Newyddion

Young people are leading a growing movement against low pay and precarious work

Strikes have taken place at McDonald’s and TGI Friday’s restaurants across the UK in recent months. These strikes are the first of their kind in the UK, instigated by a new generation of trade union members fighting for better pay and fairer working conditions.  At the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and…

UK Government Revises National Statistics on Trade Union Membership in Response to WISERD Research

Rhys Davies reveals how official figures have under-estimated the presence of trade unions within UK workplaces over many years. This morning, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published its latest estimates for trade union membership in the UK based upon data from the Labour Force Survey.  Today’s figures reveal that 6.2 million…

Trade Union responses to the changing world of work

WISERD researcher Dr Helen Blakely is working with UNI Global Union to identify trade unions’ responses to the changing world of work from around the world. This work is being presented at UNI Global Union’s World Congress in June 2018, the largest single global union gathering in the UK in 2018. Here they outline some…

TGI Friday’s staff go on strike for fair pay and fair tips

Continuing with research into current trade union activity, WISERD researcher Wil Chivers reports from a day spent in London last Friday, as TGI Friday’s staff go on strike for the first time in Covent Garden and Milton Keynes. Another week, another strike. There is definitely something growing here. Hot on the heels of the UK’s…

Dr Sioned Pearce awarded ESRC New Investigator funding

Dr Pearce’s successful research grant will fund the WISERD-based research project ‘Youth unemployment and civil society under devolution: a comparative analysis of sub-state welfare regimes’.  The £211,000 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council will fund a two-year project examining divergences in civil society responses to youth unemployment (policy) in the four, devolved nations…

McDonald’s workers strike for the second time on International Workers’ Day

Following last week’s WISERD blog post about the 2017 McDonald’s strike, Wil Chivers and Helen Blakely report from the picket lines in London at the UK’s second McStrike. Until now our research on the McStrike has been at a distance. We’ve followed the Twitter conversation and although we’ve got a good sense of what’s been…

How the UK’s first #McStrike was tweeted

In September 2017, McDonald’s workers went on strike for the first time in the UK. Researchers at WISERD analysed the social media conversation that surrounded the ‘McStrike’ at the time. With a second McStrike scheduled for the 1st May Wil Chivers, Helen Blakely and Steve Davies outline key findings from this research. Young workers unite…

Does social enterprise mean business?

The financial crisis has been identified as the catalyst for the tremendous growth seen in social enterprise – organisations that have social purpose but rely on the functioning of the market to maintain long term viability. Social enterprises are thought to have grown from an estimated 5,000 in the late 1990s to an estimated 70,000…

Tracking progress on the government’s disability and employment commitments

  WISERD’s Professor Melanie Jones blogs for The Conversation with Professor Victoria Wass, Cardiff University. Disability affects the lives of millions of people in the UK. With about one in six working-age people currently reporting some kind of disability, around 70% are either working, looking for work or want to work. Good quality work is…