About
Professor Lydia Hayes is a Principal Convenor (together with Prof Helen Stalford) of a groundbreaking new Research Centre that will launch in Spring 2025.
Lydia's research explores how employment law and welfare policy, as well as the regulation of public service provision, shapes the lives, livelihoods and life chances of people in low wage work. The focus of her work is on minimum labour rights, welfare entitlement, equality provisions, occupational regulation, trade union law, and the legal organisation of public services, especially adult social care. Lydia's research is co-produced with low wage workers, it blends rigorous analysis of statute, case law and regulatory text with data gathered through community writing methods, story-telling, animation, and narrative production.
Prior to joining Liverpool, Lydia was Professor and Head of Kent Law School and a Principal Investigator for Wellcome Trust. She has won awards for research excellence from the Socio-legal Studies Association (SLSA), Society of Legal Scholars (SLS), University of Bristol and Oxford University Press. Lydia has been a visiting scholar at RMIT, Melbourne and was awarded the first Journal of Law and Society Research Fellowship 2013-2016. She has previously worked at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, at the Transport and General Workers Union, at University of Bristol and at Cardiff University. Lydia is a Vice-President of the Institute of Employment Rights and a member of the Berkeley Centre for Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law. Her research has been funded by Leverhulme/British Academy, Wellcome Trust, ILO, Welsh Government, Journal of Law and Society, Wales TUC, UNISON Scotland, UNISON North West, GMB, All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Care, Oxfam UK, European Commission.