September 17, 2018
Growing gig economy could be behind buoyant ONS employment figures
Recent ONS figures showing a rising employment rate could be inflated by the growth of zero-hour contracts within the gig economy, as the number of UK workers on zero hour contracts having more than tripled since 2012. This is propping up overall employment levels by accounting for almost a quarter of overall employment growth, new data by Adzuna has suggested. With the employment rate currently at a record high of 75.7 percent according to the ONS, Adzuna’s data compares recent growth in the number of people in work overall to the increasing number of zero hour contracts, to ascertain how much these contracts have contributed to the growth.
September 14, 2018
All those workplace trends lists that you see? We’ve been there before 0
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Furniture, Workplace design
Conference and show season looms and with it arrives the annual swarm of workplace trend forecasts. These are often presented as groundbreaking but many of them are indistinguishable from each other and based on some very familiar tropes and assumptions. These days such things tend to be shaped into lists, because that’s how the Internet likes it. That is all perfectly natural and we are free to make our own mind up which of these features are meaningful and which are hack jobs. No football pundit was ever fired for stringing together clichés rather than thinking and talking, and no marketing person has ever lost their job for publishing a list of Ten Trends.
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