“Traditional employer-employee dynamics are no longer fit for either individuals or businesses,” says Unilever on its Future Work website. It’s a radical statement from the consumer giant whose products range from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to Dove soap, and which employs roughly 150, 000 people around the world, 6,000 of them in Britain.
Throughout this special report on “making jobs work,” “flexibility” and “security” are recurrent themes. But both terms can have very different—and contested—meanings between managers and workers. It is therefore interesting to find a multinational going with the grain of its employee demands, by developing a remarkable new scheme called U-work. Fifty British staff piloted the scheme, in which they were paid a monthly retainer in return for a commitment to work a minimum number of hours for Unilever a year, whenever they wanted, on projects they chose. With a suite of benefits including pension contributions and holidays, to a millennial employee like myself, it sounds like an ideal arrangement. But what’s in it for an employer?