An article about the reality of life for women employed in ‘casual work’ by Kent Law School’s Dr Emily Grabham has been published in a national magazine.
The article, ‘Balancing casual work with care’ has been published in Security Matters, a publication produced by the University and College Union (UCU) for staff on insecure contracts working in post-secondary education. It draws on Dr Grabham’s current three-year research project Balancing precarious work and care, which has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under its Future Research Leaders scheme. The project involves an investigation of how women in casual work fare alongside ‘family friendly’ rights in the UK.
In the article for Security Matters, Dr Grabham says: ‘My current project studies what life is like for women who don’t have full-time steady work: how they manage their jobs alongside caring for children or adults, what their work conditions are like. I’m interviewing women in casual jobs around the UK to understand how they manage, what they understand of their legal rights, and what seems relevant to them. The point of this research is to use women’s own perspectives as the basis for proposing changes to employment law or policies to improve conditions for casual workers.’
In order to build a much fuller picture of how precarious workers understand their work-life balance options, their reasons for doing precarious work, their strategies for managing the tensions caused by care dilemmas, and their understanding of legal rights, Dr Grabham is in the process of conducting in-depth interviews of women in precarious work across the UK.
In the article, which draws on preliminary findings from interviews already conducted, Dr Grabham says: ‘Overall, what these women have taught me is that despite their courage, hope and persistence in standing up for their rights individually, we need more wide-ranging and structural solutions to improve the position of casual workers with caring responsibilities. Some of these solutions might include expanding rights so that they are available to a wider range of workers, not just employees on permanent contracts. Not all solutions, however, need involve changes to the law. The challenge we should post to employers and future governments is making working and caring possible for all kinds of workers, not just those in permanent jobs. Family friendly rights do exist, and they are certainly not perfect, but at the moment they’re only working for those women who are already relatively well protected in the workplace.’
Read the article in full on the UCU website.
Working with Professor Sarah Vickerstaff, from the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Research at Kent, the qualitative research gathered for the project will contribute to a policy report that will inform debates about the future of family friendly rights.
Dr Grabham, a Reader in Law at Kent Law School, is also co-founder (with Professor Judy Fudge) of the Gendering Labour Law Research Network. She is a member of the peer review colleges of the ESRC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council and sits on the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies. Dr Grabham’s research interests include: labour and equality law; interdisciplinary approaches to gender and labour; precarious work and gender; time and temporalities; feminist legal theory.