of anxiety and depression aspects of mental health although different to the measures that are collected in some other surveys one of the things that strikes me I guess thinking about reporting of mental health is of course how well it is reported so as you say whether managers are fully aware of mental health issues in their workplaces to be able to report it in a survey how individuals feel I guess in different survey context about reporting their own health issues indeed whether someone in poor mental health is simply less likely to respond to a survey in the first place meaning that they're not there in the data so yeah I think they are there are important issues and difficulties there okay okay I'll bring in Gordon MacDonald to think some of that question what is the subject we should always look at the methods behind any survey so I was wanting to ask you a couple of questions about your survey the first one is the percentages are they just straight percentages of the responses or are they weighted in any way to say reflect the range of size of organisations from small SMEs to large multinationals to reflect the range of organisations within the economy I mean is there any weighting in there yeah there is so the findings that I presented are a mix of findings from the employee survey and from the manager survey but everything is weighted so they can be considered representative of the economy as a whole in the findings that we report we have as workplaces with five or more employees so every time I give a workplace finding it's representative of that population you're right absolutely there is for technical reasons when you sampled the survey you oversample certain groups of workplaces to make sure you have enough but we have a set of weights that allow us to correct for that in the analysis is there a margin of error in the numbers then because a lot of the numbers are very close to each other so for instance the one for public sector which says employees agree and I have never seemed to have enough time to get my work done suggests that that has went down from 51 to 40 which wouldn't suggest that given the budget constraints in the public sector that would be the case but of course there is a 3% margin of error it could actually be increasing you're absolutely right any survey estimate there is always a margin of error around it because it's an estimate of what the true value is out there I don't know how clearly you can see it on the slides but where there is an underline under a number it means that that change was statistically significant between 2004 and 2011 so if there is no underline that change is not statistically significant as you say sometimes you'll see a small difference in the numbers but because of there is a margin of error we can't be confident that that is a true change in the population as a whole that is underlined effectively and of the 2,700 workplaces that were surveyed what proportion of them were in Scotland what number of them were in Scotland it is 276 in Scotland right so roughly 10% that means I can ask my last question then my last question is the page on trust in management in the widening gap while I accept that they are not underlined and therefore they are not significant they all show a declining picture so why in the public sector do you think it is a declining picture where it isn't in the private why overall is there a declining picture in trust in the public sector as opposed to the private sector as opposed to the private sector and of course indeed the private sector seems to be in a better starting position in 2004 I can't answer that question in a factual way with findings from Wales that show you why this has changed although I'm sure it would be possible to look into that in some analysis broader factors I guess actually we looked for a relationship here with what had happened in recession because we anticipated that in workplaces where there had been cutbacks and so on that perhaps there was an atmosphere of declining trust going on there but actually it's not as straightforward as that if you look across the public sector that seems to have been a bit more of a general phenomenon this decline so whether that's not specifically about what happened in those workplaces but a perception of austerity and so on impacting general I can't give you a factual answer from where it's this factor that contributed okay can I remind members we are quite short of time we've got about another 15 minutes or so left I've got four members want to come in and I'll start with Patrick Harvey thanks very much good morning I suppose again thinking about this question about how we frame the rest of the inquiry and sort of where we go from a starting point several of the discussions and some of the presentations as well have been almost leading us to think about this as a comparison either with other countries are we a little bit better or a little bit worse than the European average or with how things have moved over time if we're looking to discuss the impact of work and wages on wellbeing isn't it reasonable that we should focus on what we know about that impact rather than whether it's a little bit worse or a little bit better than our neighbours if there's an injustice that's happening does it actually matter that it might be happening in other European countries as well just as badly and I guess also I'd like to ask what can we say about the long-term impact of work and wages or what's happening to them on health and wellbeing as opposed to the immediate impact I'm thinking in particular about generational impact for example we know and there's a great deal of recognition these days that the impact of young people, children's early years is crucial in shaping their likely health outcomes for the rest of their lives if a parent doesn't have the confidence to know what their income is going to be one month to the next one week to the next if they're not in control of their working hours has all of the control of their flexibility can we say anything about the likely long-term impact on the health of the population given those kind of factors can I offer a few comments to stab at that is that okay we do have evidence from the growing up in Scotland study and also from the bigger UK studies on the millennium cohort study and also a whole range of longitudinal studies which highlight the importance of what happens in early years some of the most important things that correlate with how well someone does later in life the social and emotional wellbeing and if you look at what's the most important factors in childhood for influencing that the most important factors that seem to come out include worklessness low income households and the mental health of parents especially the mental health of mothers now if you join a couple of those things up you have for example if you look at how the mental health of different groups of the population compare if you look at low and mid-income individuals living in a lower mid-income household who are looking after home and family I would suggest they are more likely to be female not always but probable compare their mental health to those who have low income and low control and there are roughly a quarter in all cases so the inference I think from that is if you're moving for example from a relatively low income with caring responsibilities for example and then you're moving into a job with low control but your income hasn't changed very much that's not going to be very good for your mental health and to come back to what I said earlier it's difficult to see how that in itself as the situation currently stands is going to be very good improving the emotional wellbeing of children and we've already seen again as I've said from lots of studies that show if you track children through life those children with poorer social emotional wellbeing and childhood the experience or range of poorer outcomes in adulthood so I think this is partly why this is important is that helpful Tull? I think I'm trying to explore something which maybe doesn't have a definitive answer yet but the comments are helpful does anybody else want to comment on this? I think the work from the solution foundation when they looked at the panel data from the new earnings survey they showed that 29 per cent of people that were currently low paid had been in low paid jobs for the past decade and they were likely to progress up and that's a really important statistic because I think it means that those people that are low paid will have impact on people's health as Martin has said we have evidence to show that the impact on people's health can be quite negative so we could do further work to see what we could pull out on that sort of longer term impact through the longitudinal studies I assume the Scottish Government is already doing some work in relation to how some degree of welfare devolved welfare policy will connect with this agenda and what the options are is there anything you can say to us at the moment about where that work has got to? It's still very early days in that sort of work we're looking at doing some analysis to support the fair work convention and again we'll be able to kind of share that with the committee once that's finished I'd also just like to ask if I can about how we can avoid when we're looking at the various statistics for example much of what was in Lucy Stoke's presentation about what the overall picture is how can we avoid falling into the trap of looking at what the average picture is and thinking that's meaningful there's been some research recently that shows that between 97 and 2013 for example the richest one or two percent of society so their real incomes increase by more than a quarter but the poorest three or four percent so a real drop in their incomes of about a tenth and that's despite overall growth in the economy over that whole period so if we're looking at that inequality of incomes is there also a chance that we're looking at the same kind of inequalities of people's control of their work of people's trust so even if there's an overall increase or decrease I think how do we explore whether the perception of a a growing gulf is an accurate one yep absolutely that was the point that had sprung up in my mind when you talked about we looked very much at comparative elements over time or with other countries and it's exactly what was sort of in my mind when you've been talking very much about what's been happened on average and perhaps that there are groups that perhaps are having very bad experiences and perhaps the ones you should be yes and that we need to focus on so absolutely I think it's very difficult in giving a broad overview not to focus on the average but absolutely I think that there's definitely a case for looking at what is happening within particular subgroups whether that's different aspects of income so we've done a little bit of that within words looking at differences whether the types of aspects of job quality I've talked about today are related to pay it's not clear cut so in some sometimes higher pay is associated with higher job quality perhaps for example in terms of autonomy you typically see higher paid jobs associated with having greater control in other areas it's perhaps not so straight forward perhaps those jobs are subject to higher