Journalists and tv researchers - some frequently-asked questions

How many jobs are affected by offshore outsourcing?
How many teleworkers are there?
Is teleworking good for the environment?
Is teleworking good for women?
Is teleworking good for disabled people?
Can you put me in touch with an exploited homeworker to interview?

How many jobs are affected by offshore outsourcing?

At present there is no way that the existing statistics make it possible to measure the international relocation of jobs with any precision at all. Any source that claims to have accurate figures on the numbers of jobs lost or gained through offshoring in any particular country, region or sector should be treated with suspicion. Not only is it impossible to locate the sectors and occupations involved in the existing employment or trade statistics; nobody has yet worked out a way to measure the relationship between the relocation of employment and overall employment reduction or growth either in the recipient location or that from which jobs are being relocated. Employment is not a zero sum game where a job lost in one place necessarily means one gained somewhere else; the dynamics are far more complex than this. Often the impact of offshoring  on the quality of employment is much greater than its effect on the quantity of jobs. For some literature that discusses what evidence there is and how to interpret it, go here.

In the EMERGENCE project we carried out the first international survey of employers  (8,000 establishments in 18 European countries plus 1,000 in Austalia) to systematically  map and measure the telemediated relocation of information-processing work, using the innovative concept of the 'generic business function' to identify the relocateable activities. The results of this innovative 2000 survey can be found on the EMERGENCE website: http://www.emergence.nu

Four years later, in 2004, we carried out a study for the European Monitoring Centre on Change that summarised the available evidence in Europe at that date, including an analysis of the results of the European Labour Force Survey to identify trends in the outsourcing of ICT and ICT-enabled services. This report  (available online) was published as Status Report on Outsourcing of ICT-enabled Services in the EU.

How many teleworkers are there?

Because there is no universally agreed definition of teleworking (nor is it possible or useful to construct one) it is impossible to state the numbers with any precision.  

What it IS possible to measure, however, is how many people work from their homes, the hours when they do so and the technology they use to do it. It is also possible, though a bit more difficult, to measure how many people work from other locations (e.g. the premises of clients, telecentres, airports, cafes, parked cars etc.).

It is also possible, again with some difficulty, to measure the numbers of employers who employ teleworkers according to various different definitions. We did this most systematically in 1992 in the Teleworking in Britain  survey in the UK and across Europe in 2000 in the EMERGENCE survey.

In 1996 we carried out a study for the UK government which led to the introduction of new questions in the Labour Force Survey that have been asked annually since 1997. These make it possible to estimate the numbers of people teleworking in the UK according to various different definitions and show a steady growth from 1997 to 2005 (the last year we looked at the figures). They also give us a detailed profile of the teleworking population. For more information on these results go here.

Similar questions have also been added to the Labour Force Surveys of some other European countries. We studied these, as well as the US data, in the STILE project. For further information, go here.

Is teleworking good for the environment?

Extravagant claims are often made for teleworking as a way of saving energy and this is indeed often the main rationale for promoting it by policymakers.  It is undoubtedly a good thing if fewer people use their cars to commute to work and also a good thing to encourage the distribution of travel throughout the day to reduce rush-hour congestions. However it is by no means clear that the net effect of teleworking is to reduce overall travel.

Studies that have been carried out that purport to show this tend to look only at teleworkers who are employees, ignoring the travel patterns of the self-employed who make up nearly half of all teleworkers (using a broad definition that includes people who only telework part-time) and even more if the definition is restricted to those who always work from their homes.  

However statistics show that the people who are most likely to be teleworkers (with an over-representation of professional, technical and managerial staff, of graduates, of men and of people with children) are also the people most likely to be car-owners. They typically combine teleworking with working in other locations and the fastest-growing group is not those who work at home but those who work from their homes. The technology that enables them to be so mobile may also encourage them to become more so - in other words they may end up using their cars more rather than less.

