IER News & blogs

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.

It is nearly fifty years ago that the EU passed its first directive on equal pay for equal work or work of equal value. While mobilising the female workforce has been successful in most European countries, a persistent gender pay gap remains across Europe. To address these structurally embedded gender inequalities, the EU and its Members States have recently adopted the EU’s Pay Transparency Directive (2023). Although the UK is no longer an EU Member State and is not obliged to implement this directive, it remains to be seen whether the newly appointed Labour government will follow suit and adopt similar measures as part of its intention to address the pay inequalities in its election manifesto.

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’.

Digital labour platforms, including their management practices and extensive reliance on the self-employed, have attracted much attention, though usually from a worker rather than an employer perspective. This book chapter contributes to the platform literature by exploring how platforms utilise algorithmic and traditional management practices, and for which purposes. It features in the new Research Handbook on Self-Employment and Public Policy