The Decent Work in Scotland Project

The UWS-Oxfam Partnership conducted, with support from the University of Warwick’s Institute for Employment Research, research on ‘decent work’. The objective of the project was to support and inform advocacy work around the policy objective of ‘decent work’. It did so by recording, documenting and analysing people’s opinions on what constitutes ‘decent work’ and by proposing what could be done to generate ‘more decent work’.

Five reports were published. The main report was ‘Decent Work for Scotland’s low-paid workers: a job to be done’. It was accompanied by a labour market assessment and articles in newspapers, campaign group blogs, magazines and academic outlets. Another four reports looked at what employers think about the concept of ‘decent work’, at the obstacles which people with criminal convictions face when looking for ‘decent work’, at the perceptions of young people of ‘decent work’, and at how ‘decent work’ is seen within Scottish local authorities. The first three of these reports were produced, like the main report, in 2016, and the report on local authorities in 2018.