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.

IER’s Dr Sangwoo Lee presented one of his recent research papers at the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) Seminar on 23 January 2024. This paper, co-authored with Prof Francis Green at UCL, examines trends in job quality, the gender job quality disparity and the job quality premium.

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 quality of paid work has become an essential component of individuals’ well-being in modern-day capitalism, and there has been a surge in policy discourse surrounding the objective of ‘more and better jobs’ (as articulated by the OECD) or ‘decent work’ (as outlined in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals) over the past two decades.

In November, Director of IER, Chris Warhurst presented at a string of events on:

• ‘Mapping the Good Work policy terrain’ to the Department of Business & Trade;
• ‘Good Work and Productivity’ to a Productivity Institute event held at Warwick Business School as part of the Productivity Week; and
• ‘Industry 5.0’ at the Digital Manufacturing Conference held in Cambridge.