Podcasts

NB: Do you want to start by just telling me a little bit about your journey into academia, how you chose your path? 

MS: I graduated from my undergraduate degree into a recession, a graduate labour market recession, so I did a master's degree in the - basically the bit of my degree undergraduate degree that I'd enjoyed the most, which was called Industrial Relations, often these days called Employment Relations. I was looking for post-graduation jobs, and a job came up as a research associate. And I thought, yeah, that's a good use of my skills. So, I went off and did that, really enjoyed it, didn't have any kind of assumption that there would be other jobs in the labour market at that point. But of course, 1997 was up and coming, and so there was a political change in the air, and quite a lot of funders had become quite interested in investing in work and employment. So, I actually saw a job advertised at Cardiff as a researcher, fixed term researcher. And if you remember, the new Labour government's agenda was really about education and work. Those were the two of the really important things. So, there's a whole lot of funding for higher education and a whole lot of funding in my area of research around work and employment. Eventually, there was a requirement of one of my contract renewals that I registered for a PhD, which I did. The writing was a challenge. I hated it until one of my friends said, “why don't you see it as practice for writing a book?” Because I was like, well, why am I writing this long form thing? In my field, articles are absolutely - nobody cares about long form anything. They only really care about your articles. And a friend of mine sort of really helped me reframe that as like, this is practice. Because if you're able to do this, you could then write a book. And that actually indeed turned out to be true.  

NB: I was going to ask you about your book, funnily enough, I was going to ask you about it later, but since you brought it up, it's called What do We know and what should we do about the future of work? The book provides a bit of an overview of paid employment in the UK, examining why we work, how we work and the future of work, the changing demographics and the introduction of modern technologies. And that's a really salient point, currently with AI. So, what are your big ideas of what the future of work will look like?  

MS: So, the argument in that book - that book was always intended to be primarily for a practitioner audience, a policy audience specifically. So, the argument I make in that book is, if the future of work is determined only by your bosses’ interests, you have every right to be anxious about that. You know, it's not at all surprising that you would be worried about what that might mean for you as a worker. And so what I argue based on deep knowledge of the field, and particularly how things work in other countries, is that when the future of work is negotiated through institutional regulation, usually collective bargaining - but not always - some countries have more government led processes than collective bargaining - then actually it's less anxiety inducing for workers because through their representative organisations, usually trade unions, they've had a say in how the implementation of various technologies work in their workplace. And we've got lots of evidence from lots and lots of countries that all of the big changes over the last hundred years or so work better. There's a better acceptance from workers if these processes are negotiated, how it's done, what skills people need support for, people who have skills that are no longer useful. So, there's been a lot of work over the years on the sort of de-industrialization of Western Europe, and what happened to those workers who had all those industrial skills. And in countries where there was a coordinated and structured and government involved, but employer and union led response to those, there have been generally better outcomes for those workers. So, some of them have been able to be reskilled. Some of them have gone through employment support, some of them have retired or gone on to disability support, etc. so the outcomes tend to be much better for societies where those things are negotiated. So, it's not just better for individual workers. It's actually better for us as a society as well. And so, we've got lots and lots of evidence that this is an incredibly effective way of managing changes at work, at lots and lots of different changes over the last hundred years. If you think about the last hundred years of work and how that's changed, those changes are generally more effectively implemented when we negotiate them. And that's the main argument of that book.  

NB: When you and I chatted briefly before our interview, you mentioned the policy space. Can I ask, just for the uninitiated, what do you mean by the policy space? And why do you think it's important to understand how policymakers think, not just what they do?  

MS: It's a good question. I my field has always been incredibly policy oriented, and the big research centres in the UK, have always been very engaged with policy makers. So, it's sort of in my bones. I came into academia at a point that impact, as we might now call it, was becoming a key part of the agenda of what academics might want to think about doing. So, what I mean by that is essentially two groups - policy politicians and policy makers, civil servants, essentially people whose job it is to implement policies. And politicians often use work and labour markets as a very politicised space. They whip up either good feelings or bad feelings in their electorates about the risks and the…so when they talk about migration, they often talk about jobs. When they talk about housing, they often talk about jobs aren't paying enough for people to afford housing. There are all sorts of ways in which politicians talk about work, often in really quite ill-informed ways, and often in ways that are actively against the evidence. 

