‘Full employment’, for so long considered an unreachable relic of a bygone age, is back on the agenda. That it is once again part of economic and political debates is testament to the UK’s remarkably strong employment performance in recent years. A record-high employment rate is something few people would have thought possible this soon … Continued

Inevitably, discussion of employment tends to focus on individuals. But this means that an understanding of how work – and the income that it brings – is shared across different types of households can be lost. During the 1980s and early-1990s employment became increasingly polarised in society, with increasing concentrations of workless single or couple … Continued

The story on pay is well-established but other aspects of job quality are less routinely measured. Therefore, in this note we return to some commonly-used broad measures of job security and stability, in particular to understand developments over the past two decades and how experiences have differed across genders and the generations.

While there is some consensus around the merits of pursuing full employment, there is no widely agreed definition of what constitutes ‘full’. Nor have we heard much on quite how any given target might be achieved. In this briefing– which marks the launch of a major piece of research on the topic which will conclude before … Continued

There was a time when some looked to the US model – in which out-of-work benefits are less readily available, time-limited and significantly less generous – for answers to the problem of extensive European levels of worklessness. This was particularly the case during the so-called ‘tough love’ era of the 1990s. The reforms of this … Continued