The new Labour Government is on a mission to grow the economy, with its primary aim focused on promoting fairness in employment, eradicating pay insecurity and offering more flexible working conditions. All of these objectives are tied to improving working conditions. As highlighted in a body of literature, including a recent study by the Institute for Employment Research (IER), good jobs with better job quality benefit both individual workers and society as a whole by boosting innovation, increasing productivity and improving individual wellbeing. The creation of more good jobs would support the Government's efforts to stimulate economic growth and generate the tax revenues necessary for public infrastructure investment, such as schools and hospitals. But what is the path towards creating more ‘good jobs’? How can we make meaningful progress in achieving better job quality?

The new Labour Government is on a mission to grow the economy. It needs to. The last government left schools crumbling, hospitals stretched to breaking point, roads that badly need repairing and far too many families living in poverty. Thousands more health workers, teachers, police and – dare it be said, armed forces personnel need to be recruited. All of these actions need to be funded. To do so, the government hopes to raise tax revenues by growing the economy through encouraging investment in house building and the green transition.

Pivoting away from economists’ traditional concerns with pay, an international group of economic historians now want to explore the wider aspects of job quality. In August the group organised a conference in Oslo at the Norwegian Academy of Science & Letters focused on ‘Job Quality from the Past to the Future’. IER's Director Chris Warhurst was invited to give the keynote talk, titled ‘Improving Job Quality: Practical, Policy and Research Challenges’.

In March Chris Warhurst of IER met with IndustriAll in Brussels to discuss job quality. IndustriALL is the global union federation for the mining, energy and manufacturing sectors and IndustriAll Europe has a Good Jobs campaign ahead of the European elections in June. The campaign champions having a proactive European industrial plan to create good industrial jobs. The discussion centred on initiatives within the UK to measure and report job quality nationally.

IER’s Dr Sangwoo Lee presented one of his recent research papers at the London School of Economics CEP Well-being Seminar on 22 Feb 2024.

This paper, co-authored with Prof Francis Green at UCL, introduces a new well-being related threshold for bad jobs. The conceptualisation of bad jobs often entails low job quality, typically associated with job insecurity or low pay. These conceptualisations often adopt a simplistic framework, focusing on a single dimension of job quality, thereby leading to a potential misclassification of bad jobs.