NB: Wilfully. 

MS: Absolutely, for political ends. And, you know, they're politicians and that's what they do. There are then some politicians who want to understand that better because they want to make changes in, you know, the number of jobs, the quality of jobs, whatever. So, there's a job of work to do there, talking to politicians about what the evidence actually is and what we know works and those kinds of things. So, we've had a big period of that at UK level, with a new Employment Rights Act, and politicians really trying to understand what they're trying to do in that space and then thinking through, well, how do we, what levers do we have? How do we deliver that? So, I've been very involved, talking to politicians as that bill has been developed and subsequently become an act. Now it's an act, it falls to the civil servants to deliver it, and civil servants will adopt whatever brief you give them, and these days, there are not that many people who understand how labour markets work. It's not something that many university degrees cover. And so, they're very interested in – well, if we designed a policy in this particular way, what do we know about its effectiveness? Or what do we know from other countries about how it works, and those kinds of things. So again, right now I'm in the space where I'm talking to UK policymakers, civil servants who are trying to design mechanisms that will now deliver the intentions set out in the Employment Rights Act. And they are again, relatively ill equipped. They don't have many paradigms for understanding how people and institutions and the economy and society all interact in that space. So, there's a big work for people who do understand that, of whom I'm one, but only one, to kind of help them understand that.  

NB: And how do you go about doing that? How do you go about not influencing their thinking, but how do you go about navigating those relationships? 

MS: So Scottish Government has always been very open to that. I used to work a lot at EU level because EU, the European Union was the main forum that was thinking about how to regulate good, more and better jobs is their mantra. They want more and better jobs across Europe. So, I used to do a lot of work at EU level. Obviously since 2020 that stopped and that was a driver for me thinking about coming to Scotland. It wasn't the only driver, but it was a key driver because the Scottish Government has taken the idea of fair work very seriously. UK Gov has been very, very closed for the last fifteen years or so. So, at UK gov level we've had to kind of build-up that engagement and it's taken a bit longer for the civil servants. Obviously, it's a bigger scale as well. So one of the things I took advantage of was opportunities that I already had; links I already had, and I had good links with a think tank called the Resolution Foundation who are thinking very hard about some of these questions. And so, I took advantage of that. And I said, you know, I'm here, you're writing about the same things as I am. Could we link up? And I was very fortunate that they asked me to take a secondment for three months last year, went down to London for three months, worked in their offices, really got to see how that policy making worked. And then from there, we've been able to together, really build up those connections in the areas that we've needed to.  

NB: And you mentioned the Scottish Government being more open than the UK government. First of all, what exactly do you mean by that? And second of all, there must be other key differences. What are they?  

MS: So, there are lots of differences. What do I mean by open? I mean easier for people of all kinds, including academics, to contact them, to tell them about their experiences of lots of different policy areas. So, one of the ways that manifests is a much, much more deeply embedded assumption that you'll consult on laws and policies. That's written into Scottish governance in a way that it's not in Westminster government - governance, but also, it's a smaller country. You know, people kind of like know each other. A lot of these people are very, you know, they're in the same rooms when they're talking about work and employment as they are about social poverty, as you know, whatever it is. So, there's these networks of people that are well known. I think it's also - there's also, because the Scottish Civil Service is much smaller, there's long been baked in an assumption that they can't do it all themselves. And so, they have to draw on the expertise that's more widely available. And they've been much more open about being very, very proactive about that. In the specific area of fair work that came out of the 2014 independence discussions and some of the policy initiatives around that - and the commitment of the SNP to fair work - and the fact that the SNP has then since then been either dominating coalition or in power, has really centered that for them. They've really taken that fair work agenda forward and thought really hard about how do you try and regulate things when some, you know, an area like fair work, where some of the things that, some of the levers that you might have are devolved, but a lot of them aren't. And they've thought very hard about how to use the levers they do have in that space, which has led to some quite innovative thinking about how you use public sector procurement, for example, to spread fair work ambitions. You know, that's relatively innovative thinking, and it comes from the fact that they don't have control over a lot of other levers which are reserved issues. So, some specificity is about the specifics of Scotland as a country being relatively small, relatively densely populated in the central belt, but also some specificities about the politics of Scotland.  

