There is a recurring theme at Prime Minister’s Questions these days. The Leader of the Opposition asks about people living in poverty – unable to afford a decent place to live, reliant on food banks. In response, the Prime Minister talks about her Government’s strong record of getting people in to work and lambasts Labour for failing to celebrate record levels of employment.
To observers like me this can all feel a little like the old joke about two philosophers out for a walk. They see two neighbours, leaning out of their respective windows shouting at one another. Philosopher one asks philosopher two what this tells us about conflict and resolution in human society. “Oh” says philosopher two “they’ll never agree. You see, they are arguing from different premises.”
It is possible – indeed probable – that Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May are both right, on their own terms. We know a lot about things it is easy to count – how many people are in work, how many people are in poverty – but not enough about the grey areas in between. We don’t know how many people are in insecure work, unproductive work, work that robs them of their dignity and work that leaves them impoverished despite their best endeavours.
And because we don’t know these things the debate becomes borderline meaningless – from their different premises, the parties trumpet either the triumphs or the travesties of our modern labour market. The rest of us are left none the wiser.
As a professional engineer and a past president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (the first woman to have that role), I’m interested in the quality of work and employment available to engineers and technicians. It is easy enough to count how many new jobs there are in our sector, harder and more subjective to try to measure how ‘good’ those jobs are. This is necessary to broaden the conversation, identify common ground, and start designing pathways to achieve good work as the Fourth Industrial Revolution gains pace. That is why I am so proud to be Co-Chair of the Institute for the Future of Work, and feel very strongly about their new ‘Good Work Charter’.
Building on extensive engagement with economists, business, trade unions, health practitioners and polling of the public, this charter aims to define what ‘good work’ actually is. It provides employers and employees with a checklist of the ten principles of ‘good work’ – from pay to dignity to learning and development opportunities. This charter is a framework that provides all of us with a cool-headed, practical means to measure whether a new job is a good job.
The Institute for the Future of Work is also developing a tool by which we can measure the foundations that underpin good work at the macro level – so that we can say authoritatively whether the UK is creating more ‘good jobs’ or just more jobs.
Why does this matter? Firstly, we want to give government and opposition a shared premise for talking about employment. No more shouting the odds on selective measures of success. Secondly, we want this work to help shape industrial and employment strategy – particularly as we face together the challenges of automation.
Many jobs will be lost to smart machines in the coming decades, many will be created too. There was no such thing as a ‘social media manager’ twenty years ago. Now no brand can live without an army of them. We cannot predict what fresh roles and opportunities the next waves of innovation will bring. But we can build the tools to measure their worth and their value so that we can make decisions about how to boost ‘good jobs’ and reduce bad ones.
I’m an engineer. Engineers build tools that can objectively be said to either succeed or to fail. I know that politics is not always like that but I do believe passionately that if we value something we have to work out how to measure it. With the tools that we are developing at the Institute for the Future of Work we want to give governments of all stripes – and employers and employees alike – a shared premise of what ‘good work’ should look like so that we can all agree on whether policies are succeeding. What the policies should be that will drive that good work? Well, on that at least this engineer will happily leave the arguing to the politicians.
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