ABSTRACT
How have the processes of economic restructuring in Britain since the 1980s affected the skill levels and the experience of the work task of those in employment? In contrast to the pessimistic expectations of labour process theory, the most comprehensive studies on skill trends in the mid1980s (Daniel 1987; Gallie 1991; Penn et al. 1994) concluded that by far the strongest general tendency was for a marked rise in the skill requirements of jobs. However, there were grounds for thinking that the later 1980s might have witnessed a rather different pattern. Whereas in the early 1980s, employers were restructuring the work process in the context of still powerful workplace trade unionism, there was a marked retreat of the unions’ organisational power in the second half of the decade (Millward et al. 1992; Millward 1994). At the same time, the public sector which had provided particularly strong institutional safeguards for employees was being whittled down by successive waves of privatisation. Employers in the later 1980s, then, had much greater freedom of action to implement the types of policies that they preferred. If there was an inner logic to capitalist relations of production that encouraged employers to deskill, then it could be expected to manifest itself much more clearly in the second half of the decade than in the first.
