At the Dónal Nevin Lecture in Belfast, policymakers, academics, students, business representatives, trade unionists and members of civic society gathered to hear the Financial Times’ Associate Editor and columnist Sarah O’Connor reflect on the state of work.
In her keynote address, Good Jobs in a Changing World, O’Connor began from a simple but unsettling observation: the 2010s delivered a remarkable recovery in employment, but for many workers it was a recovery that felt joyless. The decade opened with acute anxiety about mass unemployment after the financial crisis. It ended with a different concern – that while jobs had returned, insecurity, low pay and weak voice had become defining features of working life.
That shift, she argued, explains why policy attention has moved from the quantity of jobs to their quality, and why “good jobs” now sit at the centre of debate in Britain and beyond. High employment on its own is not enough. Whether work provides adequate pay, predictable hours, security and a say at work matters profoundly for living standards, health and social cohesion. This, she suggested, is the backdrop to current reform agendas, including the Employment Rights Act in Great Britain and the proposed Good Jobs Bill in Northern Ireland.
O’Connor illustrated what poor-quality work looks like through reporting from a ready-meal factory. On the same production lines, doing the same tasks, permanent and agency workers lived entirely different working lives. Permanent staff had fixed schedules, occupational benefits and the ability to plan. Agency workers bore the volatility of just-in-time production. When orders were cancelled or machinery failed in the middle of the night, they were sent to sit in canteens without pay, waiting for lines to restart or for buses to run. Shifts might be confirmed only by text on the morning itself. The work was identical; the risk was not.
This, she argued, reflects a wider “twin-track” labour market in which insecurity and unpredictability are systematically concentrated among those least able to absorb them. For workers already close to the poverty line, variable hours and income make everyday life – paying rent, arranging childcare, buying a weekly travel pass – extraordinarily difficult. These are not simply lower-quality jobs; they are jobs that undermine the capacity to build stable lives.
The late 2010s, O’Connor noted, marked the point at which this disjuncture between high employment and fragile job quality began to attract sustained political and academic attention in the UK. The Conservative government’s Taylor Review acknowledged the spread of insecure work, while growing evidence linked poor-quality employment to worse physical and mental health. At the same time, policy turned decisively to lifting the wage floor through substantial increases in the National Living Wage.
Here she offered a nuanced assessment. The minimum wage has been one of the most successful labour-market interventions of recent decades, raising pay at the bottom with little sign of the mass job losses once predicted. But through the late 2010’s and 2020’s it has become the only lever being utilised to improve job quality. And higher wages introduced into a labour market with weak enforcement and limited collective institutions do not operate in isolation. Employers facing rising labour costs may seek adjustment elsewhere: through tighter scheduling, greater work intensity, expanded use of agency and platform labour, or shifting risk onto workers. Pay can rise, while insecurity simply mutates.
This is why, she argued, enforcement and worker voice are central. Without effective regulation, even basic legal standards can be routinely breached, as continuing evidence from sectors such as Leicester’s garment industry shows. And without collective representation, workers have little capacity to influence how firms respond to cost pressures, technological change or restructuring.
Looking ahead, O’Connor suggested that the least discussed but potentially most far-reaching elements of current reform concern voice and representation, including fair pay agreements and stronger collective institutions. Drawing on research from highly automated workplaces in Sweden, she described how co-determination and collective bargaining helped workers and management navigate technological change together, building trust and aligning productivity gains with pay and security.
The “joyless jobs recovery” of the 2010s, then, was not simply about low wages. It was about where risk sits in the modern economy, how insecurity is distributed, and what happens when employment grows faster than the institutions that make work fair, predictable and dignified. As O’Connor made clear in Belfast, the challenge is not just to create more jobs, but to ensure that that the labour market creates that people can build their lives around.