ABSTRACT
Job security, until recently, has been seen as a defining characteristic of traditional public sector employment, and the ‘risk-averse’, time-serving bureaucrat is a common, negative stereotype of the public sector worker. As the restructuring of the public sector has gathered pace over the last twenty years, however, the security of employees has come under threat. The primary purpose of this chapter is to review the extent to which public service workers have become more insecure. Using the broad framework for analysing employment security suggested by Heery and Salmon (this volume), we use a range of secondary and official sources to examine ‘objective’ changes in the structure of public service jobs, changes in the institutional and economic environment surrounding those jobs and the ‘subjective’ perceptions of insecurity of public service workers. Along each of these paths our aim is to measure the extent of change in order to reach an overall assessment of the degree and manner in which the employment security of public service workers has been eroded over the past two decades.
