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Prospects For Improving Pay At The Lower End Of The Labour Market

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In the UK today 22% of the entire workforce are low paid with the minimum wage for over 21’s being only £6.50 per hour (Lloyd & Payne,2012). Consequently mainstream political parties aim to promote in today’s culture the idea that people who work hard can progress to better jobs (Lloyd & Payne,2012). Moreover, there are barriers which prevent the prospects for improving pay at the lower end of the labour market. Thus this essay will examine and evaluate the prospects for improving pay and recognizing the barriers which hold back people from moving up in the labour market. The first part will assess internal labour markets and how affective they are at improving pay, the second part will discuss trade unions and how affective they are at …show more content…

Nevertheless, there has been evidence to represent a breakdown in ILMs, reducing prospects for employees at the lower end to progress internally. Grimshaw et al (2002) illustrates how possibilities for ‘moving up’ in the labour market have been eroded throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s due to de-layering of employees. Delayering involves removing levels of the hierarchy from the organisational structure (Riley,2014), this meant a transformation of the internal job ladder appeared where job positions within the middle of the hierarchy were usually removed (Grimshaw et al,2002). This resulted in some employees, usually at the bottom of the hierarchy losing their jobs altogether. Nevertheless the main effect of delayering is the rupture of ‘natural skills progression’ which means it is harder to move from lower positions to managerial positions due to a bigger gap between positions (Grimeshaw et al,2002). The breakdown of ILM also causes deskilling of workers which came from the theory of Fordism, this theory says businesses should aim to achieve higher productivity by standardizing the output and breaking work into small deskilled tasks. The concept of deskilling was put forward by Braverman in the 1970s, he said that ‘there is an inevitable tendency towards deskilling of work as capitalists search for profits in the competitive market’ (Noon&Blyton,2013). Thus this results in lowering prospects for improving pay at the lower end as employers

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