UK workers still feel grip of economic downturn
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Falling job satisfaction and high levels of job insecurity are still rife in the workplace, according to a survey of 2,000 employees by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
The quarterly poll shows employees are three times (29%) more likely to report their standard of living has worsened over the last three months than to say it has improved (10%), compared to 28% and 13% for the same findings last quarter.
Nearly a fifth of employees (18%) think it likely they could lose their jobs and two-thirds (66%) think it would be difficult to find a new job if they were made redundant.
Almost half of employees say that their organisation has either frozen (40%) or cut (7%) pay in response to the downturn, and a similar proportion of staff say their organisation has either already made redundancies (31%) or is planning to do so (16%).
Among public sector staff: more than a quarter (26%) think it likely they could lose their jobs, compared to 17% in the private sector. 40% say their employer is planning to make redundancies compared to 10% in the private sector, and the majority report their organisation has either frozen (51%) or cut pay (7%) - ccompared to 38% and 7% in the private sector.
Ben Willmott senior public policy adviser, CIPD, said: “Official GDP figures may suggest that the UK economy is continuing to move away from recession, however the reality for many in the workplace is that they still feel like they are in the grip of a severe economic downturn.
“Against this background it is worrying to see that public sector employees have increasingly negative attitudes to their senior managers, with less than a fifth saying they trust senior managers or are consulted by them on important decisions.
“One of the difficulties facing senior public sector managers in the current environment, in which major spending cuts have been announced but few details have been released, is that they too may also be in the dark and may not yet know how many jobs will have to go.
"However it is important that, if this is the case, they communicate the situation to staff and continue to have an open dialogue with employees as more information comes through. People are more likely to accept tough decisions if they are kept informed and given the right information at the right time.
“The government also has a key role to help rebuild trust in public sector leadership by allowing adequate consultation with employees over proposed changes to public service delivery so staff feel that their views have been taken into account before decisions are made.”
