Worse jobs have raised the level of incapacity benefits

This post explains a claim I made on a BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘Fit for Work’ (episode 3), by Jolyon Jenkins – for transparency, I wanted people to be able to go and scrutinise the evidence behind it.

In the documentary ‘Fit for Work’, I claim that one of the reasons that so many claim out-of-work disability benefits is because jobs got worse in the 1990s. This is important because – in the presenter Jolyon’s words – “the great mystery that’s flummoxed governments for decades of why there are more people claiming incapacity benefits, even though general health is getting better – that’s partly explained by the changing nature of work, not the changing nature of people.”

The actual claim I made is as follows (from 20:20):

Me: Autonomy at work – control over how you do your job and other aspects of it – got worse across the 1990s in both the public and private sector, although at slightly different times. And that means that more people moved from work to claiming incapacity benefits, because without that level of control, it was harder for them to manage their health condition or disability in the workplace.

… Jolyon: What’s the evidence that the trend towards less control, less autonomy, in jobs is actually responsible for more people moving on to incapacity benefit? I mean, it could be coincidence obviously?

Me: So I did a study of this where I tracked people over time in a very large representative sample of the British population. People that were in jobs that had less control were more likely to claim incapacity benefits a year later than people in high control jobs. And somewhere between sort of a quarter and a third of the rise in the number of people moving from work to incapacity benefits can be explained by declines in the level of control that people had at work.

Where does this evidence come from?

This actually comes from my PhD research (further appendices here), which I finished over a decade ago! The best place to read this particular study, though, is this paper from 2014 (free version; further materials).

One thing I should have done in the interview is make clear the limitations of this work – you have to try to compare people that are basically identical except for the level of control they have at work, and this is very difficult to do. More generally, it’s very difficult to estimate the causal effect of working conditions, because you can’t usually do experiments with work. Even natural experiments are likely to change lots of different things about work at the same time (e.g. Covid-19). There’s lots of different evidence to suggest that job control matters – e.g. I also did a qualitative investigation in my thesis – but it’s still worth emphasising that this area is tricky. (I’m actually just starting a new project that’s trying to go into this in more detail, so watch this space.)

Another part of my claim here is that control at work got worse over the 1990s. I review all of this in chapter 2 of my PhD (further appendices here), but to save you wading through this: the highest-quality trend in the UK comes from the Skills & Employment Surveys 1992-2017 – there’s lots of write-ups of this, but one good short summary from a while ago is by Francis Green 2009, and a summary of some of the 2017 findings is here.

Other claims in the interview

There’s a couple of other things I said in the interview. One is a claim about the ineffectiveness of conditionality for disabled people – this takes a whole explanation in itself, so I’ve written a separate post on that here.

The final claim I made was as follows, just after saying that job control had got worse:

But there are [other] things that were probably also changing. And one of this is around the formalisation of the workplace. So now we have, particularly in larger organisations, lots of HR processes around everything to do with every aspect of work including health and disability. But one consequence of that, I think, is that it’s very hard to change jobs, and just to be very flexible about the best way of doing the things that this organisation needs to do in the best way possible given the people that are there. Increasing formalisation of HR practices is not always very helpful for people with health conditions and disabilities.

Put simply: I still haven’t written anything on this yet! So I should have made clear that this was a bit more speculative – and also that while there are downsides to the formalisation of HR, there are good things about it too (including the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act). Still: I do genuinely think that formalisation is a problem, and everything I’ve explored has supported it; for example, I think Debbie Foster and Vicki Wass’ amazing paper fits this explanation. But I’ll try to actually test it in future work.