The Work Foundation

It's mostly a need for shifting skills and figuring out what skills will be amplified in a world of this technology transition.

So I think something that... aligned to that, in August, the Work Foundation published a survey of 1,001 UK senior business leaders, and 36% of them had cut entry-level roles for 16 to 24-year-olds in the past year.

But 43% said they had invested in AI or automation that reduced those entry-level roles, the entry-level roles that were available.

And another stat, which is weirder, 60% among employers with more than 250 staff.

There's something that came out from the Liberal Arts Foundation has recently done some research around insecure work and one of the findings from that report was that disabled workers are more likely to be in insecure work.

So around 23% of disabled employees are in insecure work compared to 18% of workers without a disability and the Work Foundation has done some research around this as well, kind of timing a similar kind of trend of disabled workers being stuck in secure work and perhaps having to trade sort of flexibility and security in their decisions.

that could make it pretty challenging.

But it's interesting about the employability, I don't think I've ever heard that phrase before, but yeah, supporting employers to kind of, yeah, support their workers.

There's going to be a tipping point.

And for our listeners, you might want to go back to a podcast from last season from Alice Martin from the Work Foundation when she introduced us to the UK Employment Rights Act because it's tried to codify and bring together a new standard for what decent work means in the context of changing work.

So that's a nice podcast to maybe refer back to if this has piqued your interest in thinking about how the UK is moving forward in this area.

Yes, that's Season 3, Episode 31, Do You Know Your Employment Rights? And I'd also direct people towards Season 3, Episode 2, Human Trafficking.

But that idea of smoothing income, and this is where I think businesses have quite an important role to play in terms of if they know there's known vulnerability and they're going to be under stress, actually finding a way to smooth incomes, to buffer their employees' income.

And I remember during the cost of living crisis that the Work Foundation did a really interesting piece of work where they asked businesses whether or not they were helping in some way people deal with their energy bills, etc., etc., So there's a sense in which that businesses are one of those institutions that also could support and help a process not descend into conflict because the costs of conflict on business activities and business operations must be enormous.

I mean, it would be the very last thing you need and want while you're trying to run a business.

Well, it was one of the first phrases the JF used during the course of the discussion was, conflict is costly.