Whose party? Whose interests? Childcare policy, electoral imperative and organisational reform within the US Democrats, Australian Labor Party and Britain’s New Labour

The US Democrats, Australian Labor Party and British Labour Party adopted the issue of childcare assistance for middle-income families as both a campaign and as a legislative issue decades apart from one and other, despite similar rates of female employment. The varied timing of parties’ policy adoption is also uncorrelated with labour shortages, union density and female trade union membership. However, it is correlated with two politically-charged factors: first, each party adopted childcare policy as their rate of ‘organised female labour mobilisation’ (union density interacted with female trade union membership) reached its country-level peak; second, each party adopted the issue within the broader context of post-industrial electoral change, when shifts in both class and gender-based party-voter linkages dictated that the centre-left could no longer win elections by focusing largely on a male, blue-collar base. Were these parties driven to promote childcare in response to the changing needs of their traditional affiliates (unions), or was policy adoption an outcome of autonomous party elites in search of a new electoral constituency? Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, this research analyses the correlates of policy adoption and the specific mechanisms through which party position change on the issue took place (e.g. legislator conversion versus legislator turnover). It finds that parties largely adopted the issue as a means to make strategic electoral appeals to higher-educated, post-materialist and in particular, female voters. However, the speed in which they were able to make these appeals (and hence, the time at which they adopted the issue) was contingent on the speed in which elites were able to reform their party’s internal organisation and specifically, wrest power away from both the unions and rank-and-file members in order to centralise decision making power on election campaigns, executive appointments and candidate selection processes into the hands of the leadership

Train in vain? Skills, tasks, and training in the UK labour market

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt pledged that measures in the budget would help break down barriers that stop people working. One issue is how to ensure we have the skills the economy needs. The UK has faced – and is facing – a change in the nature of work. Nye Cominetti, Rui Costa, Andrew Eyles, Kathleen Henehan and Sandra McNally present an analysis of how the skills needed in the labour market have changed over the past decades and how well placed our system of training and particularly on-the-job training is to help us adapt to these changes

Net zero transition to mean significant change for 1.3 million workers

The UK’s experience of structural change through deindustrialisation during the 1970s and 1980s drove up unemployment, concentrated among particular parts of the population, and left deep scars on some parts of the country. However, the net zero transition will have impact on jobs across the economy but is unlikely to follow the same path as these previous episodes of change. Molly Broome, Stefano Cellini, Kathleen Henehan, Charlie McCurdy, Capucine Riom, Anna Valero, and Guglielmo Ventura assess the likely scale – and nature – of labour market change brought on by the net zero transition over the next decade