 Good evening everybody. Can you hear me? I think so. Yeah. Excellent. Okay. So a warm welcome to those of you here in the Charles Wilson Lecture Theatre in Glasgow University and to those on Zoom, to this British Academy lecture organized in partnership with the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow. My name is Colin Miller and I'm in the Council of the RPSG and I'll be chairing tonight's meeting. The talk will take about 45 minutes followed by a five minute break and then the question and answer session. If you want to ask a question via Zoom please use the Zoom Q&A box. Please state your question as concisely as possible please and could I also ask those of you in the audience to mute any electronic that's a kit that you have. Thank you. After the Q&A session, refreshments will be served just outside the lecture theatre. I'm delighted to say that this hopefully signals a return to our pre-COVID normal practice. A little bit about the British Academy. It was founded in 1902 and it is the UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences. They mobilized these disciplines to understand the world and shape a brighter future. They do this by investing currently about 25 million pounds per year in researchers and projects around the UK and overseas, engaging the public with fresh thinking and debates, bringing together scholars, government, business and civil society to influence policy for everyone's benefit. The RPSG was founded in 1802 to aid the study diffusion and advancement of the arts and sciences with their applications and the better understanding of public affairs. This is done by holding 12 fortnightly lectures from about middle of October to the beginning of April. We have wonderful speakers who are expert in their fields. Lectures are open to the RPSG members and to the general public. Tonight's event forms part of the British Academy lecture series which was established in 1908. We are thrilled to welcome Professor Patricia Finlay to continue this series of lectures. So our wonderful speaker tonight is Professor Finlay. She's appointed as Professor of Work and Employment Relations at Strathclyde University Business School in 2010 and is now a distinguished professor there. Her current research focuses on job quality, workplace innovation, productivity and well-being. She is co-chair of Scotland's Fair Work Convention having been the Convention's academic advisor since its inception. She also sits on an absolutely enormous huge raft of other national and international work and employment related committees, editorial boards and also on the British University's Industrial Relations Association just to name a few. Professor Finlay's lecture tonight is entitled Fair Work for the Future. Question mark at the end. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Finlay. Thank you very much Colin for the kind introduction and thank you to the Society and the British Academy for inviting me along here this evening and for the audience of course joining us in person or online. This is my first time in a lecture theatre for two years so it's a slightly novel experience for an academic who used to spend a lot of time in lecture theatres. As Colin has said what I want to do tonight is to reflect a little bit on the contemporary world of work and to make the case that work, paid work and good quality work really matters to talk about the benefits of what that work can bring and to think about the challenges in trying to embed and deliver fair work here in Scotland and beyond and I'll draw on the various roles that I have as Colin has indicated so I'll draw on research that my own team and research partners have done over the last decade or so and I'll draw on my own experience as the co-chair of Scotland's fair work convention and there's a lot of crossover between those two roles because of course the convention draws very heavily on research, it's an evidence-based process so the arguments for fair work in Scotland are very well steeped in good reliable social science evidence and there's a lot of overlap between the convention's framework and the kinds of work that myself and my own team do. So what I do really is I spent my career researching the world of work, I spend my days thinking about what people like you do all day and every day and some of that involves doing very specific things about what's the implications of a particular workplace practice, what effect does it have on people's experience of work, some of it looks at the configurations of business choices in sectors and industries and what that means for the quality of people's work and some of it is around what does government do, how does government create policy and legislation that changes what work looks like and that improves what work is and one of the things I wanted to stress is the kind of job I do and it shows how much work is both an ordinary and an extraordinary part of our life, it's ordinary because we do it all the time, we spend most of our days of the week at work, we spend most of our adult years at work, more than we spend in education for many people, more than they spend in retirement. So work is a constant feature of our life and in that sense it's predictable and routine and for many people a little bit mundane but in actual fact work is extraordinary in the impact that it has on our life, on our health and well-being, on our prosperity and the prosperity of our families and communities, on the goods and services that are available for the public, on the provision of public services, on the economy and on the wider society, so work is a really extraordinary role in our life and that's really where I think I want to start this evening's discussion, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives and we spend most of our days at work, there's a variety of estimates of how long we spend at work but one of those estimates suggests we spend upwards of 90,000 hours in our life in paid work, perhaps a more catchy one is that we spend as you'll see from the lyrics newly resurrected in a car ad on television, we might spend eight hours of our day at work, eight hours at play and eight hours asleep, I'm not sure how accurate that estimate is, it certainly doesn't take into account paid, unpaid work, it doesn't take into account all of the work that goes into cooking, cleaning, household maintenance, childcare, child reading and other caring responsibilities but just like the authors of the lyrics Lucky Me I'm also not going to focus on unpaid work this evening, I'm going to focus very particularly on paid work but bearing in mind that paid work is inextricably connected to unpaid work so the shape of women's jobs, the shape of women's careers are very much affected by the parameters that are imposed by their engagement disproportionately in unpaid work and that has huge implications for women's job quality. So specifically tonight I want to focus not just on paid work which is very important but I want to focus on high quality work and I'm going to argue that that should be an important aspiration for employers, it should be an important priority for policy makers and it should be of significant concern to all of us as citizens because paid work matters a great deal to all of us. It's a very interesting time to talk about work because of course we've just, we're at the end of two years of a pandemic which has disrupted heavily the world of work, we're at the beginning of a cost of living crisis which looks like it will be very significant, the new statesman referred to it as a a dystopian combination of higher prices, lower real wages and higher taxes and we sit at a time when average real wages have fallen below the level that they sat at 2008 before the global financial crisis. So it's a good time to be looking at the world of work. We know a lot about how good paid work is for us from the absence of paid work, so a very robust body of research and insight about unemployment. We know that people who are unemployed have much poorer mental and physical health that affects their morbidity and their mortality, we know that it affects the structure of their day, it denies them social contact, it denies them the opportunities to use their talents, it denies them the opportunities and the resources to be able to achieve various things in their life. So we know a lot about why good work is good for us, why work is good for us because we know that not having work isn't good for us, but interestingly recent research has suggested that work is not always good for us depending on its quality. So there's been some work carried out by Chandola and Zang in 2017 and they were interested in what happened to unemployed people who transitioned into different types of work and following a population sample in the UK they found that adults who transitioned from unemployment into poor work had poorer health and stress biomarkers than adults who stayed unemployed. So in some circumstances paid work is not good for us, what matters of course is the quality of that work and that's something that social sciences has recognised and researched for a very long time. The quality of work, the importance of the quality of work has been recognised since the 1950s and 60s or 60s and 70s with the quality of working life movement, but thereafter from about the mid 1970s on the quality of work fell off of the agenda of many academics and indeed of policymakers and one of the reasons that that happened is that the oil crisis and the associated economic shock and job loss of the mid 70s meant that a focus was placed much more heavily on the ability to have any job and not just a good job and interestingly some 50 years later that focus of any job being better than no job at all is still an important part of public policy but I'm going to argue that actually that's something that is really quite problematic. More recently we've seen a resurgence in interest in the quality of work from about the 2000 onwards in terms of academic work and maybe a little bit later around policy. It's worth saying of course that the ILO the international labour organisation has long had a commitment to what they call decent work and bodies such as the EU and the OECD have followed on with strong policy commitments over recent years to the importance of job