work intensity so I think there is definitely a case for looking at groups also might want to look at age for example what's happening with different age groups of workers different regions and so on and differences in inequality yes I think it's very important to look at those okay we are very short on time John Lennon I mean I'm very struck that your suggestion was to tell but there's a direct correlation between work and mortality serious and therefore it's you know it's not some theoretical argument what's a good and a bad job but it's actually specifically about people's health as well as consequence of that I mean I take Patrick's point about you know why would we compare with other countries just simply to make yourself feel better because we're at mid league rather than the bottom but it is interesting to look at if there are factors that are consistent and I should know this but I don't would all of the countries you've looked at for example have a minimum wage no again they're quite different across Europe some countries don't have a minimum wage some countries do some countries have strong levels of unionisation others don't there's quite a lot of variation I think that's all I can really say there because it's not my my field because it would be interesting to look at the impact of the establishment of a minimum wage and giving people some sense of job security at the very point when it then looks as if it was this increased job insecurity because of ours I suppose the other issue we won't have much time to look at because I think it's worth exploring is the whole question of particular groups and I'm interested for example in women who will disproportionately be in low-paid jobs does that mean that that is coming out in the survey it would matter more more likely that women are going to be carers and have external pressures so it would matter more to them that whole question of flexibility rather than presentism which I think is a different challenge for some men in high-pressure jobs you made a broad presentation Lucy but is there in your survey a bit of drilling down into the nature of certain sectors will mean that there's concentrations for example of women or people within the black and brown ethnic community that we could look at further it's definitely possible to do that so we do cover some of those dimensions within the book so we will look a bit for example at differences between men and women and as you say quite rightly so you can then build that into the analysis so whereas also our employees whether they have caring responsibilities and so on number of dependent children so it is certainly possible to look at their experiences in relation to the demographic characteristics and some of their circumstances at home I'm presumably with whether sectors are particularly unionised or not Yes absolutely definitely Thank you Joan McAlpine Yes Lucy when you were talking earlier I think in response to Lewis MacDonald's questions you talked about higher levels of insecurity in the public sector now your survey is GB wide as you've said on a number of occasions the public sector that's under the Scottish Government's control at the moment has a no compulsory redundancies policy would that no compulsory redundancies policy be reflected in your figures of the GB wide and so excuse my ignorance at what point would that have been introduced I believe it was 2011 okay so it was around the time of their field work and I mean their employees perceptions of how they rate their job security so that might be a result of concrete things that they observe such as redundancy policies and so on it may be a feeling of how they perceive things to be in the workplace it may be something broader than just seeing a set of redundancies or policies it might be other perhaps more subtle things that they pick up on generally or within the workplace you see or I could say in terms of differences is that you do see that falling job security also if you look for Scotland alone although you're right the figures that I presented are overall for Scotland they haven't disaggregated by private and public sector but we could certainly look at that right okay thanks and speak quickly to Martin on page 4 of your written evidence you have some really very interesting figures on modelling from the Scottish Public Health Observatory over 10 years about the effect on health of different policy changes for example you see a modest 10% increase in the value of jobseekers allowance which result in 26,000 fewer years of life lost and 17,000 fewer hospitalisations and you also talk about similar impacts in terms of raising the national minimum wage to 720 an hour at a 10% rise in working tax credit as well which would result in 8,000 fewer years of life lost I thought they were very striking figures but the other thing that struck me was that these relate to changes in things that we don't control here in Scotland we don't control jobseekers allowance we don't control the national minimum wage and we don't control working tax credit we just say that was a correct observation I'd say that's a correct observation yeah okay thanks very much okay check buddy I wonder if I may ask about the issue of control and going back to my colleague Dennis Robertson's question about collecting data I wonder what if you've done any exercise on looking at the variations in health for those that have full participation in the company equity participation participation in decision making and also if you've looked at the third sector in social enterprises where there is of course a almost full control has any work been done on that? There was a recent report looking at the third sector in Glasgow and some of the findings of that in terms of the experience of the employees there in terms of their health and wellbeing I think it was quite a positive picture I think I'm probably better just finding out more details if that's okay my experience with companies in Europe is where you have work councils involvement in the management process and decision making that I'm not saying that they're always happier than people here but there's a tendency for that the other thing is in your paper Mr Tybalt you mentioned there should be work truly opportunities should be distributed geographically and occupationally according to need have you investigated I mean I'd love to know how you do that but was there any discussion in terms of mobility and how that people's ability to move where there are jobs you used the example of Aberdeenshire for example Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Glasgow has there been any work done on the mobility of people and the impact of that has well economists might give a slightly different answer I think it's probably worth putting the case that if you break Scotland down into different regions and those for example are the regions that are used for example by Skills Development Scotland that there is a quite an interesting spatial pattern and in fact if you go back to 2008 so this is pre recession you do in fact see a similar pattern in terms of the west of Scotland Dumfries and Galloway having a relatively lower number of vacancies available for our people against a more buoyant picture in the east of Scotland and heading north into the highlands in England so that's not answering your question no it's not one last very last question there are a lot of techniques that are being applied in terms of continuous improvement process which involves employees and they are effectively involved in decision making to improve the productivity of the workplace have you considered the implications that that's had on the wellbeing of employees I don't I'm not aware of questions within the health service I'll ask those kind of questions so I'm not aware there are I could certainly repeat there are some papers that have looked at the growth of these methods in terms of involvement or they have various terms in the literature but there are certainly studies that have looked at the association between that and employee wellbeing and productivity whether and there are sort of two main paths that can go down whether those practices lead to employees feeling more engaged in higher wellbeing and that leading to greater performance for the firm or another route where perhaps employees feel stress is more of working intensification or maybe the firm sees an improvement but the employees don't and there are certainly references on that I can direct you to okay we are out of time thank you very much to Martin Talbot Lucy Stokes and Elaine Drenan for coming along it's been very helpful in terms of setting the scene and we will now have a short suspension to allow a change over right if we can reconvene I would like to welcome our second panel we are joined by Stephen Boyd assistant secretary Anna Ritchie-Allan who is the project manager for close the gap Patricia Finlay professor of work and employment relations and director Scottish Centre for Employment Research department of human resource management at University of Strathclyde and JB Livingstone who is head of Oxfam Scotland welcome to you all and thank you for coming along we've gone about an hour and ten minutes or so for this session can I remind members we're not here to conduct the whole inquiry we're just here to scene set and just get an understanding of the top line issues also can I say to the panellists because there are four of you if you all try to answer every question it's going to take quite a long time to get through the topic so I would ask members if they would direct their questions perhaps at one panellist initially and then if you'd like to come in and respond somebody else's has made just catch my eye and I will bring you in this as best I can as time allows and if we can keep questions and answers fairly short that will allow us to get through the topics in the time that's available to us can I maybe just start off I think you're all here listening to the evidence we heard earlier on which is quite helpful in setting the scene what we as committee really are doing in the sessions today is trying to focus down as best we can on this very broad topic of work wages and wellbeing and how we've taken that forward as an inquiry after the summer recess can I maybe just ask each of you to say just in a few sentences I'll maybe start with Steven Boyd and work my way along what do you think the key issues are that we as the committee should be focusing on in this inquiry start with Steven Boyd one just generally speaking I think it's having clearly the inquiries being framed around what has happened in the labour market since 2008 I think it's quite important that we don't treat 2008 as some kind of year zero here I think a lot of the trends in the Scottish labour market we're concerned about at this moment in time we are actually apparent before 2008 and the concern at this moment in time is the recession which followed have further embedded those trends nothing radically new or different this happened since 2008 but we've just seen some adverse trends become embedded I think it's quite important to look at trends in the Scottish labour market think through to what extent these might reverse as the recovery becomes further embedded and there's a lot of uncertainty around that at this moment in time but what are