NB: And when that new thinking is going on, is it a collaborative process between academia and policy and as an extension of that question, how do the two worlds integrate? Because they're very different, right? And are there clashes and how do you navigate those?  

MS: I think I've gained greater insight to that in the last couple of years. And yes, I think it is pretty collaborative, certainly in Scotland. So, there are lots of spaces that I'm now in where you can see how politicians and policy makers are understanding some of the technical detail of the kind of stuff that I research. So, I sit, for example, as one of the very few social scientists on the Scottish Science Advisory Council, and we have senior civil servants regularly come and ask us for reports on various things. And so, we are using our expertise to pull together a group of experts who can then write a report that then goes directly onto the desk of the relevant minister. So yes, that is quite collaborative. Your second question about where are the tensions - there are tensions, I think for me personally, there's always the tension of the speed at which they move - is very different from the speed at which we move. 

NB: In what way? 

MS: So, politicians and policy makers tend to want very rapid response. So, weeks. Maybe months. But academics find that quite challenging because of all the other things we do apart from our research, that's not a huge problem. It means sometimes you have to say no, or you have to sort of create a team and then let the team get on with it. And you can just coordinate the team or whatever. There are ways around that. There's then a sort of second challenge, which I've kind of got over in the last few years, which is the assumption that as academics, we tend to be trained, that we only talk about our expertise, whereas non-academics of all kinds often want us to talk quite generally about things that we know about. I've become much more relaxed about that. As academics we tend to go, oh no, I don't know about that. You know, I only know about this tiny area. I think, you know, yes, I can, I can pull together some quick evidence on the economic effects of collective bargaining, for example, which is something I did for the Department of Health and Social Care in UK Gov last week, because I do know where to find that literature. I'm not a labour economist, but I can kind of make the key points and I can kind of summarise it. And then if they want to go to the papers where they actually understand the labour economics, I'll give them all the references and stuff. So that's a really good example where I'm not a labour economist, I think even a few years ago I might have said, oh, I'm not really a labour economist, I'm not really the person to speak to. But actually, with a couple of hours work, I can pull together a sensible fifteen hundred words summarising some of that. So, they're now going away, they're going to digest it, and then they're going to come back. And if they come back with technical questions, I sure as hell will put them in touch with my colleagues who are labour economists, because that really is then the limits of my knowledge.  

MS: So really, there's no special circumstance. There's no magic wand to these high stakes relationships. It's just like any other working relationship with an external or third-party partner. You just over time, learn to compromise and to pick your battles and to and to be openminded with your thinking.  

MS: Yeah. And I'm lucky. I've never had a circumstance where an external funder has requested a change in, for example, the presentation of some data or the narrative that's constructed around some data or asked me to hide any data or anything like that. And I know that can sometimes happen. Generally, not in this kind of area that's more qualitative social science, where those narratives are kind of up for debate anyway. That's what we do as academics. That's what politicians do in their particular way, so I've never had that. But I have often thought about what I would do in those circumstances and I'm clear about my own boundaries, what I would change and what I wouldn't and under what conditions. But in my experience, it never comes to that because there's always so much more that goes in before you ever get to that point. You know at the inception meeting how wedded they are to a particular finding and there are plenty of points there where you can either walk away if you need to, or actually just shape their expectations about what is and isn't possible to say from whatever data they're asking you to collect or, or to analyse or whatever.  

NB: We talked about labour earlier on, and the 1997 focus on employment. Labour is now proposing significant employment reform. Again, how do you think they can make these proposed changes stick?  