quality as a driver of inclusive economic growth and more sustainable economic activity. So that resurgence has led to a number of questions about what constitutes good quality work how can we measure it but crucially how can we intervene to try to deliver it. A very quick discussion about defining and measuring job quality so there isn't a standard definition of what job quality is in the UK or indeed internationally there's no one accepted definition. Some people use single indicators to try and measure job quality and those indicators are often exhibit a disciplinary preference so economists might use pay as a proxy measure of what job quality is, social psychologists might use job satisfaction as a proxy measure and scholars who are from a more sociological tradition might use control of work or task discretion as their insight into what job quality looks like. Some of those measures are objective so what you're paid or the number of hours you work is an objective measure your job satisfaction or your autonomy at work are not objective those are subjective measures and that can create complications when different data sources point in different directions so hairdressers often have very high levels of job satisfaction but on any other indicators we would tend not to see that hairdressers have good jobs and that's why job quality's multi dimensionality is somewhat tricky both to measure and to intervene to support. There are a number of different indices which are composites of job quality measures and I've put one on the screen just as a way of showing you the kind of things that they contain so the one by Munoz de Bustillo and colleagues is the one used by the EU and you see from that that pay is a part of job quality but it's not a predominant part it's 20% on their measure that's the weighting that it's given but other features such as the intrinsic nature of your work the characteristics of your work and your broader health and safety and work-life balance are also included. So there is some consensus of the kind of areas that constitute good job quality I tend to focus and my team tend to focus on three important areas we focus on the important the quality of your employment do you have a stable contract is your income stable are your hours predictable is your income sufficient measures like that we also focus on the quality of your task and your work so is your job fulfilling does it challenge you does it use your skills is it stretching is it something that you can develop meaning and purpose through do you feel dedicated and absorbed in your work and our third element is what we refer to as workplace quality and that's really looking at the governance contact of your context of work who makes decisions do you have a voice in those decisions do you have any influence when you exercise your voice what are workplace relationships like and are they something that increase your perceptions of how good or poor work is so that's the focus that we use the top line finding of all of the measures of job quality would suggest that the UK is in the top quartile of job quality in the world and that's interesting but there's that doesn't that highs I suppose is a composite measure some of the things that are going on underneath that overarching measure because researchers have become increasingly concerned about rising numbers of what we might call bad jobs deterioration and what we might call good jobs and the implication that that has for the stock of jobs because of course bad jobs and good jobs change in terms of their proportions within the economy and that that's a concern there are some real challenges around data so there are some things that we have very good data on we've got very good data on employment quality indicators reasonably okay data on task or work quality indicators although one important source of that the european working condition survey will now disappear because we won't be part of that in the uk as a consequence of leaving the european union we have much poorer data when it comes to workplace quality and that's an issue that i'll pick up later on here in scotland of course for the last seven or eight years we've had a very strong policy interest in job quality or the term of preference in scotland is fair work the scotland has had a fair work convention established in 2015 established by the scottish government the independent of scottish government it has a membership of employers and trade unions and some academic advice reflecting a broadly social partnership approach to what job quality or fair work looks like in scotland it has two roles to advise the scottish government in relation to fair work and to advocate more widely in scottish society and beyond for fair work and for the promotion of fair work the convention launched its framework in 2016 and that's available online if anybody wants to have a look of it at it and that outlines why we think it's important and what we what we think job quality is and i'll look at that in a second but it's really worth stressing that all of what the convention does and all of what the fair work framework aims at is to improve the well-being of our citizens in work and therefore has a very strong overlap with wider agendas of well-being so i won't spend much time in this because the framework has been out there for rather a long time but we we define fair work as being something that offers opportunity fulfillment respect security and voice that is a balance between the rights and responsibilities of employers and employees and we argue very strongly can generate mutual benefits across all of those groups we have an aspirational visit vision which is that scotland should be a world leader in fair work and one single recommendation the organizations with a locus in the area of work should strive to deliver it the change levers at the heart of the convention are workplace cooperation and dialogue so problem solving problem identification and problem and and evaluation within workplaces but also the establishment of industry level or sector level structures where appropriate and we saw the growth of some of those during the pandemic and a commitment to broader partnership arrangements collaboration and to mutual gains from the process of the delivery of fair work before i'm but before i move on you'll notice that the term we use is fair work in scotland the term of preference in england is good work in the EU it's better work at the ILO it's decent work does the terminology matter well for the most part no we're all talking about similar things but i think there's something very important about the emphasis on fair work in scotland because fair work draws attention to two or three really quite significant things the first is it draws attention to the notion of what we might call the distributive problem what is it just for people to have in work who gets what and why do some people get more access to aspects of fair work than others i think the second important element of fairness in the context of fair work is the idea that we draw attention not just to the distributive issue but also to the procedural issue how our decisions arrived at so we don't just look at who gets a part of the cake we look at how the cake is divided and implicit within that and implicit within the fair work framework is an interest by everyone to have a bigger cake the way in which fair work can drive a larger amount of resource to be distributed so in that sense i think the term fair is a useful one i've put on the slide the very colorful slide which is on the screen at the moment i've put on the slide the fair work dimensions and what i've indicated on that is the way in which those benefit individuals and i won't go through those because it's because it's very clear that the benefits of fair work accrue to individuals it makes their working life better it makes them more prosperous it gives them greater confidence in work it allows them to enhance their own self-respect and self-esteem during work and i'll come back to to talk about what are the benefits for fair work for other parties for employers and for the state but for the moment let's let's stick with individuals and i'm going to very quickly because i'm conscious that we have 45 minutes and not as i had understood an hour i'm going to very quickly scan through some of the data on whether or not people in scotland and the uk do have fair work the reason why i'm specifying scotland and the uk is there's quite a lot of areas where we don't have good data for scotland and we can't disaggregate it so therefore we use uk data because we have no really good reason to believe that the profile of good work in the uk is in the rest of the uk is is really any different from what it is in scotland so let's run through some of those some of these challenges and gaps in the area of fair work so if we look at security we know that in surveys throughout the world people value job security incredibly highly is the most valued aspect of job quality and we can understand why that's the case because of the benefits that security bring but we've seen quite a significant rise in non-standard working in the uk and indeed across other economies so at the moment about 20 percent of people in the uk labor force are on non-standard contracts some of those will be on those contracts by choice we can't assume that all that all of that 20 percent are in somehow a precarious position but what we do know from studying the evidence is that those non-standard working arrangements tend to bring with them poor job quality they tend to bring lower pay fewer access to benefits fewer access to sick pay in maternity leave and and and so forth so we know that non-standard working is fundamentally associated with poorer job quality of course that means 80 percent of people are in open-ended relatively secure employment but actually in the uk we're at the bottom end really of the oecd advanced nations when it comes to to employment tenure so people have employment 10 years on average of about seven years and that's relatively short compared to other countries we know there's a concern about underemployment underemployment means that you don't have enough hours of work to make a sufficient income or not as many hours as you want to have and there is a massive