News and Blog

WISERD Director Ian Rees Jones pays tribute to Julian Tudor Hart who passed away on 1st July.  It is a great sadness to hear the news of the death of Julian Tudor Hart.  Born in 1927, he studied medicine at Cambridge University and in London, graduating in 1952. Julian worked for 30 years as a…

Dr Peter Mackie, the Chair of WISERD’s housing research network, will today share findings from his research at an event on homelessness at Westminster. The panel discussion, ‘How can we tackle the homelessness crisis?’ is part of the Social Market Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)’s ‘Ask the Expert series’.  This event…

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…

Wales is in the process of developing a curriculum that is designed to transform the nature of teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools. The ‘Curriculum for wales’ – sometimes referred to simply as ‘Donaldson’ after the person who developed the proposals – is based on ‘ a brand new way of developing a…

Last Thursday I was invited to the French Senate, the second chamber, to contribute my thoughts on introducing territorial diversity into the French constitution, with a focus on drawing lessons from comparable European experiences.  The specific brief was to discuss how the UK government had managed to introduce Devolution almost two years ago. As with…

In 2017-18, a record number of people (1,575 in total) in the UK donated their organs after death, resulting in more than 5,000 life-saving or life-improving transplants. These figures, released by NHS Blood and Transplant, show numbers of deceased donors continue to rise in the UK. The 2017-18 figure was an 11% increase on the…

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…

Most of us are used to seeing crazy bargains when we go into the local supermarket, with items such as baked beans, bananas or milk being sold at a price that seems far below what they must cost to grow/make and sell. It’s a well-tried method – “loss leaders” are used to draw us into…

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…

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…