MS: It's going to be really challenging. The political decision that was made was to roll up all of these changes into one enormous act. And the result of that was it took quite a long time to get through Parliament. So, there's already been nearly a year and a half, two years of parliamentary process going on to get this bill through Parliament. It's inevitably contested because anything to do with work and employment will always be contested. What we've now got is a clear set of intentions, but relatively little work on the delivery plan, but really quite a lot of work to do there. And many of the things, I mean, everything will be delivered because, you know, if it's in statute, it gets delivered. But the quality with which it's designed and thought through and developed will be quite variable across many of the different clauses of this act. And so, there'll still be work after that to actually shape it and deliver it. Now that that could be really positive, but where I think there's, a real risk is that you might end up with various bits of the act sort of working against each other and not kind of coherently joined up. So, at the moment I'm spending quite a lot of time with civil servants to understand, to develop, and then for them to understand what their theory changes. So why we're doing these things have the effects that you want to try and get in the labour market. And then a final step, which is starting to emerge, which is how do we think all of this will add up so that all of these theories of change is about the different bits of this act, then join up into one big set of changes that don't work against each other, and that can actually really start to improve things for workers, no matter who they are in the labour market, the most vulnerable, some of the most vulnerable, through to some people who already have good terms and conditions of work. Some of that thinking still needs to be done in the civil service. And it is being done. And I think that's good. But it's interesting to me that it's only at this stage that we really start to get into the weeds of those kinds of things. And I think that's a function of the act being so enormous. If it was a simpler act, some of that work would have been done as it was going through Parliament. It was just too big to, to do all in one go.  

NB: And forgive me if I'm not picking this up, but how do you stop acts like these being dismantled by subsequent governments? 

MS: You can’t. So, any government can come in with a statutory agenda to do whatever it likes, so in that sense, there'll always be a see-saw effect in employment law, but employment law is only one way of regulating work and employment. So, what I study is the bit after it becomes law. So how it actually gets operationalised by the social partners, by employers, by workers, and how it actually starts to become something that's so taken for granted that actually getting rid of it is not on the political agenda. So, the minimum wage is a really good example. We were very worried when we were introducing the national minimum wage, that another government could come in with a different flavour and just undermine it. Actually, by the time that happened, the minimum wage was so embedded in how the regulation of work and employment works in the UK that actually it would have been very difficult for that coalition government to just completely dismantle it. So, the answer is you get it embedded as quickly as possible, and then you try and demonstrate that there's benefits to workers and to society and to employers, and to everyone. You create real value within the electorate.  

NB: It becomes impossible to dismantle.  

MS: It's never impossible but it certainly becomes politically more difficult. And we have seen reform, for example, today say that they would try and change the national minimum wage, the functioning of the national minimum wage. And if they had a majority government, they could do that, but they would then face… It's been quite interesting to look today at like, who's come out and said, actually, I'm not sure that's a great idea because you'd expect the trade union congress to come out and say, that's not a great idea. They have done obviously, but actually some employers, organisations have also said, you know, we're really not convinced this is a great idea. So, the politics of that is really what I'm interested in - how do you get those institutions embedded so that they become almost taken for granted?  

NB: So, I'm taking a couple of steps back with this question. But just as you mentioned Reform there, it just put me in mind of the potential differences in the policy makers that you end up working with throughout your career. Every time there's a change in government, you could be working with a whole new set of people with a whole different set of values. And that could be for better or worse. And so, you could end up all of a sudden in a really challenging situation where you're working with people who are difficult to work with for a variety of reasons. How would you prepare - like what if a party, any party whose values went against your own personal values to such a significant degree that (it) would make your job sort of - would there become a point where that would be really difficult for you personally?  