occupational class gradient in underemployment and when i when i use the term occupational class really referring to the hierarchy of the standard occupational classifications which has managers and professionals at the top and it has routine workers at the bottom and if you look at underemployment it's very rare to have underemployment as a manager or a professional it's very common to have it as a routine worker much more common than it is at the other end we've heard a lot of discussion about zero hours contracts and the concerns the zero hours contracts are a poor form of job quality and are exploitative um there's probably about 700 000 people in the uk on a zero hours contract there's a much bigger proportion of people who have anxiety about working hours instability around 1.7 million employees in the uk report that they are anxious about the unpredictability of their hours despite having um having open-ended contracts and we know that that insecurity feeds through to insecurity and pay it feeds through to poorer working conditions and it feeds through to um in some senses to performance intensification there's also insecurity across significant parts about 29 percent of the uk labor force about job status so valued aspects of their job are they have concerns over whether or not those valued aspects will continue so a deterioration in their own job and interestingly job insecurity is quite common across the occupational hierarchy it doesn't have a gradient so managers and professionals are also very concerned since the 1990s we've seen a bit of a convergence around job insecurity so that's a whole series of challenges low pay is a big challenge um on 2019 data about 19 percent of people in the uk are on low pay who are in work 25 percent if we talk about hourly data because that takes into account insufficient hours low pay is highly gendered so um one in five women are low paid compared to one in seven men and low pay drives the uk's significant income and equality and indeed in work poverty and we know now that around 59 percent of people who are in in work poverty are in working households so it's not the case that that being in work necessarily protects you from poverty non-pay benefits track pay so if you're highly paid you get high you get higher levels of benefits if you're poorly paid you get low levels of benefits and that gap is widening over recent years and in an overarching sense what we've seen is the wage share so the proportion of national income or national income that goes to labor has deteriorated quite significantly while the proportion that goes to profits has increased so we've some real security challenges in in sections of the labor market i don't think it'll be a particular surprise to anybody when we start to talk about opportunity uh that fair work conditions are differentially distributed across people in different categories so across pretty much all of the protected characteristics women young people and old people in different in relation to different dimensions um race disability job quality is much lower for those people in those with protected characteristics than it is for other people and that's systematically embedded and well entrenched in the uk economy so that's one problem with opportunity another problem is the emergence even in good jobs of a very clear class ceiling so we we heard from the the social mobility commission a few years ago that even if you look at professional work graduate based work what we find is that people of low socio socio economic origins tend to have more difficulties in achieving professional work and even when they get there they face a significant social origins pay gap so there are real challenges of opportunity and remember class is not a protected characteristic in the uk um although some people argue very strongly that it should be and the most systematic variation we see in uk job quality is by occupational class so on almost every index whether it's paying benefits whether it's contracts whether it's um in job design or intrinsic work characteristics and almost all of those indicators the higher you are up the occupational hierarchy the more likely you are to experience better job quality there is one exception and that's work life balance senior level occupations tend to report more challenges with work like balance worth work life balance but even then that's a bit tricky because on the one hand they work longer hours many of those hours are unpaid but on the other hand they have access to much better flexible working arrangements so somewhat somewhat curious and there's no occupational gradient when it comes to health in the most recent data moving on to talk about fulfillment there are some key job fulfillment challenges from uk data so we've noticed over recent years a real concern with what we call skills under utilisation and that simply means that you go to work and you do not use the skills that you have because your job is insufficiently challenging we see quite significant proportions of the uk labour force and uk managers reporting that people's skills are not well used in in workplaces so some cipd this chartered institute of personal development work from 2018 suggested that more than one third of workers in the uk don't have effective skills utilisation and at the other end one tenth don't have enough training to give them the skills to carry out their jobs effectively we've seen a decline in recent years in task discretion and you'll remember I said that for sociological research that control that you have over work is quite important we know that task discretion is incredibly closely associated with individual well-being so being able to have some control over what we do improves our own well-being but we've seen a decline really since about 2012 in levels of task discretion in Britain alongside increasingly demanding work so the statistics on people who report high stress jobs highly demanding work in francis greens terms suggest that about 35 percent of people in the uk report high stress jobs which is significantly higher than other advanced economies and lastly in fulfillment it's very clear that there's differential access to training and development in the uk the biggest the the biggest correlation with access to training and development in the uk labour force is whether or not you have high education if you're highly educated you get more training and development we might have thought that it would be important to invest in the training and development of people who were less well educated who had fewer qualifications but at the bottom end of the labour market some people a significant minority receive no training and work at all other than to meet statutory or regulatory requirements when it comes to respect and i'm going to speed up on some of these because we'll run out of time when it comes to respect we know that health and well-being is affected by poor quality jobs the people in poor quality jobs have the lowest amount of health and well-being we know that people's physical and mental health are impacted by having poor work about 23 percent of people say work is bad for their physical health and 25 percent say it's bad for their mental health there are real health concerns around the demanding work that i just referred to and the way in which that is is is growing in Britain and a significant minority are concerned about the way in which their work impacts on their wider work and family activity a fifth of respondents for the cipd says their job strongly affects their personal life and 24 find it hard to relax in normal normal home life because of the demands of their jobs we don't have very good data around bullying at work but we know that about 15 percent from cipd data suggests 15 percent of people suggest that they are bullied at work and quite a proportion of that around 40 percent it's not interpersonal bullying not get you know bullying by individuals it's bullied bullying related to performance and lastly there are huge gaps when it comes to effective voice in the uk part of that reflects the design the institutional deterioration of trade unions in the uk so the fact that we have lower trade union density and collective bargaining coverage since the late 70s and the corresponding rise in what we might call management sponsored voice practices has not compensated for that for that deterioration in collective voice there are the most recent systematic data we have is collected in 2011 from the workplace employment relations survey which is unfortunately now discontinued but that suggests that about 48 percent of people in uk workplaces and sorry 48 percent of uk workplaces and about 28 percent of employees have access to systematic voice channels at an individual level within their workplaces those channels however show some evidence of hollowing out so what management consult on has become further away from real decision making and influence so we've seen a decrease in managers consulting on early stage plans and an increase in managers consulting on management preferred options so the role of consultation has changed and higher level consultation on strategic issues has also has also deteriorated over in the uk interestingly enough there is a gold standard for voice which we find from the workplace employment relations data which suggests that voice produces better outcomes where you have individual live channels and you have some collective channels and that's the gold standard because it improves firm performance as well as improving individual well-being but that exists in the uk on the most recent data in 10 percent of workplaces and for 30 percent of employees why does it matter why does any of it matter well we clearly know that it matters to the individuals who experience poor job quality but why does it matter to anybody else well let's start with employers i would argue very strongly that it matters to employers because they miss out on all of the benefits that arrive arise from the provision of good and fair work we know that secure employment and can enhance employee commitment increase their trust support their learning and their skills development and reduce turnover which is often very important we know that opportunity leads to more diverse organizations where you access new talent and