the implications if they carry on in the current trajectory that might intensify the things like we have seen the employment rate for women really grow very rapidly over the last couple of years in Scotland I don't think that's particularly well understood the reasons behind that a very important trend that we constantly draw attention to which I think is under discussed is the increase in number of older people remaining in work which again can be read in an optimistic or pessimistic fashion I think and as usual the truth is probably somewhere in between the conflicts another real concern at the moment is rising inactivity amongst young people we've seen a big drop in youth unemployment over the last year we've not seen a concomitant rise in employment therefore a lot of young people get into inactivity what does this mean are they going into full time education and training which would not be a bad thing of course or are they falling out the labour market altogether or falling out the labour market and education altogether which would be a real concern so I think there's a lot of work to do to try to understand concerns a bit better I mean I think is the first panel demonstrated when it comes to quality of issues around about job quality there's a great deal of uncertainty there's not a huge evidential base in which to draw and I thought a couple of good points were made about the difficulty and compare in Scotland with the rest of the UK and beyond in this respect I mean I think in a lot of the work I've been looking at over the last few years which have used low wages as a proxy for job albeit an imperfect proxy for job quality I think the evidential base is quite strong I think when you try to extend that into other areas these comparisons become somewhat more dubious so I think at the point it was Patrick I think made it understanding what is happening in Scotland as a good thing in and of itself better understanding those processes I think is a very important part of your inquiry I think clearly focus on the last point in your call for evidence about what the Scottish Government and Scotland can do to improve job quality and indeed the number of your lab at Argedersbrough long-standing structural deficit and decent employment in Scotland what we can do to try to reverse that and indeed I'm probably going through questions I think there's a number of areas in which we can look at in some detail in that respect okay thank you that was quite a long answer but I appreciate it I did spring that on you first I hope to come up with something intelligible name thank you I think in terms of the focus of the inquiry that it's quite critical to understand that women and men have a very different experience of the labour market and how that impacts on local economies and on the Scottish economy as well some things to consider just very very briefly the implications of public sector spending cuts on women's employment women's position within the labour market and how both of those impact on the gender pay gap thinking more broadly we need to look at welfare reform because we know about the links with in-work poverty the impact on welfare reform 85 per cent of social security cuts have come from women's incomes that has a direct impact on women's poverty child poverty it impacts household budgets and it impacts on local economies as well as on the national economy as well a couple of final points we need to look at the under-utilisation of women's skills which manifest within occupational segregation within the labour market one of the main causes of the gender pay gap the economic arguments for addressing occupational segregation are well rehearsed and finally one other point that we should look at is the equalities practice of employers in particular there's a lot of evidence now on the public sector equality duty and how public sector employers are not performing very well in that regard we're working on that and a project and I can speak later about that later on or we'll put that in close the gaps response but we also need to look at the private sector as well there's less data on that but we do know the instances of sex discrimination of pregnancy maternity discrimination these are up but women are unable to access justice because of tribunal fees okay thank you thank you for your invitation there are four things and if I say them very quickly I should stay within the time scale I think the first which falls on from this morning's session is there is a huge issue around measures there's no accepted one accepted measure of job quality either in this country or anywhere else nor indeed is there a map of job quality in Scotland although there is some on-going work that's attempting to address that and I think there is a danger of getting drawn into what is what some of the committee members drew on which is a broad range of different types of evidence that does different things some of which is more or less reliable than others and I think that would be a bit of a diversion evidence is important but we need to take that evidence in context the second thing I would say is in terms of some of the findings there's two ways to think about that in very simple terms one is as somebody pointed out this morning to say on average maybe around two thirds if we take a rough estimate of some of the measures that were put forward this morning by NISR two thirds of people are quite happy quite satisfied with the kind of job quality that they have so we could look at that and we can say fine that's okay let's not do anything else the key issue for me is to say what's happening with the other third or the other 40% and that's the issue about I suppose we can think of that in two different ways three different ways maybe one is to say what are the costs that are being imposed on the people that occupy that 30 or 40% are the people in that group distinct from the people that are in the other group so do we need to understand better what the demographic map of job quality is and I think that relates very much to what Annas just said and what ways in which and to take a less negative sense I suppose not just the costs imposed on an individual what's the potential for those people whose job quality is not maximised or not improved are we losing out on the potential of some of our populations I think that's quite important and I think that takes me to my third point about the costs of job quality we often think about job quality and we talked about health outcomes this morning in terms of the negative impacts on individuals but in actual fact job quality imposes a whole host of other costs it imposes costs on the welfare system it imposes costs on the health system it imposes costs on the taxation system it imposes significant opportunity costs on employers so people who don't have decent job quality and we know that there are some problems between the level of job quality and issues of productivity and performance and innovation that's an opportunity to cost for employers so coming back to just finish on my last point it seems to me that for your committee to move forward you should try and drive that with an agenda a problem rather than a debate necessarily about statistics thank you fundamentally job quality is an issue right up the income distribution but for Oxfam clearly the focus for us is on poverty we're a poverty organisation and clearly people in poverty work fairly hard for the poverty the impact of poor quality jobs has an impact right across their everyday lives they work long hours, they're on call they work multiple jobs still struggling though to earn enough and in doing so they're degrading the wider assets that they've got therefore compounding their level of poverty where we fundamentally come from in this discussion when it comes to definitions there is, as has just been said no clear definition but we need to move towards a level where we have at least some minimum benchmarks and in order to do that we're really keen that we don't just sit around a table and just carve those up ourselves but we actually go out and talk to people around them many of you will be familiar with our work around the human kind index we think a similar approach would be useful when it comes to trying to define job quality and we're planning to take some research forward on that because fundamentally then we need to make sure that we embed how we measure success on job quality within how the Scottish Government measures its own success through things like the national performance framework and that then informs policy solutions but Oxfam has also been focused on looking beyond government action and influencing private sector in general and we've done quite a bit of that internationally and I can come on to speaking about that and that international perspective I think is useful I think the committee could make gains by looking at things like the UN framework on business and human rights that starts to look at corporate responsibilities and again we can talk a bit more about that OK thank you well that's been very helpful getting your views on what the priorities should be before I bring others in I just want to ask one more question around this idea we've been kicking around as a committee of good and bad jobs and I suppose my question is this are bad jobs inevitable in some form or another and let me illustrate this with an example because you're nearer I represent agriculture and food production is a very important part of the economy so we have very large agricultural operations employing people doing very dull repetitive jobs in big sheds sorting and picking vegetables, potatoes broccoli, carrots working in an environment where there's very little daylight in a cold environment because the temperature is kept down you know these are jobs that would drive me mad but somebody's got to do it so is it inevitable that parts of the economy will depend upon what we might call bad jobs and anybody like to pick that up Jamie Livingstone I would hope not I think there is some structural issues with the economy that's worth talking about in terms of people talking a lot about how for example less developed countries have benefited from globalisation from technology which obviously has an impact in terms of jobs for people in terms of the impact on that automation etc but it's important to note that this problem is an issue yes in the UK but also in developing countries we often assume that we've exported all the bad jobs internationally and that somehow that doesn't exist here but that hollowing out of those middle tier jobs has had an impact both in the UK but internationally as well so we've actually created more bad jobs here but we've exported more bad jobs internationally at the very same time in terms of whether it's inevitable you can say almost anything's inevitable we've been doing a lot of talk about inequality recently and I'm highly encouraged by the number of eminent academics and economists coming forward and saying exactly the opposite inequality isn't inevitable there are some clear policy and measures that we know can have a fundamental impact on job quality it's about the political willingness to actually put those into practice I'm not sure that really answers my question though because my question was are these jobs, I would regard that as a bad job