Gary Slater

• BA, MA, PGCHE, PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Leeds

'Temporary work' entry in In Johnstone, S., Rodriguez, J. and Wilkinson, A. (Eds) Encyclopedia of HRM, 2nd Edition, Edward Elgar: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/encyclopedia-of-human-resource-management-9781800378834.html

'Employment Agency' In Johnstone, S., Rodriguez, J. and Wilkinson, A. (Eds) Encyclopedia of HRM, 2nd Edition, Edward Elgar: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/encyclopedia-of-human-resource-management-9781800378834.html

Blog for Leeds University Business School Research and Innovation Blog series: https://business.leeds.ac.uk/dir-record/research-blog/1834/investigation-into-amazon-s-use-of-agency-workers-raises-important-questions

This article assesses the impact and probably limits of automation. It looks, in particular, at the case of the UK economy. The prospects for automation are seen as necessarily uncertain and potentially regressive in their effects, with technology likely to sustain a large number of low-quality jobs. The deep-seated problems of the UK economy—low-i...

Purpose Temporary agency working continues to grow in the UK. The purpose of this paper is to look at a number of important developments in the agency industry, which generate implications for the performance of agencies, temps and the user firms in which temps work and to set out some of the key performance implications of these developments. Thes...

Entry on 'Employment Agency', in Wilkinson, A. and Johnstone, S. Encyclopedia of HRM, 1st Edition, 2016

Entry on 'Temporary Work' in Encyclopedia of HRM, 1st Edition, (Eds Wilkinson. A. and Johnstone, S, 2016)

This article examines the changing role of the state, through an analysis of the development and implementation of the EU Temporary Agency Work Directive in the UK. The article outlines and utilizes the concept of the ‘competition state’ to help frame and comprehend the UK Government’s approach to negotiating and shaping the Directive. Using archiv...

This article examines the impact of work-time regulation, introduced by the UK’s New Labour governments (1997–2010). In doing so, we return to Marx’s hypotheses regarding the length of the working day. These include the arguments that class conflict over the length of the working day is inherently distributional in a surplus-value sense and that wo...

This paper considers the interconnections between the nature and organization of work and the level of unemployment. We consider how actions taken at the workplace level can impede as well as facilitate the reduction in unemployment. We also consider how the workplace may be reformed to overcome some of the obstacles, economic as well as political,...

This report looks at the effects of the Agency Working Regulations (AWR) on employer and agency practice. It presents recent statistical data on agency working from the Labour Force Survey, alongside findings from 28 interviews, conducted across 11 agencies, four user firms, union and industry representatives, along with a small number of agency te...

- This report examines the role played by temporary employment agencies in pay setting for agency workers. - There are important gaps in our understanding in relation to the role played by employment agencies in pay setting issues. - At a very basic level, very little research has been conducted to address the question of whether agencies do play...

Recent studies of work futures commonly deploy partial and particular data as a basis for constructing grand narratives of apocalyptic change. The narratives are typically light on theory, resistant to grounded historical and institutional interrogation, and commonly substitute anecdote for searching empirical analysis. This article presents unique...

Economists and policy-makers often present per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as by far the most significant indicator of economic well-being. Such measures are frequently adopted in making international comparisons, constructing time-series for particular countries and in studies of regional inequality. In this paper we challenge this view us...

and Change (CERIC) engages with contemporary issues in the area of work and employment that have direct policy relevance and significance. Members of CERIC have sustained a recognised external reputation since the late 1990s and have an outstanding track record of publication at the level of international excellence. Research conducted by members o...

This article investigates the impact of the threat of job loss and participation on productivity using data from the 1998 British Workplace Employee Relations Survey. Threat and participation have often been seen as alternative devices for motivation: the former based on coercion, the latter based on cooperation. The study examines whether there ar...

This paper examines the relationship between participation, performance and the external labour market, using data from the 1998 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey. Our results show that participation can have positive productivity effects, particularly when practices are implemented alongside individual and organizational supports. Yet,...

Forthcoming, Personnel Review (2006), 35, 2.

Purpose To examine the experience of agency employment for workers and employers' use of agency workers in Britain to evaluate competing claims made about this form of work. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on results from three recent representative surveys of employment in Britain to examine the current nature and experience of agenc...

This paper examines the relationship between participation, performance and the external labour market, using data from the 1998 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey. Our results show that participation can have positive productivity effects, particularly when practices are implemented alongside individual and organizational supports. Yet,...

Document is made available from the Journal of Economic Issues by special permission of the copyright holder, the Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Debate over the nature of temporary agency work has intensified in recent times, spurred on by a proposed European directive and by speculation about links with the much heralded 'knowledge' economy. This paper examines the debate, focusing on the current character of agency work in Britain. Using data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), we assess...

In this paper, we examine the inception and development of activation in Slovenia and the UK in order to identify the rationales for its introduction, to plot the direction of reforms and to consider the outcomes of policy implementation for citizens. In this unconventional country comparison, we are interested in understanding third-order (Hall 19...

This paper examines critically the method of abstraction offered by critical realism. Our main argument is that critical realism fails to articulate the synthetic side to abstraction. For this reason, the critical realist method is unable to capture the 'inner connection' of social phenomena. We argue that critical realism is prone to extend a meth...

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of temporary working in the UK. The UK provides an interesting context in which to examine the various claims made about temporary employment. Firstly, growth has historically occurred against a backdrop of minimal legal labour market regulation, both for temporary or permanent workers. Hence expansion c...

Uncertainty is a core assumption in transaction costs theory. It forms the basis of the explanation of transaction costs and also provides a vital link in the conceptual analysis of the transition from market coordination to internal organization. Yet, the term itself has been relatively neglected in transaction costs economics; issues of opportuni...

Debate over temporary employment has intensified in recent times, spurred on by speculation about its links with the much heralded new, knowledge economy, and by new European directives covering the regulation of temporary work. This paper examines that debate, focusing on the evolution of temporary work in the UK. In doing so, we consider the exte...

Books reviewed: Laboring Below the Line: The New Ethnography of Poverty, Low-Wage Work, and Survival in the Global Economy edited by Frank Munger. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2002. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. Granta Books, London, 2002. Hard Work:...