new ideas we know that fulfillment makes people more likely to be engaged in their work and unleashes creativity and innovation we know that respect protects employers from legal liability and improves communications and social exchange and enhances worker involvement and we know that effective voice allows constructive engagement and participation in the workplace so all of those things are not just good for individuals they are good for employees for employers as well and now aside from the separate dimensions of fair work the combined impact of fair work practices is very positive for what we call discretionary behaviors so we use a framework called the AMO framework which is a theory of employee performance which suggests that if you have the right ability if you have the right skills if your skills are invested in and kept up to date if you have the right motivation which might be both extrinsic you feel well rewarded or intrinsic you feel well engaged in your work and if you have jobs that give you scope to make a difference then you are likely as an employee to engage in discretionary behaviors that benefit your employer either discretionary performance behaviors or discretionary innovation behaviors and therefore that configuration of practices that fair work delivers produces positive outcomes for employers this is a very busy slide so I don't really expect you to to make anything of it I just wanted to put it up there to make one point what this slide is is a set of practices which my team have worked on over a period of years in a project called fair innovative and transformative work and what it does is to say can we identify a relationship between the operation of certain types of fair work practices and outcomes that are valued by employers and we've mapped all of these relationships in a variety of different ways and what those columns tell you are the kinds of practices that will support discretionary performance innovation behaviors and that will enhance trust and we know that trust also supports discretionary performance and innovation behaviors and the reason why I wanted to put the slide up is really not so that you can read any of it but it was to draw attention to the numbers in the brackets because what the numbers in the brackets tell us is how frequently those practices are adopted so one of the challenges for fair work in the UK and in Scotland is not that we don't know what practices work it's that employers don't adopt them okay so we see low levels of for example access to flexible working or giving people time to reflect and problem solve low levels of collective voice and we need to ask the question then why are those practices adopted if good work benefits us all why isn't common sense common practice and that's a question that we really need to ask of employers part of the answer to that is that for some employers low quality work is highly profitable the nature of their product market the nature of their business model is built specifically around low quality work and it can be highly profitable in the short and in the longer term part of the problem is that while poor work practices might cause difficulties for employers collectively for example in terms of recruitment recruiting people with the right sets of skills for example but it might not cause a problem for individual employers so that unit of analysis problem who are we talking about when we try to understand where where the drivers for for poorer work come from employers clearly face different pressures when it comes to labor market and product market characteristics so some employers are in a product market where you cannot you cannot be a successful business unless you engage in you deliver high quality work your customers expect it if you have a high value added product or a high value added service your customers expect that to be delivered by people in whom you have invested similarly for some employers labor market pressures require that you have high quality working practices because otherwise you simply won't have any staff or staff of the right quality but the real challenge exists in circumstances where labor market pressures or product market pressures don't produce good quality work so where you've got low level personalized services for example that people don't are not willing to pay a lot of money for then how do you ensure that work is maintained at a high quality sometimes an investment in high quality work arises because of an employer's values so an employer may decide that fundamentally their moral or or philosophical position is one where they invest in good quality work and we see great examples of that in Scotland and and elsewhere in the UK Scotland currently has a business purpose commission which is looking precisely at that what's the role of business values and business purpose in the kinds of outcomes that businesses produce but that's not always the case and often what we see is something which academics call unhelpfully mimetic isomorphism often what we see is that businesses copy other businesses fancy term very easy explanation businesses copy what they see so if you set up a business you set up a business in the same way as other businesses that you have you have identified and therefore your business takes the same form and we see an awful lot then of similarities in the way in which certain kinds of businesses operate and that's not always to the benefit of high quality work the other challenge of course is structural fair work is nested in a whole series of different kinds of systems that can constrain its delivery in most businesses fair work is not a first order strategy it can be you may as an employer decide that you your primary purpose as an employer is to run a high quality business for your own employees but that's not often the case more often than that work is an outcome of it's a second order or a third order outcome of other business decisions so decisions about what your value proposition is or what your business model might be decisions about what your broader organisational strategy is and those decisions are both constrained and facilitated by the operation of wider markets including global markets and institutional arrangements that either constrain or facilitate how employers behave if we were to do a quick aside and look at P&O we would argue that that is a business model and the recent redundancies of P&O are a business model which reflect an organisational strategy for which the outcome is the redundancies of the workers who were previously employed and for which institutions government legislation regulation doesn't seem to have much of an answer it's not we've got soft institutions that are not making much of a difference and sometimes that takes us to a place where we need to think about why society should intervene where employers don't where markets don't to deliver fair work so we've talked about the benefits to individuals of good quality and fair work we've now talked about the benefits to employers what's the benefit to society as a whole well fundamentally good work produces better citizen well-being we are better off for having good work but there are huge externalities of poor work that fall on the wider society so when people are in poor work certainly poorly paid work what happens is that has an implication for government spending on welfare benefits it reduces tax revenues it requires it has an impact on health so it requires that there is an additional spend in terms of the NHS so there are externalities of poor work which the state tends to pick up and for that reason the state might have an interest in reducing poor quality work poor quality improving the quality of work also helps with efficient resource allocation allows us to draw more people from different protected characteristics into employment and into good employment and that's very very good for social cohesion which is part of the priority for the Scottish government if we don't have good work quite a lot of the money that we spend on education and we spend a lot of money on education in Scotland quite a lot of that that spend is is not well realised so if people have higher level skills and qualifications than the jobs they do then the returns to that skill and skill investment and education investment is is minimal what happens within workplaces in terms of conflict resolution in terms of solving problems can actually be really important from a societal point of view so if workplaces do better in terms of the processes of fair work we're less like to see people take legal action we're less likely to pay money for employment tribunals we're more likely to encourage the development of skills of good conflict handling which can apply to other domains of public and private life and I suppose fundamentally what I'm saying is society should pursue fair work and the state should pursue fair work because markets won't or markets won't always for the state the pursuit of fair work allows them to focus on where value is created in the economy and how that value is shared and distributed so it takes us very closely to where value value creation takes place and to the kinds of business models which impact on broader inequality and in our society but the other point I want to make this evening is one of the reasons why society should address fair work is to is to should pursue fair work is to address what we might call wicked problems so wicked problems are complex unruly things with which can't be solved with current current resources which require stakeholder collaboration in which stakeholders have different interests and wicked problems are amenable to more complex and sophisticated collaboration of the kind that fair work helps to deliver what might those be well I think we've done quite an interesting experiment in the last few years of managing people in a pandemic I think that was a very challenging problem which transformed how we managed people in organizations overnight all of a sudden what happened in work became incredibly important whether you could go to work whether your work was safe whether your economic activity could be continued we saw a massive expansion and working from home it didn't appear to have much of an effect on efficiency and productivity either as reported by employees