other people might take a different view and somebody's got to do that work job matching expectations to roles as well I don't think that bad jobs are enough to when I think I may have written a book with that very title to which I hope the answer was no we know that work is an incredible source of meaning for people and we talked about this this morning a variety of aspects to what makes a job a good or a bad job so there's issues of pay there's issues about its intrinsic nature there's issues about the relationships in which you do work, the task itself issues about how much voice you have around those work so I think it's a mistake to assume that a job that is either low skilled or routine or has some adverse physical and environmental factors is necessarily a bad job part of what we want to do is to do two things one is to align people's skills and talents to the opportunities that are available in the labour market and the other is to try and expand those in ways which are meaningful for the employer and so the fact that a job is low skill doesn't mean that it necessarily doesn't have the other aspects that make it a good job so it's reasonably well enough paid people are treated with respect and dignity the danger of that argument is that we say basically for a whole section of the economy you can't get good job quality somebody illustrated to this asked me a question recently in a similar type of presentation where they said you know I spend my life trying to get people with learning disabilities into employment for them a good job is any job and I very much reject the view that a good job is any job you want to have a job which reflects your skills and your capabilities but the components of that are you respected do you have a voice are you supported those are important parts of any job whatever the task is I should say that the workers I've met in some of the businesses I've talked about would not regard themselves as being in bad jobs but the perception externally might be that's a bad job I'm going to bring some others in start with Richard Lyon can I pose a question to Stephen Boyd in your submission the STUC believes this is a crucially important inquiry but then you go on to say the STUC has long been concerned over the range and quality of labour market statistics and the length of time it takes for those inadequate statistics to be published and you give you actually believe that the Scottish Government plays a weak can dealt by the ONS the Office of National Statistics very well but those statistics compare purely to other advanced nations and you I just love your last quote which is the sectoral employment data for Scotland is extrapolated from a UK survey to useless can you explain that? I mean I've tried to say out quite clearly hopefully in the paper a range of concerns here I'm always kind of struck by the fact that quite correctly headline labour market statistics are the source of much political argumentation in this place I mean that is entirely proper but you look at the quality of the statistics that are published for Scotland on a monthly basis by ONS I'm very little I would say about how actual real people experience the labour market in real time and often presented as what is happening in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK for a whole and once you take into account the margins for error and the statistics very often we're arguing in here about very little or nothing you know when it comes to differences but specifically on sectoral employment data I'm talking exclusively about the workforce jobs survey data that's published by the ONS each month which as I say in the paper is extrapolated from a UK wide survey so it will interview company X which may have 10 significant workplaces in England and Wales but none in Scotland but it will deduce from that a figure for Scotland so the survey does not relate to the sectoral makeup of the Scottish economy and what you've seen is that the methodology was changed in 2010 I think it was so I'm really quite remarkable statistics so in 2011 it was shown the highest rate of health workers ever in Scotland you know at a time we know not sorry across the public administration services it was shown the highest level of workers ever in Scotland at a time we know public sector jobs were falling in Scotland now again it's imperfect because it's not all public sector workers and that actual survey but there was a range of sectoral data coming out that just made no sense and I know the Scottish Government who are very reticent about using these figures at this moment in time due to a range of problems we essentially stop using them the Scottish Government is able to use a number of surveys that are not published for general use to embellish these statistics and therefore come up with stats that will be more credible but from a user's perspective like ours we have to be extremely cautious about how we use these so how what action would you take to improve you know we've got so many companies employed and you could go and touch anyone and they work for a you know to do statistics and that's the old saying dare I say, damlies in statistics what would you do to improve the information we need in order to ensure that this inquiry progresses in the right direction what I deal with here is a problem of under investment the sample size in Scotland for labour force surveys is too small which is why four times a year we have to embellish it using the annual population survey which is four times the size of the labour force survey so what we need are bigger and better surveys which is going to cost someone a significant amount of money unfortunately the direction of travel ONS as you can imagine is precisely another direction we were even discussing about 18 months ago in the census and ONS seemed to be moving to a position where it was just going to be undertaking the stats required by European directives so it was just going to be a UK version of what EuroStat produces I think you know we managed to fight that off but from a Scottish perspective it's very difficult to see how things are going to improve as long as we carry on in the current model where we're just kind of something Scottish by UK level survey data we're not doing our own new and better surveys but as I say it's going to cost someone a significant amount of money to do that until we do that I think we just have to be quite cautious in terms of how we treat some of the statistics that you're likely to come across in the inquiry I'd like to come back to the issues of what makes work satisfactory for people doing it and I've thought that one of the strongest pieces of evidence we've seen was the workplace employment relations study and some of the information it's separated out job satisfaction into pay on the one hand and everything else that the witnesses have all talked about control, autonomy, respect on the other hand I wonder first of all what the view would be of the relative importance of pay for example the 18 jobs that the community described what's the relative importance of pay in the context of these other aspects of job satisfaction that you've all talked about which suggests that pay is not the predominant element in calculation of job quality if you look at the European job quality indicator which is the most commonly used indicator for European comparison that allocates a weight of 20 per cent to pay so it suggests that other job factors are significant I think we need to be very careful about that because when you ask the research suggests that when you ask people to rank different factors of their job, pay doesn't always arise at the top but we know that pay is fundamentally important to the other outcomes that people receive from jobs so we need to be very careful about how we factor in some of those pay issues just to pick up briefly on that in terms of our experience from the human kind index that gave a nod towards the elements of work of the 18 priorities identified by people in that satisfying work to do came out third secure work and suitable work came out fifth and all of those were above financial factors so I would absolutely agree that those non-financial factors are primary in people's minds but there's an underpinning in terms of pay levels and the use of satisfaction are very sensitive to issues of expectation so if people expect very little from the type of job that they do then their satisfaction can be quite high despite the fact that the job is quite low quality and we have to be very careful that that issue of expectation doesn't feed into a misaligned view of job quality to take an illustration of that for many women who downsize their careers or work in particularly flexible forms of employment during their childbearing and childrearing years and do voice more than men higher levels of job satisfaction but it's in a constrained context they're satisfied with the job that they can get that will fit with their life but that's not necessarily a maximisation of their own potential for job quality I would agree with what Patricia said there as well but just also add to what we know from our experience of working on women's equality is that what matters to women as well is working somewhere that is inclusive of a workplace culture that supports gender equality and that means providing flexible working so that women can balance their caring responsibilities and other responsibilities outside of their working life Just to add to what the others have said I mean I think the timing of this where survey is quite interesting obviously it was in 2011 that was two years into a five-year period of falling real wages which is entirely unprecedented in modern times you know you may well have started to find different results if that survey was two or three years later I think in terms again of some of the evidence we heard in the first session pay or income is clearly critical to inequality and therefore to some of the other outcomes we've talked about although the point about it being relative to other things is clearly important as well one of the debates that's clearly going to happen in the next few months is over measures that have been taken for example under the previous UK Government to address relative poverty of people in work in work poverty through tax credits and so on and clearly that's now being questioned by the current UK Government without going into the political choices between tax and benefit how significant are incomes whether from social security or for employment to people who are facing disadvantage in other ways in the context of work particularly perhaps we do need to address the political question because it's going to dominate the period of our enquiry social security has been questioned for those people in work with no suggestion yet I think from the Prime Minister as to what should happen instead of social security sport for people in work I wonder what the panel make of that in the context of what we're examining in this enquiry There is a particular issue in Scotland if we look at the rate of employment growth so in the submission you'll see I've made some reference to the pay details in which we've seen employment growth in the last few years and if you look in Scotland job growth has been much higher in the lowest to pay details so the people who