What is a good job? Surely it must provide us with individual resources: money, security, acceptability, stimulation, personal development, flexibility, health protection, social interactions. It must protect us from the vicissitudes of life, such as illness, unemployment and retirement. It must also protect against the vicissitudes of society: wars, pandemics, economic upheaval, climate change, and demographic change. Individual well-being thus also depends on the jobs of others; high inequality puts the brakes on well-being.
Looking back at the past decades, good jobs for everyone have never been achieved. There have always been large differences between core and marginal workforces, people with and without jobs covered by social security, people with good, low and no income. Over time, new inequalities have occurred, while others have been successfully reduced.
In this lecture, Professor Allmendinger will discuss the major challenges of today: how does digitalisation, decarbonisation, demographic change and globalisation affect our jobs and employment trajectories? What is being done already - and what can be done?
About the Speaker
Professor Jutta Allmendinger is the president of the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre and a professor of educational sociology and labour market research at Humboldt University since 2007. She is also a senior fellow at the Centre for European Studies at Harvard University. Professor Allmendinger will look at the lecture will focus on what constitutes a good job, digitalisation and the labour force.
About the Lecture
This lecture series was endowed to commemorate the work of the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Modern Industrial Society (1973-2009). The first lecture was delivered in 2011 under the auspices of the British Academy by Sir Tony Atkinson on “Britain, Germany and Social Europe 1973-2020”. The series is now managed by NIESR, and takes place in alternate years in London and Berlin on a topic of public policy interest.