Scale and nature of precarious work in the UK

Summary

This report is focused on estimating the changing scale and nature of precarious work in the UK. This focus reflects the evidence that: 1) precarious workers are likely to be at a high risk of experiencing labour market non-compliance; 2) non-compliance tends to particularly impact upon precarious workers’ physical and psychological well-being; and 3) precarious workers appear rarely to report, or seek justice, when faced with non-compliance. The Understanding Society Survey (USS) can be used to derive a new measurement of precarious work and make an inference to the UK population. Initial analysis (added to the Technical appendix of this report) suggested that non-standard work and low income are relatively more important factors than firm size and immigrant/ethnic minority background, so the weighted classification model that we used took this into account.