Research
As a professor of labour rights, I study (what I call) working people’s law – a tapestry of rights, duties and processes that are intrinsically connected to economic well-being, democratic participation, politics, social citizenship, and (perhaps surprisingly) public health. Terms and conditions of work have a strong influence over life expectancy, risks of mental illness, physical disability, and on our general health as individuals and across society. Where rights for working people fail or are ineffective, public health deteriorates. Most recently, I have been working with food banks and food pantries across Liverpool to build knowledge about how labour rights could better protect people from food insecurity.
Through my research I’m building a case for working people’s law, especially employment and welfare rights, to be reinvigorated and redesigned for the purposes of protecting health. This would make a strong contribution to social justice, to people’s enjoyment of life, to our national productivity, to our economic and social security. I am building evidence about how that might be achieved and why.
I’m also very interested in social care and its importance for communities and societies. My multi-award winning monograph Stories of Care: A Labour of Law, Gender and class at work (2017) argued that design of labour rights excludes care workers from effective protection and exposes them to a process I call ‘institutionalised humiliation’, through which care workers are persistently judged to be inferior labour market participants. Ive since written many papers and articles about the need to support improvements to the quality of care workers’ jobs and the positive impact this would have for the quality of care provided to older and disabled people in need of care and support. As a principal investigator for Welcome Trust on the project Social Care Regulation at Work, I worked with Dr Alison Tarrant and Dr Hannah Walters to establish that the regulatory law designed to ensure safe care provision in England, Scotland and Wales, is also a source of employment norms that are specific to the social care sector. Drawing on data gathered from care inspectors, care home managers and care workers we concluded that if social care regulation was understood more fully as a source of labour standards for the sector, care quality could be improved, and care workers could be better supported and rewarded.
I am gradually building the manuscript for a new monograph, which is about equal pay law. I advance the case for new forms of law to eradicate sex-based low pay and expand our ambitions for what the principle of equal pay ought to mean in the twenty-first century. I look at over one hundred years of campaigning and court decisions to demonstrate that removing discrimination from pay setting is too narrow an objective for equal pay law in contemporary context. I argue that new law is needed to tackle sex-based low pay. If working-class women in low waged work can achieve equal pay, they will achieve access to sufficient income through work, will enjoy working conditions that support good health, and will secure for themselves the fundamental starting point of equal pay for work of equal value, from which effective political voice can grow.