The Paula Principle

Paula at work

I’m aiming to build up examples of the PP in operation at the workplace – at all levels.

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More

Working Women’s Charter

Exactly 40 years A Working Women's Charter was published.   You can see a good TedX talk on it by Pamela Cox.   On Saturday, a group which admirably aims to provide policy debates with a historical perspective, History  & Policy, ran a meeting to reflect on  how many  of the original Charter's demands had been met, and what a new Charter might look like. The first Charter's 10 demands were (in abbreviated form - I looked for an online version of the more detailed list, but in vain): Equal pay Equal occupational opportunities Equal access to education and training Equal working conditions Equal legal rights Free childcare More paid…
Read More

Low pay, part-time and job satisfaction

We seem to be getting a flurry of useful reports just now.  Last week it was the turn of the CIPD to publish very solid one on Pay progression, focussing on the barriers for the low-paid to moving up the ladder.  It has a very strong Foreword from Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman (sic) of the John Lewis Partnership.  He argues that our low pay reflects a productivity problem, and notes how many low-paid people have no clear paths to show them how they might progress. The CIPD use the three  categories of low-pid worker which were developed originally by the Resolution Foundation, and which have proved themselves sound: - Stuck are those who…
Read More

Ageing and skills: how and why we are losing out

A powerful new report, The Missing Million, has just been published by PRIME, the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise.  It makes the case for enabling far more older people to stay in work.  Many elements of the case are quite familiar:  the challenge  to us all of an ageing population; the need for individuals to assure themselves of a decent income in old age;  the intrinsic value of work, e.g. in the social contacts it brings;  and so on.  But there is a wealth of factual analysis and insights to back it up, some of them quite surprising (to me at least).  Apparently people in the UK on average believe that…
Read More

Pensions and skills

Pensions don't grab everyone.  When I was a youngish researcher, about 35 years ago, I did a study of employee trustees of pension schemes, and how much influence they had on the way the schemes were managed.  I got quite into this, since it seemed (and seems) to me really interesting that there were employees formally involved in the management of huge sums of capital (even then, in the early 1980s, the funds were worth many billions).  "Pension fund socialism' was a prospect raised by the management guru of the time, Peter Drucker.  In fact I got so into the topic that my friends used to make 'switch-it-off' gestures; years…
Read More

Fair play

Chwaere Teg means  'fair play' in Welsh - a good title for an organisation that is doing excellent work promoting equality issues in Wales.  I was in Newport last night giving a lecture for them on Paula (and chapeau to them - they aim to alternate female and male speakers in their lecture series, though the audience was 90% female). We had quite some discussion on careers.  Chwaere Teg produced last year an excellent report, A Woman's Place, on women in the Welsh workforce.  Welsh women are upping their learning - 55% have recently taken part in adult education or training, compared to just 39% in 1996, and a full…
Read More

Discrimination and networks

In the last couple of days I've done one of my last PP interviews, and had a lively discussion with members of the NHS Employers Forum.  Both brought up the question of the effects of networks on people's career prospects, and how difficult it is to draw the line between networks which are part of 'normal' working lives, and those which serve to exclude women. My interviewee, Olivia, is 30ish and works for a global branding agency.  She told me how in her first years there a middle-aged manager had put together a group of younger male colleagues, who went whisky-drinking together.  Olivia saw this as a rather desperate attempt…
Read More

Citizen’s Income and its relevance

I've just finished reading Money for Everyone by Malcolm Torry.  It's an exhaustive, and quite exhausting, account of the case for a Citizen's Income - a basic unconditional payment to be made to every citizen -  man, woman and child.  A simpler version of the case is available from www.citizensincome.org.uk. The CI would bring together our current tax and benefits systems - if they can be described as such.  Torry goes into gruesome detail on the complexities of the benefits system.  He shows how strong the incentives are for people to cheat.  The complexity and perversities of the 'system' are such that anyone with an unstable earnings record is likely to…
Read More

Home working

I've been off-blog for a while attending to family business, of which the central feature was scattering my mother's ashes in her native Kincardineshire.   She was 98 when she died last year and ready to go, so there was no sadness.  We (me and my family, my brother and his family) used the opportunity to hook up with some cousins and second cousins whom we had either never met, or not seen much of.  My grandmother had 12 siblings, and my mother as a result had 64 cousins, so the family tree is a bit complex.  We filled in some gaps, but principally we just enjoyed exchanging family stories.…
Read More

Penelope Fitzgerald, late careers and low pensions

For my book group (all-male  - apparently book groups are powerful examples of our homophiliac tendencies, even more so for women than men) last night we had read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring.  Everyone had enjoyed it, laughed at it, and marvelled at Fitzgerald's apparent capacity to get under the skin of Russian society without ever having been there.  (None of us knew much about Russia, but the descriptions were thoroughly convincing to us and to the critics who put the novel on the Booker shortlist.) Fitzgerald had a remarkable personal history.  She was the granddaughter of the Bishop of Lincoln and grew up surrounded by uncles and aunts of diverse talents. She…
Read More

Needed: a new vocabulary of time

  I've just read Guy Standing's The Precariat, which came out a couple of years ago.  Standing, a former ILO official, documents the global growth in the numbers  of people working in insecure conditions, with few or no contractual rights.    He builds a very powerful argument, though to my mind he throws slightly too many babies into the bathwater, and it becomes difficult to see where the boundaries are that divide the precariat from the rest.  Women, of course, form the bulk of those who work in these conditions, especially in poorer countries but also in wealthier ones.  They have always been part of what used to be called the…
Read More