Buying decent work has attracted increased political and academic attention in Denmark, where especially trade unions and centre-left political parties have pushed the agenda for applying labour clauses in public procurement as well as ensure their enforcement. All Danish regional authorities and nine out of ten Danish municipalities apply labour clauses in some of their publicly procured work.

The Nordic countries are known for their comprehensive welfare states with universal high-quality services and an industrial relations model that fosters competitiveness, high wages and good working conditions. This explains why Nordic solutions are often highlighted as examples for European Union countries, especially in terms of social and labour market policy.

Trine Pernille LarsenLink opens in a new window joined the IER in October. Trine’s background is in Industrial Relations, Public Administration and European Social Policy, where she uses mixed methods to understand the processes of regulatory changes as well as outcomes in the areas of comparative employment, industrial relations and European work-life balance policies.

This book chapter by Chris Warhurst, Richard Hall and Diane Van Den Broek, published in the Emerald Handbook of Appearance in the Workplace edited by Adelina Broadridge, examines the operation of the anti-lookism component of the equalities law in the Australian state of Victoria.

Gianni Anelli’s research article 'But which skills? : Natural Language Processing tools and the identification of high-demand skills in online job advertisements' discusses the relevance of data from online job portals. Using two skills dictionaries, the ESCO dictionary and a national labour market dictionary, this study extracted required skills from Chilean online job advertisements.