Political debate on immigration currently includes very little forward thinking: the current government is desperately trying to make its policies on asylum seekers work; and both parties have pledged to bring down net migration, which has recently been at record levels. Immigration looks like being the hottest topic in the parties’ 2024 election campaigns. But immigration isn’t a short-term election issue. It is integral to how the UK delivers its economic goals and runs key services and industries including health and social care, food production and construction. What will happen to levels ..read more

Ashley Community Housing (ACH) is a social enterprise working to integrate refugee and migrant communities. We employ more than 100 staff in Bristol, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry of whom more than half have relevant direct lived experience. Access to work is an important part of the journey for many of our clients. But what sort of work? The flow of refugees and migrants into the UK has become a controversial topic in recent years. Brexit, the Illegal Migration Act, the Rwanda plan and predictions of a ‘hurricane’ of migrants have all created a ‘hostile environment’, obscuring attemp ..read more

The UK has experienced record numbers of immigrants in 2022: over 745,000 arrivals. Although the figure fell to 672,000 to the year ending June 2023, immigration was making big headlines in both the media and by the government. With a general election due before the end of 2024, and the Conservatives lagging significantly behind the opposition in opinion polls, the record figures have been used to show a section of the electorate why the government is making certain policy decisions. In May 2023, the government announced that from 2024 it will ban those international students studying taught M ..read more

Migration is an important part of the West Midlands story – it has reshaped Birmingham and the wider region and has made our communities among the most diverse and dynamic in the UK, if not Europe. We have a rich history of diversity from the post-war industrial boom in the area in the 1950s and 60s when much-needed workers from the Commonwealth countries made their way here. Today the makeup of the West Midlands is still constantly changing as we continue to welcome refugees and migrants. Ours is a young and multicultural region with a hyper-diverse language profile. Around 108 different lang ..read more

This issue of Futures of Work could scarcely be better timed. Migration is about as high on the UK’s political agenda as an issue can be, in part because of the recently released figures showing new peaks in migration but also because of its status as one of the key sources of tension between different factions of the Conservative party. This ferment has bubbled over in recent months into open rows, ministers’ resignations and a high-profile Supreme Court judgement on the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, a plan which the current Home Secretary has refused to deny calling ‘ba ..read more

Turkey has become the world’s largest refugee-hosting country, with 3.7 million Syrians under temporary protection and over 320,000 refugees and asylum seekers of other nationalities. There are 2.2 million Syrians of working age (between 15 and 65 years old) but only one per cent of them have been working in the formal sector due to bureaucratic difficulties in accessing the labour market, insufficient legislation and administrative hurdles. Syrians who suffer labour discrimination are motivated more by push than pull factors and have formed more than 20,000 micro, small and medium enterprises ..read more

It is good to see Futures of Work back! In this first issue after the relaunch, the articles included address a range of different forms of labour market inequalities, with gender a particular focus in most of the pieces.   The changing world of work is being shaped by a whole range of factors, with the COVID-19 pandemic being just one of the most obvious. The current set of articles highlights a range of interconnected factors and conditions that are rarely jointly considered or researched because there is just too much to include, but which jointly sustain and reinforce gender, rac ..read more

The official inquiry into the UK government’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will not come to its conclusions for some time. In the meantime, we are reminded of our own pandemic experiences, such as those that followed the Prime Minister’s instructions on national television on 23 March 2020 to all but the most essential workers to ‘stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives’. As a result, our daily experiences of working dramatically changed. With that change came an imperative for managers, guided by HR colleagues, to adapt established policies and procedures to deal with the enforced ..read more

The longstanding underrepresentation of women at executive level is widespread, but particularly frustrating in those sectors that supposedly hold liberal values, such as the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). However, in 2018, after a series of high-profile appointments of women to Artistic Director and Chief Executive roles in UK arts organisations, I looked more closely and received a pleasant surprise: publicly subsidised arts organisations (PSAOs) across the UK had, collectively, appointed equal numbers of women and men at executive level. These PSAOs all receive regular subsidies f ..read more

While the nature of work has undergone significant changes and expanded economic opportunities, the labour market impacts have been accelerated by work arrangements that include remote work, gig work, freelancing, fly-in-fly-out work and a heightened dependence on digital technologies. These transformations have concurrently exacerbated labour force challenges. First, the accelerated uptake of digital transformation has necessitated new skills, demanded increased efficiency and intensified performativity pressures. Secondly, while gig and freelance work have afforded flexibility, this has come ..read more