IER News & blogs
Good jobs can help grow the economy - Blog by Emily Erickson and Chris Warhurst
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.
EU鈥檚 Pay Transparency Directive 鈥� A lost opportunity for the UK? Blog by Trine P. Larsen
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鈥檚 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.
Job quality: even economist historians do it
Pivoting away from economists鈥� 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 鈥樷��. IER's Director Chris Warhurst was invited to give the keynote talk, titled 鈥業mproving Job Quality: Practical, Policy and Research Challenges鈥�.
With or without algorithms: managing the self-employed in the Danish platform economy
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 contributes to the platform literature by exploring how platforms utilise algorithmic and traditional management practices, and for which purposes. It features in the new
Self-employment and older workers in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic: seniorpreneurs, senior precarious or somewhere in between?
This book chapter examines self-employment among people aged 50 and over in the liberal market economies of Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA against the backdrop of the economic shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and in the context of long-standing efforts aimed at increasing levels of older workers鈥� labour force participation. It features in the new