Sifting through the ASHE: Job Polarization and Earnings Inequality in the UK, 1975–2015

This chapter presents an analysis of changing job and pay structures in the UK, constructing for this purpose a novel dataset covering each year from 1975 to 2015 linking different datasets and ensuring that key variables such as occupation are captured on as consistent a basis as possible. This provides the information base required to investigate job polarization in a much more disaggregated fashion than previously possible, allowing important distinctions to be made by gender, sector, and region, between full- versus part-time workers, and across birth-cohorts. The analyses are thus able to reveal the differing implications of long-term trends in job structures and pay for these different groups, and bring out what the varying patterns reveal about the underlying processes at work in the labour market.