themselves or indeed as reported by managers so so about 40 or 50 percent of people reported that that productivity was the same and about 30 percent said it was increased very few people said that productivity decreased when they worked from home it's clearly the case and there's a missing word on the slide that the pandemic exacerbated some pre-existing inequalities so women's experience of low pay became worse during the pandemic some voice channels increased and we would have expected them to in order to implement public health restrictions within workplaces but we also saw a rise in workplaces that had no voice channels at all which is the curious thing like interesting to work out how public health restrictions were managed in those contexts but we actually saw a much greater appreciation amongst survey respondents to the CIPD about how voice worked within their own workplaces the quality of voice and dialogue and representation improved what became really clear in research over the last few years is that where business heat had invested in fair work in the past it stood them in very good stead to manage the challenges of the pandemic where you had high quality jobs where people could take autonomous decisions where they could work flexibly where they were secure in the work that they did they were much more able to be able to respond and adapt we also saw some other interesting benefits my own team analyzed the CIPD quality of working life survey which took place just one took place in January 2020 so just before the pandemic and the next one in January 2021 so it gave us the first snapshot of what how job quality had changed over that course of over that incredibly disruptive period and interestingly very little had changed to be perfectly honest work-life balance had improved unsurprisingly and it improved even more the number of hours that people worked from home people's health and well-being improved there are some concerns over aspects of job quality such as isolation and burnout but it's very clear that response to the pandemic showed illustrated the stickiness of good job quality and the way in which it became an asset for employers in being able to deal with a period of massively disruptive change but it also illustrated clearly the embeddedness of poor job quality so the pre-existing inequalities stayed the same or got worse just very quickly we had some new categories of workers we'd furloughed workers for the first time ever and their job quality was couldn't be compared with previously they didn't exist before but they were they reported the highest levels of job insecurity so being furloughed although it protected your income didn't make people feel less anxious about the work that they did perhaps even more interestingly we now have a category of critical workers who the government defined as being essential to the ongoing conduct of economic and other activities over the pandemic and the critical workers stem from high level occupations to low level occupations critical workers on almost every job quality indicator were worse than other workers they reported much more negatively work-life balance health and well-being access to resources to do their job and so forth so critical workers came out of that really poorly on anything and everything other than meaning and purpose in work so the pandemic showed us that we could have high quality jobs that would assist employers and society in the responsiveness that was required to be able to cope with the challenges of the pandemic so where else could we apply the benefits of fair work to wicked problems well one area might be in terms of the the UK productivity puzzle and the productivity puzzle in the UK is a that we have had a lag in a slow growing productivity since the global financial crisis and b that we lag average g7 productivity by about 16 percent and that that's an important lag anti-halden formerly of the Bank of England now for of the Royals the RSA used to talk about leaders and laggards that we had businesses that were doing really well in terms of productivity and businesses that were doing very poorly and there has been an emergence of a debate which suggests that part of why some businesses do really poorly is to do with the kinds of management and work practices that those businesses adopt the work of Bloomin Van Renan draws our attention to the way in which the use of targets monitoring and incentive can massively increase productivity but aren't widely used within the UK economy and that and that's one of the possible explanations given as to why productivity lags in those laggard companies that had that has Haldane referred to there are other explanations of productivity productivity challenges in the UK such as corporate governance practices that don't that deter and inhibit innovation because of short term return affixation on short term returns we're particularly interested in what's the role of fair work and enhancing productivity how does that improve productivity of lagging businesses our current research focuses really on that the relationship between fair work and performance enhancements that drive productivity such as innovation and it's very clear from that research that intrinsic work factors the type of work you do how engaging it is is an important driver of performance innovation and well-being but crucially and equally strong is the role of investments in job quality where people feel fairly treated where they feel that their experience is where they feel secured in their experience of work that that drives very strongly a commitment to performance and to innovation and innovation is an important driver of productivity and that's similar to the findings of the UK working life survey which also focuses on the relationship between good work and task and context performance of task performance the job you do context performance the other things that you do that improve your own organisation I'm going to quickly move on because I think we might be about to run out of time I'm hoping somebody will tell me um we can apply a very similar argument to more to automation so we we know that prior to the pandemic there were big challenges around the adoption of automation and the implications that it might have some really scary stories about the job destruction that automation would bring um very polarized accounts of what automation would bring to the UK economy giving us a very bright or a very brutal future real concerns that because of the adherence or the the attachment of some UK employers to low-cost business models and low-cost labour that what we would see is automation being delivered and or automation either not being delivered or being delivered to reduce job quality rather than to enhance it but all of that is a choice the choice of how technology can be used and its impact on job quality and and fair work is a choice that businesses make not a choice without constraints but a choice that is open and available to them and there are some very good examples of the way in which businesses have decided to use automation to raise people's skills to improve the quality of their own work so clearly businesses are constrained in their response to automation but they still have scope for particular choices and those choices when they are made in the direction of good and fair work actually act as a driver to innovation so there's very good longitudinal data from the EU suggesting that an investment in good quality work pays off in terms of long-term innovation performance again we can make the same argument when it comes to climate sustainability so we know that workplaces have an important role in carbon production we know that labour movements across the world have been active in trying to around climate issues but we know there are tensions there between the potential for job destruction and the the scarring effect of industrial transition and an interest in clean green jobs we know that employees have a role as a potentially important change agent when it comes to how businesses address green agendas they can identify areas where green improvements can be made and all of that draws on the very characteristics of fair work that we outlined that I outlined earlier so the ability to engage in dialogue the ability to feel secure the alignment of green agendas with health and safety and well-being agendas the opportunity to be creative around deploying skills and talents to to improve firms environmental performance the very process of discussing environmental issues within businesses having a dialogue which allows environmental improvement to be made all of that is picked up in research which focuses on how on the ground people can deliver change that makes a real difference in terms of climate change so one of my own PhD students Andrew Bratt in a few years ago did quite a lot of case study work around how businesses in Scotland used their relationships with their own employees and their own trade unions to drive a strong environmental agenda in which everybody had a clear interest and that process of addressing climate change and job quality simultaneously has been endorsed both by the Fair Work Convention but endorsed also by Scotland's Just Transition Commission who've argued very strongly that workforces need to be an essential partner when it comes to environmental progress. There are concerns however that businesses are not doing enough or that people don't trust businesses to do enough so some recent research in 2022 by business in the community in Scotland suggested that in fact while people were supportive in the public were people in the public were supportive of a broad environmental agenda they didn't think that they would share in it and they didn't think that businesses would share the gains from it and so a fair work perspective on that might take us into a place where the possibility of mutual gains is made much more clear so how do we change it all I'll finish off very quickly on how do we embed fair work within our economy. Lots of people have a role here we have multiple actors, employers, government, trade unions, civil society, campaigning organisations and consumers importantly all of those have a role to play in the embedding of fair work within Scotland. Employers are fundamentally the key decision