Workplace location and the quality of work: The case of urban-based workers in the UK

Abstract

Recent growth in flexible work which is detached from traditional urban workplaces, including homeworking, mobile working and forms of self-employment (gig work), has increased interest in the quality of work. This article compares job quality indicators between urban-based workers in standard (employer/business premises) and non-standard (homeworking, driving/travelling, mobile working) workplaces. Multinomial logistic regression is applied to UK panel data from four waves (2010–2011, 2012–2013, 2014–2015, 2016–2017) of the Understanding Society study. The analysis finds that urban-based employees working at home, predominantly in highly skilled occupations, have jobs which exhibit a number of characteristics of good work. Self-employed homeworkers, more often women, have lower job quality but leisure satisfaction benefits. Mobile working jobs offer greater spatial and temporal flexibility and job satisfaction, but also exhibit lower quality characteristics evident of trade-offs and divisions between forms of mobile work. Driving/travelling jobs exhibit lower job quality characteristics, especially among self-employed urban-based workers.

The changing work landscape as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic: insights from remote workers life situations in South Africa

“…Homeworking consists of having the option to work from home occasionally, sometimes or mostly (Zhu, 2013). Home-based teleworking is a recent phenomenon related to the remote working domain (Wheatley, 2020). The homeworking arrangement offers both employers and workers with a variety of benefits, such as no necessity to commute to and from workstations and also workand-life balance advantages (Wheatley, 2017(Wheatley, , 2020Moos and Skaburskis, 2007).…”

“…Home-based teleworking is a recent phenomenon related to the remote working domain (Wheatley, 2020). The homeworking arrangement offers both employers and workers with a variety of benefits, such as no necessity to commute to and from workstations and also workand-life balance advantages (Wheatley, 2017(Wheatley, , 2020Moos and Skaburskis, 2007). However, no consensus has yet been reached regarding standardising the definitions and terminology used for remote working.…”

New spatialities of work in the city

“…With the focus on gender, the study suggests that if the developed workplace location classification is applied, workplace gender segmentation is much greater in urban areas than existing studies that focused solely on non-spatial job characteristics have assumed. Wheatley (2021) takes the classification of jobs by their spatial characteristics further through linking these with job quality. The empirical study not only uses multiple dimensions of job quality to capture worker wellbeing in a comprehensive fashion (security, autonomy, skills development, working time quality, earnings) but also applies this multidimensional approach to employees and the self-employed and hence considers the increasing variety of worker types in cities.…”

“…Wheatley (2021) takes the classification of jobs by their spatial characteristics further through linking these with job quality. The empirical study not only uses multiple dimensions of job quality to capture worker wellbeing in a comprehensive fashion (security, autonomy, skills development, working time quality, earnings) but also applies this multidimensional approach to employees and the self-employed and hence considers the increasing variety of worker types in cities.…”

“…Rodriguez-Modrono’s (2021) study focuses on self-employed women working at home, similar to Wheatley (2021), with respect to a number of (objective and subjective) dimensions of job quality. The study uniquely combines quantitative analysis of the homeworking of self-employed women compared with that of self-employed men using European survey data and a qualitative investigation of self-employed women in the Spanish city of Seville.…”