are at the bottom 20 per cent of income have experienced there are more of those jobs now and there are more jobs in the highest three details so given that the issue of taxation and in-work benefit is likely to hit people at the lowest details of pay because those are also the areas of the economy in which we've seen job growth More and more people affected That raises this issue of polarisation Do we end up with some people in the Scottish Labour market who are doing very well We've seen a growth we've got very significant growth in higher level jobs associate professional and technical jobs we've also seen a lot of growth at the bottom end and the difficulty that that raises for not just for pay but for broader job quality issues to develop your career and to maximise your own potential means that those middle tier jobs are significantly lower than they used to be It's important when having any discussion about low paid workers and also social security cuts as well that both of those have a gendered dimension to them 85 per cent so far of the social spending cuts have come from women's incomes and that is obviously the focus of an inquiry elsewhere in the welfare reform committee but looking at the concentration of women within low paid jobs there will undoubtedly be a gendered impact to any increase in those Your question raises all manner of different issues One of the questions that has been asked in the call for evidence support is the impact of low job quality and low pay on the economy as a whole I would argue over the last 30 years when you've seen the proportion of workers pay as a proportionary GDP fall reasonably consistently over that period it's led to an economy that's less resilient and less stable what you've seen is more low wage jobs at the bottom and people having to supplement household incomes with debt and what you've seen at the top end of the larger share going to the very top end of the distribution you've seen people with a much lower marginal propensity to consume so it's stripping demand out of the economy and it's also enabling those people to engage in speculative investments which have a destabilising effect as well so I think that macroeconomic effect is very worth the committee's attention in terms of the link with benefits and policy mechanisms that's happened over the last few years you might well want to address a political question and of course we'll do my very best to keep politics out of it and it's very difficult when you start getting into this kind of conversation that you know you immediately start getting into what Government X did and what Government Y did I think it's very helpful just to look at the policy mechanisms themselves and what they have achieved so if you look at the work that David Bell and David Iser presented last week to David Tewm Institute while 60 slides are now up there in the David Tewm Institute's website but you can see pretty clearly from those slides the very beneficial effect that the national minimum wage and tax credits had on income distribution now I would argue that's a good thing in dampening the effect of inequality which of course did rise less over those years than the UK and then it did in other nations but that also has a stabilising macroeconomic impact as well which I think we have to think of it Good morning and I'd like to thank Patricia for defining the difference between good and bad jobs in terms of perceptions versus reality I wonder if I can ask Alan a question I don't think that any one of this would demand from having a focused high wage high productivity economy and one in which there is a quality of treatment, quality of conditions and where that treatment and advancement is based on merit regardless of faith gender or ethnicity we have in the economy many crisis in terms of lack of engineers and yet we can't get enough women into engineering appropriate because there's a conference on that I understand today you mentioned lack of inclusion in the workplace in that particular sector do you evidence the lack of inclusion and what actually happens in that particular marketplace regarding women? Yes, specifically to engineering the barriers, structural barriers that women face in terms of participating and progressing within engineering roles there are some distinct to them but there's commonalities across all the labour market but in male dominated occupations and sectors it's very similar first of all gender stereotyping which starts at school means that girls are less likely to study subjects such as maths and physics which are obviously required to go on to study engineering this also lessens again when we get to further and higher education level because what we know about occupational segregation is that it affects across the whole of the skills pipeline and girls and women detach at various points engineering firms are often in the private sector as well who are less likely to have good equalities practice but we know that when women want to take time out to have children that combining care with work is often quite difficult to do because there's a lack of flexible working practices in terms of progression we find that there are unfair and biased recruitment practices in place which mean that progression is very often linked to what's known as the old boys network where this is based on informal networking practices to which women don't have access or as great as access particularly when those networking opportunities are based around stereotypical male activities such as playing golf there also just straight out discrimination where some employers and colleagues within workplaces and broader society feel that women are just not suitable for engineering as well as the fact that engineering itself as a profession seems to have the perception that it is something different to what it is so it's quite dirty and therefore I think maybe there's a misconception about what engineering actually is not to say of course that some girls and some women like doing things that get dirty such as maybe working in an abattoir so you think positive discrimination might help that or does it in fact in some cases hinder it quite substantially positive discrimination is unlawful but positive action is not so I suppose some positive action measures to specifically target training for example pre vocational taster sessions for girls there's a lot of discreet project work that has been done to try and encourage girls and young women into engineering and also into other male dominated sectors and these have proven successful to an extent but the problem with these individualised projects is that they are quite expensive and the outcomes actually only affect quite a small number of girls and women and when the funding gets taken away from that then the number goes back to zero and that is why gender should be mainstreamed which means that every employer every public sector body should be taken into account how gender equality can factor into the functioning of their organisations one question have I made for Stephen Boyd I asked the question earlier which you probably heard in terms of the voice of the employees and how successful companies that have had equity participation management participation works council involvement I wonder if you could share your views on that I also like to together with that consider the growth of substantial growth of the social enterprise voluntary sector third sector and what does that mean for trade unions going forward I thought you made a very good point earlier on and I think it is a major determining factor and the quality of a job to voice that employees having a workplace the McLeod review was published six or seven years ago now that looked at employee engagement across Europe and found that the UK was something of an outlier in terms of how employees had voice within a firms other countries as you rightly identified tend to use other mechanisms that we don't have here so if you are in a unionised workplace and you benefit from a collective bargaining agreement in the UK then you're probably in a better place than other workers but again they don't have the kind of co-determination that is the norm in Germany we've got a lower level of employee owned enterprises and some of our employee owned enterprises are employee owned in all but name they don't really walk the walk I have to say in terms of really engaging employees in the strategic thinking about the company I would put all this under the banner of industrial democracy frankly and I think it is much weaker in Scotland than in the UK than in other European countries and they benefit significantly because of that I don't think this conversation necessarily translates very easily into a conversation about the role of the third sector in Scotland I think some third sector organisations are unionised tend to be the bigger ones obviously some third sector organisations are very well managed providing very decent quality work some are not some we've seen very poor quality work actually disputes in some of our major third sector employers over the last few years I think that sector has been playing a very positive part in discussions about how we improve the Scottish workplace I don't think it would pay to be a two pan glossy and perhaps about the role that it has played up until now In the impact on trade unions industrial democracy more workplace safe for employees is pretty clear in a range of places and over a long period of time unionise what places tend to provide better quality work again I don't think there's any particularly special issues when it comes to the voluntary sector I think it's pretty similar in terms of unionisation to the rest of the economy the issues are pretty similar to all sectors of the economy one of the issues I was exploring with the previous panel was around how to avoid being distracted by averages and understanding the inequalities or the granularity that exists underneath those figures whether inequalities of age, gender socioeconomic background different employment types or what have you and it relates of course to Professor Grant about if two thirds of people say there's not a problem that doesn't mean that there's not a problem we should be looking at that the rest of the experience I'm aware that human beings often look for bits of information they like and they form a pattern out of it and that's a mistake that you can often make so correct me if I'm wrong but we've seen some comments here from NHS Health Scotland about the impact on mental health not well being in general but mental health of income and I don't know if you can see this or if you've had a look at it beforehand but all of the healthier ends of the score are middle all the middle incomes are in the healthier end of the score all of the high incomes are spread right throughout from high to low in terms of health impact Jamie Livingston mentioned the humankind index and some of the comments that people made about what really mattered to them was satisfying work when they did talk about money if I remember rightly people talked about having enough to pay the bills or enough to live with dignity a sense that enough was a concept that people get but governments regardless of party politics very often focus on attracting or creating high pay when clearly that's not