POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations

Governments worldwide assume that national competitiveness can be improved by developing workforce skills. This book critically examines this 'high skills' vision at both policy and practice levels. It challenges an oversimplified policy rhetoric that underestimates the complexity of the processes involved in developing a skilled workforce.

This is the last of three reports in a longitudinal study that has followed the journey of a group of young people from less advantaged families through Higher Education and into the labour market. This report focuses on the young people's progress from full-time study into the graduate labour market. Free PDF available at www.jrf.org.uk

This study examines the relationship between poverty and informal work. Exploring the experiences of people in low-paid informal work, it contends that unless government seeks to include the informal economy in its strategies, it will never be able to reach its employment or anti-poverty targets.

Free pdf version available at www.jrf.org.uk

This book provides the first critically informed discussion of work and workers in the UK welfare sector under New Labour. It examines the changing nature of work and explores the context of industrial relations across the welfare industry.

"Beyond the workfare state" explores equality, discrimination and human rights in relation to employability and 'welfare-to-work' policies bringing together a wide and distinctive range of illustrative studies that gives voice to a variety of potentially marginalised groups.

Towards a democratic division of labour? starts from the challenge of balancing values of 'equality' and 'freedom' in all sections of modern societies, introducing the Combination Model as a scientific tool for studying the division of professional and family work and for elaborating adequate policy perspectives.

Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces, "Work, families and organisations in transition" illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees' experiences of "work-life balance" in contemporary shifting contexts.

The important study investigates changes in women's transitions in and out of paid work, comparing Italy and Great Britain across four subsequent birth cohorts from the time they leave full-time education, up to their 40s.

This book casts light on the empirical relationship between labour market deregulation through non-standard contracts and the three main dimensions of worker security: employment, income and social security.

Highlighting what can be learned from individual experiences, the book analyses the changing welfare and labour market policies which shape the lives of working carers in Finland, Sweden, Australia, England, Japan and Taiwan.

This book by the world’s leading authority on global social policy examines why and how the Social Protection Floor became ILO, UN and G20 policy and how the World Bank and IMF took steps to lay its foundation.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Engaging with contemporary debates about precarity, unfreedom and socio-legal status, this ground breaking book presents the first evidence of forced labour among displaced migrants who seek refuge in the UK.