MS: Yes. And I think Reform probably is for me personally, an example. I think it's very unlikely that even at this stage that Reform would be in a majority in a government. So, they as a minority partner, then it always depends on who has what. Portfolios and work and employment is usually so important that the dominant party definitely does want to keep charge of it. Like defence is another one that is so important that the bigger party wants to keep that for itself. But yes, there are definitely questions to ask. What I think actually we've seen, slightly surprisingly, so if I go back twenty years, I thought that by the time we would be talking to a government that wasn't Labour, that we would be talking about labour market policies, but the evidence of what the benefits are for business. So, I was working at the time a lot on apprenticeship policy, for example, and I thought that we would then pivot away from talking about the social benefits for young people of getting good jobs, good work experience, good training. The social mobility aspects, which all sort of appeal to a Labour kind of government. And I thought we would be talking far more about, well, there are also benefits to business and there are societal benefits and what have you. What we actually found was a shift away from politicians being interested in any of this. So it wasn't that they were actively kind of needing different kind of tone of message. It’s just academics weren't in the rooms at that point, which was interesting, and I don't think would necessarily be the case in every change of political flavour. And then there was a period where it was very difficult to get to talk to politicians or civil servants about these things. It wasn't impossible. Covid and of course, the labour market crises of Covid lockdowns started to change that a bit. But it was notable that that wasn't mainly where we were talking. That said, almost always somewhere in the world there is somebody who wants the evidence about this stuff. So, the EU has always had work, you know, labour markets work, employment as a key objective, so, you know, even if you're working in the UK, there's nothing to stop you going and talking to Brussels and colleagues there. Or you can just go back to your office and write your theory book or whatever, you know. So, there's always options in academia. And I think that's been very interesting for me. I didn't always see that actually, sometimes this is just a bit of a pause where I can write something that's a bit more abstracted, more theoretical, and you know, that will be valued by my field, by my academic colleagues, and that's a valuable thing to do as well.  

NB: You're an optimist by the sounds of it.  

MS: One has to be an optimist in social policy. I'm an optimist because work can be really horrible for a lot of people. But good work is really beneficial for a lot of - for almost everyone. Being a long way from the labour market is often a very isolating experience for people who find themselves in that situation. It's highly associated with poor mental health as a spiral. So, it's not just causality running in one direction. Having bad labour market experiences is incredibly detrimental to young people's long-term outcomes. So, we can do things to make better jobs. I mean, we know what works. So, so yeah, let's be optimistic about that.  

NB: Finally, and quickly for the researchers. What is the piece of advice that you would give people who might be entering the space of working with not just external policymakers, but partners in general?  

MS: I think academia has changed in the sort of 25 years or so that I've been in academia, and that's partly because there are more people doing PhDs. So, there's more competition in the labour market in those early stages. And that makes things very different from when I was entering this profession, but also very different from when most people who are now in senior positions were entering the labour market. And I think it's really important that we attend to that, because what worked for us is almost certainly not necessarily what's going to work for them. So, the idea of advice is often a bit difficult to capture. And I certainly wouldn't presume to know what it feels like in their shoes. That said, I think there's always some disciplines, but also some individual researchers who want to explain the broader relevance of whatever their field is to groups outside academia. And that might be the general public, it might be politicians, policymakers, it might be schoolchildren, you know, it can be all sorts of people. And I think we have a real privilege that we do have some space to do that. And our institutions do value it. And that opens a space to kind of work out what that looks like for you. So, I always say to colleagues, you know, not everyone is expected to do impact work. There's no expectation that everyone will be working in this space. But for the people who do, those kind of early conversations and building up that understanding of how do you, how do you really communicate with people who are not lost in the weeds of the really nerdy technical jargon and, phrasing and, data that you might, because you're an expert on this and how do you kind of step back from that and explain it to your grandmother or a taxi driver or anyone else who's asking?  

NB: Or a podcast host. 

MS: Or podcast host indeed, and I think that's useful practice. I mean, you know, explaining it to a seven-year-old is always, you know, if they're willing to listen, if you can get that right. My goodness me, you can explain it to anyone. 

NB: Thank you very much for chatting with us today, Mel. It's been a really fascinating conversation. 

MS: Pleasure. Thank you.