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.

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.