necessarily the same as good jobs so I was interested that your discussion with the University of West of Scotland one of the criteria on pay that people were talking about there was lower wage ratios between low middle and high paid employees isn't there a strong case that creating lower wage ratios in our economy public and private sector would focus our minds both as employers as employees and governments focus our minds on what really matters in terms of job quality which is those other factors rather than continuing this slightly unhealthy delusion in my view that high pay is the measure of what's important to attract in the economy or in our own personal lives the human kind index focused on suficiency of income the way it was it wasn't footballers' wages that people were looking for it was an income that was sufficient to support a decent quality of life but even then those financial factors were lower than things like an affordable decent and safe home physical and mental health etc so that puts it in some context I think you're right in terms of wage ratios we recently did a policy forum some of the panel were speakers at that as well that looked at minimum criteria that policy forum was with the University of West of Scotland and as a somewhat of a precursor to the research that we're hoping to to do but reward came out quite strongly in that in terms of the gap between top and bottom so I would agree pay and wage ratios is something that would be beneficial I also think in general and speaking as somebody as a former journalist politicians in general we focus on job numbers almost exclusively the job stats came out last week senior figures from both the Scottish and UK parliaments seized on those as encouraging etc without much reference to the quality of the jobs there I think we've got a bit of a culture shift to do and there is a degree of momentum behind this in terms of and this inquiry is one part of that there is a degree of momentum in Scotland in terms of trying to broaden the approach beyond purely numbers of jobs to that decent quality and in terms of those pay ratios I think it's something that we need to do more work on I think in previously from memory we've talked about a sort of 1 to 20 ratio that's particularly non-reflective of current pay ratios particularly in terms of large footsie 100 companies for example Anybody else and in particular in terms of what government economic policy or enterprise agencies practices and so on can do to help shift the focus away from fetishising high paid jobs and into the things which matter more in terms of quality and the equality of people's experience of that Can I say that we do know on a whole stream of research over a very long time how important equity is to how people perceive fair or unfair pay so equitable comparisons with people who work in the same organisation as you or who do the same job as you in another place so equity is a really fundamental part about how people perceive issues of fairness it's challenging in terms of ratios to work out where the ratio would apply so that comparison is not always an internal one-on-one organisation it's not just what happens in your workplace irrespective of what happens in other workplaces there is a related debate around how we've seen the mechanisms through which we've seen inequality rise in some organisations and inequality has risen in part, not in full, but in part related to issues of individual payment for performance and that takes us into another area of concern around job quality which is around the issue of performance management targets which I think sits very nicely with some of the where's data on intensification so that issue of equity is very important but there's not an awful lot of levers which particularly in private organisations Government can use at any level to try and deal with issues of ratios and equity a couple of points I think you are more compressed distribution is very desirable for the reasons outlined earlier discussion around inequality it's how best to achieve that when I would argue those nations have a much more compressed distribution also don't have a national minimum wage do benefit from very high levels of collective bargaining coverage Nordic nations in particular and I would argue collective bargaining is a much more efficient way of managing a more compressed wage distribution particularly when there's strong social partner organisations there to engage in a national level collective bargaining a much more effective way of doing that than by applying wage ratios and pressures already alluded to difficulties very quickly what you come back to point you made about mental health because I think this is a huge issue and it also relates again to the point about performance management that Trish has just raised when I make mention of our written submission to the research and performance management we published a couple of years ago with specific reference to the retail banking and communications sectors which shows the new forms of performance management which again seem to have become more embedded post the discussion are having a real and very detrimental impact on people's mental health because they're seen as arbitrary they're seen as intensifying work and I think this is kind of born out in the statistics and what we have seen over the last few years despite all the efforts is the number of people in disability benefits started to fall kind of post the session continued very very weak falls have recently started to tick back up again but what we've seen is the composition for claiming benefits has changed quite radically for people who must go from skeletal disorders who used to work in heavy industry et cetera to people who are now it's overwhelmingly dominated now people with mental health problems particularly stressing depression there must be some link to changes in the modern workplace although I'm not aware of any empirical research that bears that out particularly strong I'll come back to your last question if you want about what Government might do I mean I think it's quite difficult in the Scottish context I think much of what Government should be doing it's already doing through things like the fair work convention which is in its very early stages I think the research shows particularly around about low wage work that the quality of labour market institutions is absolutely pivotal here and the most important labour market institution again is collective bargain so anything that can be done through the fair work convention to make the case for wider collective bargain coverage and to help make that happen I think will be particularly important there's a whole range of moral suasion techniques they can use and I guess the business pledge is the latest one although we have some concerns about how that's planned out clearly economic development policy and what sectors you choose to invest in is going to have a long term impact in that as well any of these issues criteria for applying for corporate welfare systems like the regional selective assistance grant? I mean the programme for government was announced the business pledge was first mentioned in the programme for government it seemed to have an element of conditionality to it that your support from Scottish Enterprise Guild Development Scotland Accenture would be conditional on you signing up to this pledge that conditionality element has now been completely lost it's a volunteeristic tool now you could make the case it's all progress you know so I wouldn't want to be too critical of it some concerns there about how it might cut across work already taking place at the Living Wage which is more of a concern I think if companies by signing up to the business pledge self-certify as living wage employers rather than through the Scottish Government funded accreditation process then there might be something of a problem emerging there the last two things that we quickly mentioned is clearly public procurement and there's been much discussion again about new indicators of employment and I think that discussion is already happening in Scotland performance round table we seem to be making some progress in the early part of last year I'm not entirely sure where that work is reached at this point but any new indicators that we can develop to again better reflect how the labour market is affecting people in new times all to the good just a couple of points one which was linked to what you mentioned in relation to a focus on high growth businesses and in particular the model used by the economic development ages in terms of providing business support to self-employed people the experience of women who own businesses and this is well evidence and promoted by Women's Enterprise Scotland is that women own businesses find it more difficult to access business support that is specific to their needs more difficult to access financial support and because the economic development agencies focus on high growth businesses then they are excluded so in some ways they can get start-up support from business gateway and what not but that in itself is not necessarily what they need when they've reached a certain level so there's a glass ceiling there for women owned businesses because of the focus that's on high growth companies and one other very quick point which I know you didn't ask about this but it's related to performance related pay is that there's a gendered aspect to that as well and it's related to pay because we know that when individuals are able to negotiate their own pay the potential for pay discrimination increases massively Thank you Just a quick point I would endorse lots of what Stephen said in terms of the round table and national performance framework we have been involved in that we've been pushing for a broadening of that review to take into account for example economic purpose which has economic growth at its core despite what we know in terms of that being disproportionately captured by the wealthiest but currently the purpose and the national outcomes weren't up for review it was the indicators in terms of relevant indicators for decent work as well I think we could serve with having another look at those there are for example an indicator around improved economic participation the quality of that economic participation so we need to establish what matters to the people of Scotland and then embed it within how we measure success because all too often that then skews the policy focus Right, I'll bring it in I think we'll probably all agree that we've got a fairly wide ranging inquiry here and to some extent fairly complex and I'm just wondering because one of the aspects of the inquiry is the wellbeing and sort of impacts and I'm interested obviously that the work of the fair work convention hopefully will look at I think some of the impacts and hopefully positive outcomes with the danger of even broadening the inquiry even further are we doing enough in terms of the education level prior to work to try and align people's expectations skills ability to get into the right kind of job the job that is going to match their expectation ability skill and obviously that includes all sectors of the population including women, people with disabilities and I'm just wondering are we doing enough at that sort of careers end and advice