IER News & blogs

Working class women have borne the brunt of the cuts to working hours as employers struggle to ride out the pandemic, according to new findings published today by social inequality researchers from the University of Nottingham and Warwick's Institute for Employment Research. Working class women were the worst affected by spring’s UK-wide lockdown, with 40% reporting psychological distress in April.

Today’s briefing paper – 'Carrying the work burden of the COVID-19 pandemic: working class women in the UK: Employment and Mental Health' [link] focuses on patterns of employment and mental health in the first three months of lockdown, as revealed by data from the monthly Understanding Society COVID-19 UK survey, and explores to what extent the experience of working class women differs from middle class women and from men.

Professor Clare Lyonette from IER said: "Many working class areas in the north are included in the higher tier groups of the government's new 3-tier system of local restrictions in England. The effects of any future lockdowns, either local or national, could be far-reaching and extremely damaging for working class women who provide vital work, both paid and unpaid'.

Sudipa Sarkar has a new ESRC-funded Impact Accelerator Award to work on NGO held data. She will be working with the NGO, Child Rights and You (CRY) to build a collaboration that will focus on the issue of child labour in India through better usage and analysis of NGO held data.

A workshop is scheduled on 6th February 2019 at IER discussing the issue where both academic and non-academic researchers will be present.

On 23 May BBC Radio 4’s broadcast a programme featuring IER Director Chris Warhurst talking about employment discrimination based on worker appearance – ‘lookism’. The talk centred on whether lookism is a legitimate business practice or should be banned as a form of illegitimate discrimination. The talk was recorded with a live audience at Coventry’s Fargo Village.

The programme, part of the Four Thought series, is available on BBC iPlayer

A series of research-based policy briefings, organized by the University of Warwick and its Connecting Research on Employment and Work (CREW) network, will take place over four consecutive weeks in November and early December 2017 in London.

Experts from the Warwick Institute for Employment Research, Warwick Law School and Warwick Business School's Industrial Relations Research Unit evaluate the employment policy, rights, skills and labour market implications of the UK's withdrawal from the EU and make research-based recommendations for future development of policy in these areas, as the UK leaves the EU.

Next dates for the briefing, which will be held at Central Hall, Maurice Barnett room, Westminster, London, SW1H 9NH from 12:30-1:30, with lunch available from 12:00:

• 14 November - Migration and Skills: Guglielmo Meardi, Anne Green & Erika Kispeter
• 23 November - Job Loss and Job Creation – Pitfalls and Opportunities?: Nigel Driffield
• 27 November - Training Funds for the Unemployed: Chris Warhurst, Daria Luchinskaya & Peter Dickinson
• 7 December - Employment Rights: Ania Zbyszewska & Alan Neal

If you would like to RSVP to any of the events, please contact Lynne Marston: L.Marston@warwick.ac.uk.

In 2017, as part of its programme of work promoting better working lives, the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) commissioned IER to produce two reports on job quality. The first report focused on Understanding and Measuring Job Quality; the second on Indicators of Job Quality. The IER team was led by Professor Chris Warhurst and comprised Sally Wright, Dr Clare Lyonette and, for the second report, Dr Sudipa Sarkar. Both reports were published by the CIPD. The research was used by the CIPD in its consultation submission to the 2017 UK Government’s Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices. The research also helped inform the development of a new UK Working Lives survey for the CIPD. Subsequent to the completion of the research, Dr Sarkar was seconded to the CIPD to assist with the development of the new survey, which was administered by YouGov over winter 2017-18.