Why Has Work Effort Become More Intense?

TL;DR

Using British establishment data from WERS98, Green argues that work intensification in the 1990s was driven mainly by effort-biased technological and organizational change, with high-commitment HR policies also contributing. Declining union power and greater use of non-standard workers had only modest effects.

Key findings

• Technological and organizational change was the most important identified source of intensification: 46% of managers reported new technology/techniques/procedures and work organization changes, while only 11% reported none. Within-sample predictions show that with no technological change, the probability that effort “gone up a lot” falls from 40% to 23% in small establishments and from 44% to 26% in large establishments; if technological change were universal, it rises to 51% in both.
• High-commitment policies also mattered: removing employee involvement and performance-related pay lowers the predicted probability of effort “gone up a lot” from 40% to 32% in small establishments and from 44% to 43% in large establishments.
• Declining union power and non-standard labor had weaker effects: collective bargaining decline was confined to 5% of establishments (10% of employees), and union decline made virtually no difference in predictions; temporary agency workers and contractors were significantly associated with intensification, but fixed-term and part-time workers were not.
• Public-sector intensification was greater: managers reporting effort “gone up a lot” were 49.0% in the public sector versus 36.3% in the private sector; worker representatives reported 66.6% versus 50.8%. Table 1 shows private-sector strong agreement that the job requires working very hard rose from 31.5% in 1992 to 38.2% in 1997, while public-sector agreement rose from 31.9% to 44.3%, with no significant change after 1997.

Methods

• Uses the cross-section component of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98), a random sample of British establishments with at least 10 workers; 2,191 management interviews were completed (80% response rate) and 947 worker representative interviews (82% response rate), with usable effort responses for 1,934 establishments.
• The dependent variable is managers’ 5-point report of change over the previous five years in how hard people work; estimation is by ordered probit of a first-difference equation including technological change, high-commitment policies, union decline, and changes in non-standard labor use.
• Robustness checks use worker representatives’ effort reports and external consistency checks; the industry-level correlation between WERS98 intensification and independent 1992–1997 effort-change measures is 0.681.

Limitations

• The paper states that the effort-intensification data are subjective, findings should not be regarded as definitive, and they await confirmation from other data sets with other effort measures; it also notes possible omitted variables, recall error, and that supply-side shifts are not empirically evaluated.
• The paper states that future returns to current effort are hard to estimate from contemporary earnings functions, limiting assessment of wage–effort links.
• Evident from the text: the cross-sectional first-difference design cannot establish causality; the analysis is limited to Britain in the 1990s; manager and worker representative perceptions differ (Spearman correlation 0.101); and the union-decline measure is rare and refers to collective bargaining over pay rather than effort directly.