Topic description and stories

A barista making a coffee

Give more people with learning disabilities the chance to work, historian argues

21 Jul 2023

Employment levels for people with learning disabilities in the UK are 5 to 10 times lower than they were a hundred years ago. And the experiences of...

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Co-author Dr Eleanor Drage testing the 'personality machine' built by Cambridge undergraduates.

Claims AI can boost workplace diversity are ‘spurious and dangerous’, researchers argue

10 Oct 2022

Research highlights growing market in AI-powered recruitment tools that claim to bypass human bias to remove discrimination from hiring.

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‘Generation lockdown’ needs targeted help-to-work policies – global report

21 Oct 2021

Nations the world over are guilty of “policy inertia” when it comes to supporting young people who lost work or will struggle to enter the labour...

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Man working at a laptop

One in twenty workers are in ‘useless’ jobs – far fewer than previously thought

03 Jun 2021

The so-called ‘bullshit jobs theory’ – which argues that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves...

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UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak at a Covid-19 press conference. Sunak is credited with instigating the UK's 'furlough' job retention scheme.

Furlough ‘stemmed the tide’ of poor mental health during UK lockdown, study suggests

24 Jul 2020

Researchers say the UK government should ask employers to share out reduced hours rather than lose workers, in order to mitigate a looming mental...

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Sheffield's Women of Steel statue during the pandemic

Opinion: Employers should cut hours not people during the pandemic

13 May 2020

If the UK emulated short-time working programmes in countries like Germany it would help mitigate the mental health as well as economic crises caused...

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Closed signs

Younger workers hit harder by coronavirus economic shock in UK and US

03 Apr 2020

Those on low incomes are also more likely to have lost jobs or pay, and less able to complete work tasks from home. Researchers warn the COVID-19...

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Steel workers

Legislating labour in the long run – how worker rights help economies

12 Jul 2018

Researchers have built the single largest dataset of employment laws – spanning more than 100 countries across much of post-war history – to look at...

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How 9,000 lists written over 300 years are helping to test theories of economic growth

03 Jul 2018

The handwritten inventories had lain largely untouched for centuries. Sand used to dry the ink still lay between the pages. Written neatly inside...

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Unsplash

The boss of me: myths and truths of self-employment

20 Jun 2018

While self-employment may not be the labour market remedy some want to believe, new research is revealing its global prevalence and intergenerational...

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Eggs. Plenty of them.

'Precarious scheduling' at work affects over four million people in UK – far more than just zero-hours

16 Aug 2017

Analysis of EU survey data suggests millions in UK may suffer anxiety as a result of unpredictable management-imposed flexible working hours...

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Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg in 1801

A real piece of work

16 Jun 2015

In 2003, researchers embarked on a project to piece together a picture of changes in British working life over the course of 600 years. The emerging...

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