maker employers make the decisions about job quality so that might work due to labour supply pressures it might work because their values are consistent with fair work it might work because we see much more shareholder activism and investment investor influence around some of these areas although that's not been a feature that we've seen much of it might work because consumers choose to use good employers before they use poorer employers and actually at this point we should ask ourselves questions about what we do with our own purchasing decisions. Do our purchasing decisions uphold fair work or do they defeat the purpose of fair work in how we choose to spend our resources? What can government do? Well rather a lot in my view and governments at different levels I think we need to challenge we need to have a very consistent and coherent narrative around fair work being good for everybody and fair work is something that drives growth and inclusive growth we need to challenge the argument that say employment protection will cost us jobs all of the evidence suggests that that's not the case we need to challenge the argument that says well bad jobs are just a stepping stone for people who access the labour market at one level but move on because we know that too many people stay in a bad jobs trap we need to challenge the notion that somehow if we embed fair work in our economy that businesses will go somewhere else because that that's unlikely to be the case we need to address some really key issues that we talked about earlier we need to address chronically insecure work either by having better minimum standards or at the very least enforcing the standards that we have we need to review what happens in terms of work family policy and address some of the issues that have come up during the pandemic we need crucially to try and find ways of embedding competing voices as an asset to business decision making so we need to find ways in which voices that are underrepresented are heard within business decision making there is an important role for government to disincentivise business models that are built on poor quality work they can do that in their relations with business they can do it using conditionality and public funding and public procurement they can do that in some not the you not the Scottish government but the UK government could do that by forms of regulation and that incentivisation disincentivisation of poor business models and incentivisation of better stakeholder orientation is part of the root to improving job quality how do they do it in a variety of ways that are available to government they're not straightforward but they're available so reform of corporate governance to encourage a far closer stakeholder orientation consistent with lots of European economies would be one step forward for the UK government if we look at areas for which the Scottish government has responsibilities the provision of business support through enterprise agencies and economic development funds can be a way in which fair work is embedded and we've seen really good examples of that across the Scottish economy in recent years employment protections need are something that the UK government is responsible for but there is a very strong argument now that employment protections are not in the light of the P&O debacle really fit for purpose and government relations how government engage with business how government talk to business what government how government support business to develop their own capacities is an important lever crucially for governments we need some joined up policy we need to be able to see fair work not as a nice to have not as something that's just about being good to employees but as something which is well aligned to how we invest in skills how we innovate how we spend money supporting businesses how we solve some of those rather large challenges in the economy around policy poverty reduction or inequality or inclusivity what does that all add up to well I think we will see some challenges in sustaining a commitment to fair work through tough times we know that there will be some economic difficulties ahead and that that fair work is often something that's thought to be a luxury of good times and not a driver in bad times we have some real challenges around multi-level governance so some of the areas for which there are responsibilities for fair work are held at Westminster and others are held within the Scottish government and we will I think we have already seen the emergence of some policy disalignment there what I would say is that there's no short term fix there's a reason why the fair work convention had an aspiration to be a leading fair work employer in society in 10 years it's because we knew that it was a rather big job that what we were talking about was not tinkering with the edges of the economic model but it was engaging in some quite fundamental changes in how the economy and businesses operate in all of that it won't be government that drive on their own the embedding of fair work in Scotland and it certainly won't be the fair work convention there is a requirement for a social movement in which consumers, campaigners, trade unions, government, businesses, all professional organisations, regulatory bodies come together to embed what we know would be very good for our economy but the prize that we seek with fair work is enormous the prize of having a dynamic well functioning responsive economy an economy in which people no matter where their life begins can find meaning and fulfilment and prosperity through work that prize is enormous that prize is worth striving for that prize is why a lot of the eight hours that I will spend every day between now and retirement will be focused on how we based deliver fair work thank you there'll be a five minute break now and then we'll have the question and answer session I think we'll we'll just start the question and answer session now so um other Trish is going to be the the runner for that so questions from the the floor very much for an interesting discussion and having worked for nearly 60 years of my life I quite agree that fair work would be nice however you missed in my opinion the key point the key point is that if we want to have a larger cake to slice up we need to generate more jobs and our current government have an anti-capitalist non-job generation in fact Scotland have had it for years we had the roots plant came up and we ruined that by trade unionism British Leland to look to build trucks we ruined that missing went to the northeast and made a success of it how do we in Scotland generate jobs not just good jobs good jobs will come I think the evidence is that good jobs don't necessarily arise out of a proliferation of employment and what we've actually seen over the last few years is a rise in the number of pretty poor jobs there's quite a number of different things in your question I'll try and take them separately so the creation I think there's been an interesting policy influence on employers where employers have been encouraged and remember we want to have employers we want to have good employers where employers have been encouraged to deliver jobs without thinking too much about their quality and that has created forms of businesses and business models which have within them their own tensions that deliver that impose externalities on the rest of society and the rest of the economy I don't think I would accept your premise around trade unionism so I would argue that of course trade unionism takes a variety of different forms there's a very clear association of good job quality in countries where there is a presence of trade unionism and poorer job quality in countries where there is an absence of them now that doesn't suggest that in all circumstances all trade unions or all employers do the right or the wrong thing but we do know that highly productive highly innovative economies have institutionally embedded voice for workers and that that works well it works well not just in terms of the quality of their jobs it works well in terms of skills policy it works well in terms of responses to automation so the relationships which unions and employers have and have had in Scotland and in the UK aren't simply coloured by the activities of trade unions they're coloured by the stance which employers takes I was in Sweden a few years ago and there was an interesting discussion about unproductive plants and the the argument that was made by trade unions and employers was you would not fight to maintain an unproductive plant in operation you would come up with something else part of the challenge in the UK is that losing your job is a cliff edge if you lose your job the opportunity of getting another one at the same level at the same quality is really quite restricted and therefore that change of economic activity and the disruption that it causes is much more costly because of the interaction between the labour market and the welfare system in the UK so so I'm not sure I accept your initial premise that that either the current government and I don't have a position on the current government in Scotland I don't think I accept the position that they are job destroying or indeed the trade unions by their nature or job destroying can I follow up on that because I found that a very interesting point I wondered if you could comment on the fact that the economy in Scotland is generally lagging behind the economy in the other three nations and if it's not due to employment then I wonder what it is due to lagging behind in what regard in all regards again I'm not sure I accept that premise that the economy lags in all regards I mean in fact the productivity gap between Scotland and the rest of the UK has been closing for a number of years employment rates are not dissimilar and productivity levels within sectors are not dissimilar some of the issues about differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK are compositional so they are and I'm not an economist but they are compositional in the sense that the composition of different economies if you look at for example the composition of the the southeast of England and including London what you find is that that drives some of the numbers from the rest for England in a way that if you were