Good work equals good health

The Work Foundation has just published a paper that suggests 'good work' should be at the heart of government policies on health.

The report is based on the following argument:

"The quality of employment has an impact on health, life expectancy and life chances and government cannot make serious progress towards the reduction of health inequalities unless it has policies to improve job quality for the most disadvantaged.

Work is better for health and life expectancy than worklessness, but it is only really good for us if it is ‘good work’...".

For further brief details see press release - More ‘good work’ needed to boost jobs and cut child poverty by Stephen Overell.

The actual paper - ‘Good Work’: Job Quality in a Changing Economy by David Coats with Rohit Lehki - can be downloaded directly here.

Please help me with my research on Web 2.0 and employees here.

What affect does "off-shoring" have on British jobs?

This, in essence, is the question tackled by Katerina Rüdiger of The Work Foundation.

The paper itself - Offshoring, a threat for the UK’s knowledge jobs? Globalisation and the extent and impact of offshore outsourcing - aims to provide a big picture account of this phenomenon by examining the extent and the nature of offshore outsourcing as well as its impact on the UK labour market.

In answering the question the paper, importantly, looks at the phenomenon itself (especially in relation to India), myths and perceptions of off-shoring, and, the extent and impact of off-shoring so far.

The conclusions are thoughtful and keep in check popular media portrayals of off-shoring.

There is also a discussion of the potential loss of 'knowledge work' in with the off-shoring of rudimentary work.

The most telling remark from the conclusion is to suggest "the scale and the impact of the phenomenon have often been exaggerated".

Only will time will tell if this will be true of the years to come.

Working life under Labour

A new report by The Work Foundation makes an assessment of working life under Labour governments - 1997 to 2006.

The report is called 7 out of 10: Labour under Labour 1997-2007 and is written by Ian Brinkley, David Coats and Stephen Overell.

Overall, The Work Foundation justifies the favourable grading by suggesting it is "...due to its record in maintaining economic growth and low unemployment, while legislating for greater justice at work through valuable new rights for employees.

This balance is Labour’s ‘central achievement’ in the sphere of work..."

Some details (see press release) from the report include:

- Most new jobs created between 1997 and 2006 were permanent and full time

- The labour market has been re-regulated without any credible evidence of damage to economic performance or organisational effectiveness

- Many worthwhile reforms (from the national minimum wage, to flexible working rights, to information and consultation rights) have offered a means of redress for employees – but enforcement remains an issue.

It will be interesting to see what direction Labour will take from now on in relation putting pressure on recalcitrant employers.

Workplace justice unlikely to come from new labour laws

The Work Foundation has just published a paper that looks at justice in the workplace.

In Justice in the workplace: Why it is important and why a new public policy initiative is needed (Paul Edwards); it argued that...

"The cause of justice at work will not be best served by introducing any new employment laws in the near future.

Instead, what is needed is a new policy initiative aiming to encourage employers both to comply with existing laws and actively pursue a fairness at work agenda."

Reforms to how organizations approach the matter of workplace justice are outlined as follows:

More pro-active advice: Rather than merely help firms comply with the law, state agencies should emphasise good practice.

Support for local initiatives: Some sectors, especially low-paying ones, often contain firms with the will to improve wages and conditions but they are locked in intense competition. Some local networks exist, but they are weakly established.

Sector forums: The existing idea of sector-level employment forums (reached as part of the Warwick Agreement) should be put into practice.

For more general details see a Work Foundation press release.

How risky is it to be the CEO of a major company?

A paper recently published by The Work Foundation suggests being a chief executive of a major company is a relatively low-risk job in comparison with many other sorts of work.

The paper is entitled - The risk myth: CEO's and labour market risk (Nick Isle) - and attempts to look more broadly at who bears risk in today’s labour market, and in particular, it examines the risks and rewards of CEOs of our top companies and compares them with the risks borne by average workers.

The main conclusion of the paper is that the old arguments about risk and reward traditionally deployed by those seeking to justify growing chief executive pay packets cannot be sustained.

For more general details see a press release on the matter.

The rhetoric and reality of work-life balance

"Employers in the public sector ‘talk the talk’ on work-life balance, but have only low levels of commitment to changing standard working patterns in practice – and in some cases deliberately block people from flexible working or grant requests only to selected favourites.

This is the conclusion of a new report from The Work Foundation, commissioned by UNISON, the public service union, which set out to examine the experience of work-life balance in the public sector."

A press release on the report can be found here. The report - Work-life balance: Rhetoric versus reality? (Fiona Visser and Laura Williams).

The role of public sector managers

The latest research to come from The Work Foundation looks at role of public sector managers.

In Deliberative democracy and the role of public managers (Horner, L., Lekhi, R. and Blaug, R.) it is argued that managers should not be coerced into following old obsessions of choice, consumer satisfaction, and market mechanisms in the public services.

Instead public sector managers should be encouraged to endorse the concept of ‘public value’.

Put differently, "the job of every single person who works in the public sector is to ‘maximise public value".

More details include:

The report argues that people who receive public services - whether a benefit, an education, a GP appointment or a TV programme – should not be seen as passive consumers, but citizens with democratic rights, whose wishes need to be respected through a serious, renewed and continuous focus on their refined preferences and priorities. Honouring what the public values most, rather than hitting centrally imposed targets, should be the principal aim of all public servants.

For more details see a press release from The Work Foundation.

Investment and the knowledge economy

The end of last week saw the publishing of an other paper from The Work Foundation on the subject of "knowledge economy" (see previous report).

The authors of the paper are critical of the level of investment in the knowledge economy and how companies implement technological innovations.

Both are said to be factors in how economies perform.

Figures on investment include:

Between 1994 and 2004, research and development spending as a share of GDP across the EU15 (there are no comparable figures for the EU25) increased by less than 0.1 per cent – and actually fell in France, the UK, the Netherlands and Ireland. In 2004, the US invested 2.7 per cent of GDP in research and development, compared with 1.9 per cent in the EU15.

For more details see a press release here and the actual paper at - The Knowledge Economy in Europe (Ian Brinkley and Neil Lee).

The meaning of "industry"

The Work Foundation recently published details of a survey about attitudes to the word "industry"

For instance, people over 45 years old tend to think of smokestacks and coal mines, noise and grime, those under 30 – and particularly those under 24 – tend to be future-oriented in their word-associations, summoning images of computers, success, money and technology.

The aim of the survey is more than an exercise in semantics. In more detail, the main objective of the survey is to, "test perceptions of industry at a time when it is frequently assumed that Britain has become a ‘post-industrial’ nation."

For more details and an expansion of the findings visit - When they think of the word ‘industry’ young people see ‘money and computers’ whereas older people see ‘dirt and decline’ (The Work Foundation).