end or is the culture still the barrier in taking that forward maybe Patricia I think there's a huge amount of very positive work going on obviously primarily engaging skills development Scotland but other agencies and the education system itself make sure that there is a much better matching of what people leave school with and the destinations in which they may end up there is a slight problem with that I suppose which is if you have concerns that we have pockets of very poor quality work then one of the arguments about aligning very closely to what employers currently need is that we might recreate the same pattern so we may reproduce poor quality work rather than encouraging to do skills acquisition and skills utilisation which is very important people to undertake higher value work and higher quality work so the policy push over the last couple of decades in Scotland and in the rest of the UK has been acquisition of relevant qualifications it's been about supply push if we push enough skills and qualifications accredited qualifications into the economy then it will have an impact and the reality is that it hasn't had a great deal of impact at all and the barrier there which I think it recognises quite well it's that those skills and talents are not properly deployed in the workplace and that comes back to issues around the design of jobs, how broad those jobs are whether or not they are inviting and welcoming to different demographics within the population if I can just use one illustration of that in my submission we have the lowest proportion of all across the EU countries that participate in the JQI the lowest proportion of workplaces in which people can engage in discretionary problem-solving activity now that's that may or may not we may think that that's not an issue but we also have the lowest G7 productivity and those things might be connected it's difficult to establish a statistical connection but they might be connected so it's not an issue just about trying to define what people do when they come out of school but it's also about opening up the world of work to be inviting to educated and well qualified school-leaving population positive destination which sounds great because it's very positive it doesn't have any negative connotation at all but depending on the type of work that a person is going into are they getting any real satisfaction is it impacting on their health at an early stage and have we taken into account the shift in the the type of work that we're no longer a heavily industrial nation which we're probably still I would think still the impact of the health on the nation is still there from a lot of that previous work so I'm just really trying to get are we doing enough or what can be done in terms of the positive destination for young people going into employment that it's not going to impact the negative flight on their health Steven movie the school end of things is not tremendously well informed about that I think it is important to emphasise that we do know through recent research that prolonged periods spent in low quality low wage work or cycling between low quality low wage work and periods of unemployment have very similar effects on young people and indeed older people that prolonged periods of unemployment do so I mean we know in Scotland we're still living it with the consequences of those long term effects of prolonged periods of unemployment so it's important to understand the extent of the potential problem here I think there's also a general point to be made about the kind of the labour market system is managed by government we have in the UK which is very much a work first approach and prioritises getting people into any kind of work as quickly as possible if you compare that to the Danish model for instance which is generally regarded as the most efficiently functioning labour market in the world that places a lot more emphasis in matching people correctly with work you know so if someone loses their job they have much higher benefits which allows them to take a bit more time to make sure they get the right job rather than just any job I don't think we change from our system to the Danish system tomorrow I don't think it's probably even particularly wise to try and do that too quickly but I think we have to start thinking through the consequences of that work first and what that means in the longer term I'm also forever emphasising to people just how little money we spend in active labour market policy in Scotland and the UK compared to other European nations I mean Denmark again not only do we spend significantly less as a proportion of GDP we come very close to spending actually less than they do in nominal terms where it's economy are 12th earth size so if we want our active labour market system to function and function well then it has to be much better funded and funded much more consistently and less cyclically than the UK system has been hoping for. Fair Work Convention sufficient enough to take us down that sort of transitional pathway for this matching the skills to which you'll hopefully equate to better health for the nation Trish is probably in a better place to handle that I'm very mindful that I'm here in a professional capacity and not representing the Fair Work Convention to which I am the academic advisor The remit of the convention as you'll have seen from any of the published documents is actually very broad it's to provide a framework in the first year of its operations to provide a framework for fair work in Scotland and the conventions at the very early stages of its deliberation but it's dealing with an awful lot of issues that are very similar to what we discussed here this morning and this is a working definition but the convention is very interested in looking at work that provides opportunity, fulfilment security, dignity and effective voice and some of that, particularly in terms of opportunity will look at issues of transition into the labour market and how people move in and out of the labour market so the convention has a very big job to do on its first target quite a short period of time but part of that is within the remit and it's taking evidence from all of the public agencies as well as a broader range of stakeholders to try and inform its work in that area Just to go back to your original question about schools and how schools are preparing young people for entering the labour market we're involved in a bit of work just now which is looking at occupational segregation we've been working with colleges and schools and the education authority to identify where along the pipeline there can be positive points of intervention to address that and one message that is coming back quite clearly from a number of different stakeholders is that young people who do not go on to university but maybe go to college or go straight into the labour market the message coming back from employers is that the young people are lacking very basic skills that could be classed under employability and how to fill out an application form and how to behave in a formal setting like that so that has come back for a number of different stakeholders seems to be quite common I suppose the focus I think for the inquiry it is about the individual and it's not good if you're ill because the job you're in and your life expense on but it's also about why that's bad for the economy and why you reflected that so I'm interested how we get a proper sense of actually what's happening I would probably think it's a distinction between a hard job and a bad job when I was talking to a care assistant in a nursing home last week who said she loved her job you couldn't possibly expect to make a lot of money out of it but she was content in her work whereas I know someone who works in the care sector which involves not getting paid till you get to the place of what we can how we get a proper understanding of actually what's happening another example of somebody working in the hotel sector I think that she's getting a certain number of hours I was told that she would get paid per room that she cleaned so it would be useful to get your ideas about how we get that evidence to properly understand what I think is a casualisation of too many workforce so maybe I'll ask Stephen directly of zero hours contracts you say that there's a longer term trend that we should be aware of rather than just explaining it all by the recession perhaps the recession has become a justification for some of these things and you also said that the zero hours contract issue is larger because people now understand it and they had no expectation of anything different to what extent do you think business now actively sees a some business see that actively use zero hours contracts or casualisation as part of their business model and what can we do about that? Okay, can I say first a minute I think it's probably quite important that the committee is realistic about what is likely to be achieved in quantifying this problem I think for the range of reasons we've already heard this morning and I think the zero hours contract issue is illustrative of the wider problems now it's not something that ONS has published on but since it's became a political issue they have done their best to try to go back and redesign a labour force survey and some of the employer surveys to get a better handle on what has happened so on the graph I think I've got on my evidence seems to show a huge jump in 2012 now we would attribute that a better understanding of people understanding that they're on zero hours contracts so when they're then asked a question by the the survey they're able to answer accurately where as before they were asked are you on a zero hours contract wouldn't have been put in precisely that way but does your contract guarantee you a certain number of hours you'll probably answer them inaccurately so that big jump in 2012 probably reflects more accurate responses ONS have also done a lot of work with employers which suggests the figure is significantly higher because clearly employers answer the survey more accurately but for a range of technical reasons that probably overestimates the number of zero hours contracts so I think to be fair to them over the last couple of years they've done a lot of work in this and they're working towards a point where we're going to get a much more accurate measure of the number of zero hours contracts in the economy hopefully that would be disaggregated on a national regional basis by ONS as well we've tried to do our best to extrapolate from the UK figures in understanding that the trends are slightly different particularly in the health service if Scotland's slightly below the UK average on this and we've come up with an estimate for zero hours contracts but we're unable to, I mean the question that you concluded with there I mean to think employers are increasingly taking advantage of labour market conditions to to offer work which is less secure than in the past and I think that anecdotally I can say that is true and it's not of course just zero hours contracts there's also things like pay between assignment contracts there's self-employment which I mean we know in the construction sector for instance bogus self-employment has been a very long standing issue but we now see things like call centres