Built on Shifting Sands: Changes in Employers’ Use of Contingent Labour in the UK Construction Sector

Abstract

There has been widespread interest across various national contexts in employers’ use of contingent forms of labour. The tendency to conflate different contract types into catch-all categories has increasingly given way to recognition of the differences between forms of labour. Despite this, systematic comparisons of employers’ attitudes to different forms of labour remain an underdeveloped area of research. Drawing on an original survey of the UK construction sector this paper offers new insight into employers’ attitudes to different forms of contingent labour and tracks changes in their use. Uniquely, the analysis of movement between different forms of labour goes beyond approaches that focus on the dichotomy between direct and contingent labour to trace a more complex pattern of movement between the different contingent forms. This more nuanced picture of changing patterns of employers’ use of contingent labour suggests an area for development in future research.