to take those economies out and look at it regionally you don't get those big differences so I'm not sure you're specifying to me where where the economy is doing so badly in Scotland relative to the UK for me to explain why I think that might be the case I'm not sure that I don't know enough about ferry building to answer that question good evening can hear me good evening um have the owners of P&O done anything have the owners of P&O done anything illegal and if they have should they face criminal charges they have done something illegal because they didn't they under the the requirement to consult on collective redundancies of redundancies were above 30 people they didn't do that and they've been very clear that they didn't do that so yes they have they have done something illegal that's something which has a civil not a criminal penalty it would require however those employees to raise that through an employment tribunal action in order to achieve some remedy and the extent of the remedy which they might achieve may be less than what P&O is offering to pay them could I just ask you about employee share schemes in the context of providing fair work and employees attitude changing towards employers under that kind of company so you're talking about employee employee owned enterprises or share schemes okay um share employee share schemes have sort of fallen as an area of interest over the last few years they were they were a particular feature in the 80s and 90s that share ownership would effect would be something that employees would do in the share distributions took place profit sharing arrangements took place and that that would change the character of employment relations I think we should maybe not fall into the trap of thinking that employment relations are terrible in the UK or indeed in Scotland in actual fact all of the indicators of poor employment relations have gone down in recent years although they may be about to move back up again um given the cost of living crisis but yeah there's more information on the impact of employee owned businesses on things like performance and innovation and commitment than there is on the impact of share ownership the the the literature's quite old but my memory of it is that it didn't seem to make a huge difference because the number of shares owned were small they tend to be they tended to be small both in relation to um the share distribution but also in relation to the income and wealth of the people who held them except when it comes to senior managers so senior managers often the impact of share ownership by senior managers is often quite significant in terms of how they view their own share ownership because it can be a much more significant source of wealth but it's a it's quite an old literature it's not something that really features in much of the contemporary discussion about share about fair work this is not something that we think is a necessary part of fair work hi um i've worked in the software industry in in uh scotland for 30 years and one thing you you talked about what to do about this and it very much comes down to two or three people in organizations the culture the chief executive and maybe one or two senior managers and you talked about what to do about this they all know that empowered employees are more productive we've been told for years and years and years however your solutions to the problem entirely focused on central government and to me that's that's not going to achieve anything in all my time there were no there was nothing occurring to look you talked about a number of good examples of good practice in scotland which have delivered benefits so how are you going to persuade those senior managers who can change everything in an instant by sharing those good practices with them get out with them directly rather than worrying about government because i think the focus has been on that for far too long it's an interesting point so i work with businesses all the time but my research team works engaging with businesses the length and breadth of scotland all of the time and we work with some tremendous businesses we work with businesses who absolutely understand the need to empower their own employees and to do what they can to deliver that and sometimes that's straight more straightforward than others so there are some spectacular examples there are lots of good examples of businesses who are striving to do that better so you're right that sometimes that will be a catalyst within the business so you'll have somebody potentially in a leadership position who will will pursue that idea and there's lots of ways in which that can be supported it can be supported through business support agencies it can be supported through the private sector through consultancy work it can be supported through relationships with universities and academics you know so heavily engaged researchers so i don't accept that there's a lot of businesses that that sorry i do accept there's a lot of businesses who are doing what they can the real challenge is the businesses who don't really engage with anybody who don't engage with employers organizations who will similarly argue the empowerment of the employees is a good idea businesses that don't engage with those who don't engage with economic development support or business support agencies don't necessarily engage with the policy community or anywhere else part of the challenge of course in scotland is that we have as as in the rest of the uk we have a really high proportion of small businesses and one of the things that takes up the time of small businesses is running their business the opportunities that they have to go and learn new things or to experiment and the risks associated with experiments can sometimes be quite high but i think i wouldn't underestimate the fact that a lot of that is that a lot of that is going on and works very very well we have some great examples in scotland of businesses who genuinely accept that their employees are indeed their greatest asset it's not a phrase and they have structures and processes and practices that deliver that we try to focus very heavily on not we don't use the term culture a lot culture's a very appropriate anthropological concept we try not to talk about culture we talk an awful lot about practice so sometimes what acts as a change impetus in businesses is just trying a new practice understanding that what your practice is is limiting people from engaging and then thinking about how you address that so we've a really strong focus on how businesses can not necessarily transform everything they do but take particular practices and try and try and pay able to transfer transfer roles could we have maybe a couple of questions from the zoom audience please from garrant certainly many years ago it was felt by many trade unionists that contracts compliance within the public sector could help improve the working lives of those workers contracted to or supplying public bodies is there still scope to achieve that yes is I suppose the simple answer and the public sector has a number of different roles and it has a role as potentially a model employer but theoretically the public sector can't be too different from the private sector or otherwise it causes an imbalance in the labour market on a whole host of indicators job quality and fair work is higher in public sector organisations because they tend for example to have more systematic approaches to voice than you might find in the private sector so you would find more union recognition agreements they tend to have more formalised procedures around things like equality of opportunity or flexible working policies because it's much easier to institute those by policy direction in the public sector than it is necessarily to influence the private sector so there are variations in job quality across the public and the private sector I don't know if part of the question is focusing on the role of supply chains or the role of conditionality a big part of what the convention is currently interested in and people who are interested in changing job quality are interested is thinking about how you can use public public purchasing whether that's through grant giving whether it's through procurement whether you can use that to shape the types of job quality and fair work that exist in Scotland so for example if you look at the adoption of the real living wage the real living wage is more widely adopted in Scotland than it is anywhere else in the UK outside of London the fastest growing area for living wage employment partly because in the public sector more broadly there is a policy of encouraging the adoption of the real living wage amongst suppliers and so public procurement does have a form of leverage which is important some of the issues around that are quite tricky so previously when we were in the European Union the issues around how much change could be done through public procurement ariated procurement professionals rather a lot we are still subject to world trade organisations rules so there are still procurement restrictions in Scotland in terms of how you can dispense public monies and indeed in the rest of the UK but yes procurement is a lever and sometimes a very big lever so colleagues and I colleagues on the with colleagues on the fair work convention and beyond we've really recently been involved in an inquiry into the construction industry in Scotland the construction industry is hugely funded by public procurement investment in roads hospitals schools and so forth the role of procurement in improving some of the real challenges in the construction industry is one that we've spent a lot of time looking at and there is an opportunity I think to think of how procurement shapes good outcomes in principle there's no good reason why we should spend public money to produce poor quality work that the public then has to cross subsidise and has to has to improve through other other forms far better that we should support good quality work in the in the first place thank you and Dallas says I heard a talk a few years ago from a trade union official he was of the opinion that everyone should be paid the same about 20 pounds an hour at current rates the ones in grottier jobs would have a huge pay increase which would reward them and