offering people work which is on self-employed contracts and people quite often don't understand that until they're on the point of starting the job so I think anecdotally we can say it's happening but I mean it would be irresponsible to try and quantify that to any extent and we just don't have the information it would allow us to try and begin to put numbers on that Scottish level on you know the proportion of work that is becoming more insecure and the proportion of work that's became more insecure since 2008 I just don't think we can do it but if we accept that insecurity and work is bad for the individual and bad for the economy what are the things that we can do to encourage people to move away from that kind of model well again I mean I would start with the pessimistic point that I think you know a number of highly deregulated labour market and even more deregulated product market which has practically forced a lot of firms down what we would describe as low road approaches to competitiveness and I think many companies' business models are built on insecure low wage work and I think for these kind of employers it's going to be very difficult frankly to set them down another direction and you can present all manner of case studies companies that do this things well they're unlikely to resonate with that kind of company that's doing fine frankly by running these kind of business models I think you know I would go back to what we can do in Scotland to try and change behaviours in this respect I could really do no more than list range of activities I gave reply to Patrick's question but again some of these are pretty long term and pretty difficult you know in terms of economic development policy I mean moving beyond the key sector-led approach to economic development I think that's really a project with the Scottish Government at the moment looking to do just that but I mean outcomes are frankly long term and highly uncertain and it would be again irresponsible to over promise in terms of what that's likely to deliver Can I ask you just finally on the question of unionisation I think it's interesting that the minimum wage policy developed out of particularly women trade unionist feeling that collective bargaining in itself wasn't going to address job segregation and so on but it's the case that unionisation then reflects less job insecurity what in policy terms could be done to support that or is it the business of the Government at any level to be involved in that I mean again I would emphasise alone clearly higher rates of unionisation are a good thing from the STUC's perspective in terms of the literature of what is really important is collective bargaining coverage and there's a subtle but very important distinction between the two and you have for instance when France would be outlier in this respect it's getting 8% union density but it's getting 85-90% collective bargaining coverage for historical and cultural reasons so what can the Government do to encourage and support collective bargaining at Scottish level I mean I guess the easy answer to that is the Fair Work Convention will be looking at this very issue over the coming years I mean to try and give you a slightly more answer to that. I mean it can look at sectors which currently well you could snap the key sectors where currently the Scottish Government provides a significant amount of support and you can look at some of the major employers in those sectors which are unionised have managed to change workplace organisation job design through engagement with the union and you can sell the story through very effective case studies and we've done that ourselves through what's happened at for instance Rolls-Royce Goldbride what happened at the ASIO up in Methw and there's very good case studies in that respect you can be slightly more ambitious and look at some sectors that we know are you know suffer from a very high proportion of low-age low-quality work social care would be probably the most obvious sector and again Government procurement plays a major role in there so how could you start thinking through the various levers that Government has with these sectors how we could use it to encourage even in the first instance to encourage a more European social partnership type approach between employers and unions in these sectors to try and determine things around about pay and job quality etc and move towards perhaps a more prescriptive collective bargaining arrangement I think there's quite a lot that can be there but there's no there's probably just demonstrated there's no quick snappy answer to that and this is complex long-term stuff I think that could I maybe tie up just two parts of your question there and I think in relation to both Serious and Testius of Unionisation I mean we know that we know the impact of collective bargaining coverage comparatively so if you look at the Joseph Rowntree work from a few years ago collective bargaining coverage is the single factor that is related to whether or not there are high proportions of low-paid jobs in an economy so we know that it's very significant and from the point of view of Scotland in the UK I would invite you to consider the fact that there's no evidence of any other alternative systematic forms of voice in UK organisations. We have had times over the last couple of decades where we've talked about non-union channels of collective and individual voice but the reality is if you look at the workplace employment relations survey only 7% of UK workplaces have stand-alone non-union forms of representation so we know that collective bargaining produces good outcomes we know that in the absence of collective bargaining actually there's not much evidence of any other channel at all other than one-to-one communication between employees and managers I take that back to your issue of zero hours contracts a knee jerk issue around zero hours contracts is from my point of view problematic in the sense that there will be circumstances where individuals and employers will be able to align around that perhaps a very small proportion of zero hours contracts will take that form but how you resolve that issue is by having a mechanism of dialogue and voice and so the two things actually are quite well aligned I think we've talked about here is that the Scottish Government's focus right now has been on movement building it's been about cajoling rather than in some ways forcing or really incentivising through things like the business pledge there's no doubt there's a business case economic case to be one with employers on it and all the evidence points that there's no trade off between job quantity and job quality and indeed for businesses who provide decent work they report lower staff turnover higher levels of loyalty better employing morale, lower costs in terms of sick pay and higher productivity and I just wanted to flag up a couple of areas where we have seen progress or certainly through our international work which has much more been about supply chains trying to find common cause with consumers and buyers has worked effectively behind the brands scheme which really tries to have corporate brands competing against each other for improved practice we did some work with the 10 biggest global food and drinks companies and that led to the likes of Coke and Pepsi competing with each other publicly on things like land grabs and land rights within their supply chains it's not just about being critical from the outside it's about supporting businesses towards better practice so we've done some work with Unilever for example in 2013 they allowed us to examine their supply chains in Vietnam that looked at things like collective bargaining living wages, working hours, contract labour and that led to a joint report and positive action from Unilever now I'm sure we would have wanted them to go further but that's an opportunity for where moral suasion comes into its own OK, thank you follow-up the comment that was made about contracts just having completed a project regarding youth football one of the things that surprised me in contact with the HMRC and also biz was that any contract that pays less in the minimum wage isn't a contract to come across that OK, can I just ask one question just to finish off one of the things we've been looking at as a committee is whether there are particular sectors of the economy we should concentrate on we've talked about the care sector we've talked about hospitality for example do we have a view, would these be good examples or are there other sectors you think we should focus on anyone a very important sector because it has a very high proportion of high quality has high quality work as well as low quality work so it's quite a polarised sector hospitality is interesting for a variety of different reasons there's no necessary link between the level of value produced in hospitality and the quality of jobs so you don't necessarily have a much better job if you work in a five-star hotel than if you work in a no-star B&B both of those are interesting areas there are also areas where clearly in terms of the proportion of women workers there are huge gender issues I think from our point of view as well that one of the things that hasn't been mentioned yet is the concept of value and how we value types of work and who's doing that particular type of work and Joanne alluded to it there we're talking about female dominated workplaces in the care sector so if you are going to look at the care sector then obviously it's women that are concentrated is women that are doing it so what we know about undervaluing is that there's two aspects to it it is the type of work that women tend to do because it's traditionally done in the home such as caring is low paid because women do it and because the skills are not seen they're not valued very much and then there's the other type of undervaluing where women are paid less for doing the same work as men so I think that any particular sector focus needs to take to focus on value and how that contributes towards job quality I think that's really important in terms of how you define work and whether this inquiry looks at unpaid work for example within its remit as well and just broadening beyond the sectoral focus I guess as well as women ethnic minorities, migrant workers more likely to work in the types of jobs where job quality is an issue so perhaps worth taking that into account financial services I think is particularly interesting I think for a number of reasons and clearly hitherto it's provided pretty decent employment particularly in retail banking it's obviously been through massive change over the last few years and certainly our quite strong anecdotal evidence suggests that the quality of work is deteriorated very significantly but I think probably most importantly looking to the future it's a sector that's really going to be most clear to the world and I guess in terms of technological change and what that might mean for job quantity and quality perhaps worth looking at That's been helpful and I think we're at the end of our time so on behalf of the committee I say thank you to all of you for coming along it's been very useful just to help set the scene and no doubt we will come back to you as the inquiry continues and at that we will suspend and go into private session