If the ability to telework encourages people to move further away from city centre offices to the countryside or to outer suburbs, then they become less likely to use the relatively energy-efficient mass transit systems of cities and more likely to make energy-guzzling individual car trips. Even if they make fewer commuting trrips, they will need to travel further for other purposes, for instance to take their children to school, to shop, to visit hairdressers, doctors and other services, and to see their friends.  They are also likely to use more energy in their homes if they have to maintain a home office, install and run ICT infrastructure in it and keep it warm in the winter and cool in the summer. For more information go here.

Is teleworking good for women?

The short answer to this question is 'not necessarily'. Neither is it necessarily bad. The answer depends crucially on the power relations that exist in the workplace and in the home. If the home is a place of isolation or repression where a woman is at the beck and call of a  partner, parents or children, and there is no comfortable place to work, then an escape to an outside workplace may bring improved self-esteem, the comradeship of fellow-workers and economic independence. Conversely if the workplace is one where she is bullied or harassed, with unhealthy working conditions, highly pressured work and a nightmare commute, then the ability to control her own pace of work and working environment in a peaceful and comfortable home can become  a wonderful privilege. In practice, most people who work from home, male or female, are making complex tradeoffs between competing demands and pressures.  For more information go here.

Is teleworking good for disabled people?

Just as teleworking may be 'good' or 'bad' for women depending on their individual circumstances and labour market bargaining power it may also be 'good' or 'bad' for people with disabilities. Someone for whom it might be 'good' might be someone who is already well educated with good work experience  who develops a disability in adulthood that restricts his or her mobility or otherwise makes it exhausting, painful or excessively time-consuming to go out to work,  who has good housing and social support in the home and a type of work that brings its own rewards and/or social contact. People who have been disabled since childhood often have a desperate need to escape the isolation and dependence of the home, to meet new people, learn new skills and demonstrate that they can be fully contributing members of society. For them, homeworking may be a negative experience, one that is actually worse than being unemployed, for instance if it prevents them going out to engage in social activities during the working day. For people in this category, the ideal work opportunity is one that involves a fully accessible external workplace, combined with good transport and good technological and social support. There are of course many other types of situation, and of disability, each with its own unique combination of advantages and disadvantages. We discuss this issue in more depth in Equality and Telework in Europe

Can you put me in touch with a homeworker, a teleworker or an employer of teleworkers to interview?

Researchers are often asked to provide the names of people they have interviewed to journalists or to other researchers. It is a breach of professional ethics (and, very often, data protection legislation) to provide such details unless the respondents have explicitly given their permission in advance. For further information about research ethics and data protection go to http://www.respectproject.org/code/index.php

But please don't expect us to do your research for you. It isn't difficult. You could probably find several homeworkers simply by asking round among your friends and neighbours and random door-knocking would probably throw you up a sample in the course of a morning.

If you want to catch people who sometimes commute into the office and sometimes don't, why not try asking questions at a suburban railway station at 7.15 a.m.?

There are lots of other ways, e.g. readership surveys of magazines, appeals on the radio, hardware or software user surveys

There is a copious literature on teleworking based on case-studies of individual employers. Many of these are second-hand, or based on repeat interviews with companies which have already been studied by others. Treat these with care. Firstly, even if the company was typical the first time it was studied, by the time an army of researchers and journalists has been in and out of the door it will have become so self-conscious that it will no longer be so. Secondly, organisations change and adapt, and case-study information goes out of date very quickly. 

If you are trying to find out what is actually going on in typical workplaces, beware too of companies which promote their teleworking schemes too hard. They are usually trying to sell something. There are also a large number of organisations around which call themselves teleworking consultancies and which exist to promote teleworking. They frequently make an excellent job of this, but their research may be suspect since it is unlikely to be objective

In order to be sure of unbiased results, you will have to undertake the tedious business of random sampling, making sure that you offer your interviewees complete confidentiality. This is what we usually do at Analytica, and this means that we cannot offer you the details of potential interviewees. To maximise your chances of scoring a quick 'hit', you could start with those sectors which are known to be above-average users of teleworkers - e.g. IT companies, local authorities, publishers, translation agencies, text conversion bureaux etc.

There are lots of other ways, e.g. readership surveys of magazines, appeals on the radio, hardware or software user surveys etc.

Good Luck!