the ones in highly skilled professional or managerial jobs would have a severe pay cut but their job satisfaction should be reward enough do you have any sympathy with this view I'm not I'm not sure that that would necessarily be a good approach to how we encourage the building of human capital I think there's a take of that was supposed to be an amusing question there was there was some media publicity a few years ago in the states of somebody who decided to pay all of their employees the same I can't remember what the figure was 70,000 or 80,000 dollars and it solved some problems and created others the whole issue of fairness is rarely resolved it's back to the distributional the distributive problem I talked about earlier the whole area of fairness is rarely resolved by giving everybody equal shares because the issues around incentive and investment in human capital make that quite tricky where I think there is a real issue is the extent of difference between people at the bottom and tops of organizations I think the the high pay commission a few years ago suggested that chief executives in UK businesses and 130 times more apologies if I've got that number wrong but it was of that of that scale 130 times more than the lowest paid member of their organization and there are real questions I think you might want to ask about whether or not that is an appropriate range of pay so I don't think I would be in favor if I had any locus in this of having no range in pay at all but I think that that some of the real challenges are the the difference between very low pay and very high pay at a Scottish level I've referred to you earlier to the the way in which we if we look at the the the picture of pay deciles in Scotland in Scotland we see this really sharp U shaped graph I would have put it on the slides but couldn't find a recent up-to-date set of figures but I don't think they've changed that much so we have if we look at paid deciles spickets breaking down pay entertains we have really high numbers of highly paid jobs in Scotland that's a good thing but we have really equally high numbers of poorly paid jobs and that's a problem in and of itself but the middle is also a problem because there are insufficient spaces for people at that lowest level of income to progress into higher income and the ability to progress in both income and career is an important incentive and something that people value highly so that structure of pay can be quite problematic because it creates too big a gap between where people start out and where some people are too too big a gap to be breached there's some suggestion in the UK that that's also an issue for managers and senior managers that the gaps at different levels of management are becoming too big and you've got a bit of a chasm between middle management and senior management that fewer and fewer people actually managed to breach so it's the scale I think of the variation which causes problems rather than perhaps that we don't all earn the same yeah we'll maybe have a couple of questions from the audience we're getting close to the end you mentioned the potential role of consumer power in helping to drive up the quality of work and I'm sure many consumers will be willing to participate in that but while there are high publicized occasional episodes of misbehavior that we all know about it can be quite difficult to know which companies are doing well and which are not in that regard how can consumer power be harnessed you're absolutely correct sometimes it's very difficult to access that information and sometimes there are few choices of alternatives so if in the purchase of particular products for example you might find that no one business is better than any others what we tend to see is the emergence of of campaigning activity so fair trade would have been one campaigning activity around the real living wage or real living hours which is which is the current focus of a lot of interest it tends to be much more organized than than necessarily individuals doing their own thing I think there is and there's a limit to what individuals doing their own thing how big a difference that can make so I suppose we're really talking here about targeted consumer behavior there are real difficulties in that where we have a real significant element of low pay then access to cheaper food and cheaper clothes becomes really important if we then penalize businesses that that produce cheaper food and cheaper clothes on the basis of lower wages then actually it becomes really difficult it creates problems in that kind of full circuit of how people spend and earn their money so so there it's not and it's not I think a solution in and of itself but I think there is an obligation and I'm not saying I always I always adhere to an obligation on people with discretionary spend not to support poor work where they know that it's poor work sometimes you don't know sometimes you realize afterwards but where you know you shouldn't do it I had a conversation a few years ago in relation to the real living wage with quite a well known business in Scotland that was not paying the real living wage to all of its employees and my suggestion was why don't you have two menus why don't you offer your customers an opportunity to pay a real living wage menu and if people can't do that or won't do that you have an existing menu now it's a slightly quirky and I was simply being provocative it's a quirky thing to do but as consumers we do sometimes know how our purchasing power is being spent it's this is not going to be comparable to the state spending money or large private organizations in their own supply chain because we should be aware that the whole notion of conditionality on good and fair work doesn't just apply to the public sector there are many businesses who once they adopt for example the real living wage institute that in their own supply chains those forces are far more powerful large organizations who improve their own supply chains quality by adopting forms of conditionality that's a really powerful lever as consumers I think we can do our bit we can do more of it more have more of an impact when we're in organized campaigns and when we associate with other stakeholders in who are interested in fair work. Very good time for one last question as always more questioners than we have time. So thank you very much Patricia for your comments just to raise that in South Africa they are requiring businesses to report the wage gap between the highest and lowest within their organization so that it's transparent to see that and they are saying that the bottom end is going up because the top end wants to go up and it needs to link back I'm sorry I'm struggling I can't hear you I'm sorry my comment was that in South Africa they're requiring businesses to report that wage gap and they're seeing quite a dramatic impact through that transparency that it's creating with businesses. My question is how far do you think Edinburgh's decision to become a living wage space has consequences for the quality of jobs within Glasgow? I don't know the answer to that I think we would need to look at the composition of the Edinburgh and Glasgow economies to get a sense of how much of a difference that will make. As I said earlier it quite important parts of the third sector and parts of the private sector have already been lifted to the real living wage so for example funding of social care in Scotland is funded at a labour cost equating to the real living wage so that has picked up people across the country who provide social care services but I don't know how that will work out. There is I suppose behind your question there is clearly at some levels of extrapolation an issue about where bad jobs go so if you improve the quality of work in certain locations do you then spread out poor quality work to somewhere else? Do we offshore poor quality work? Do we actually make it more difficult and that's an argument which has been common when we discuss things like the gig economy when we talk about the gig economy in the UK we worry about it as being a problem but actually for parts of the world access to that economy although it might be heavily exploitative is an improvement on other employment opportunities so at some kind of existential level we do need to ask questions about how we can balance out commitments to our own citizens when it comes to the delivery of fair work alongside citizens elsewhere in the world but you could extrapolate in terms of supply chains you could say that businesses need to be encouraged not just to care about their own direct workers or their own immediate supply chain but they have to think about what kind of consequences they have elsewhere that's something that's come up in the sustainability debate when businesses think about their environmental footprint and take responsibility for the health and well-being and environmental impact of their broader supply chain so yeah it's a tricky one I don't know the answer to the Glasgow Edinburgh thing. Right I think we've had we've had a lot of questions a lot of answers and a lot of thoughts I'd like to now ask the vote of thanks to be given by Professor Lindsay Farmer who's professor of law at Glasgow University and is also the vice president and is also the vice president of publications and conferences for the British Academy. Thank you thank you very much so first of all on behalf of the British Academy I'd like to thank Patricia for an extremely interesting and stimulating talk exactly the kind of fresh thinking the engagement with social problems they bring together academic ideas and reflecting on practical issues that the forefront of the kind of work that we do. So thank you Patricia for the talk thank you for engaging with the questions even as it's getting late in the evening and thanks also obviously to the audience for coming out tonight and for those who are listening on Zoom and also secondly like to thank the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow for organizing the event and for partnering with the British Academy in hosting tonight's event. It's been wonderful to to be able to have such an event to to bring people out on an evening a cold evening like this in March and so so thanks to you all for attending on behalf of the British Academy.