The
Working Lives Research Institute
is a major centre for research and teaching based at the London Metropolitan
University. The Institute undertakes socially committed academic and applied
research into all aspects of work and working lives, emphasising equality
and social justice and working for and in partnership with trade unions.
The Institute’s links with trade unionists, community and voluntary organisations, campaigns and progressive institutions are key to the development of its research programme. Research is undertaken and commissioned both locally and at European level and there are strong relations with European Institutions. It is currently working on six major EU-funded research projects: investigating how trade unions counter racism and xenophobia, how trade unions can represent workers in small firms, how British trade unions are using the government’s union learning funds, how women refugees in London move from volunteering to paid employment, how British labour market discriminations against refugees compare with discriminations experienced by visible minorities, and why older men are being pushed out of the labour market.
In February 2004 the Institute has 24 staff plus a further nine PhD students and 20 internal and external research associates. Its resources include the TUC Library Collections, the Women’s Library, the Centre for Trade Union Studies, the Centre for Equality Research in Business and the Centre for Environmental Protection. Staff members are: Professor Steve Jefferys, (Director), Professor Mary Davis, (Deputy-Director and Head of the Centre for Trade Union Studies), Fiona Colgan (Head of the Centre for Equality Research in Business), Dr Tim Strangleman (Institute Research Manager), Alison Gosper (Research Administrator), Dr Sian Moore (Senior Institute Researcher), Amar Dhudwar (Research Assistant), Dr Sonia McKay (Senior Research Fellow), Professor John Grahl, Dr Umut Erel (Research Fellow), Dr Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick (Senior Research Fellow), Dr Ali Tasiran (Principal Research Officer), Nigel Morter, Pat Hayes, Ian Read (Research Fellow), Bridget Henderson (Research Fellow), and Professor Anna Pollert. Ursula Huws is Visiting Professor at the Institute.
Umut is a Research officer for Working Against Racism. She has experience of research in the area of ethnicity, migration, gender relations and the labour market. Her PhD thesis concerned agency and subjectivity in the life stories of migrant women from Turkey in Britain and Germany (Cultural Studies Department, Nottingham Trent University).
Mary Davis is Professor of Labour History at London Metropolitan University where she heads the Centre for Trade Union Studies and is the Deputy Director of the Working Lives Research Institute. She has written, broadcast and lectured widely on women’s history, labour history, imperialism and racism.
Her published books include Comrade or Brother? a history of the British Labour Movement 1789-1951; Marxism & Struggle; Fashioning a New World: a history of the Woodcraft Folk and Sylvia Pankhurst: a life in radical politics.
She is an elected member of the TUC women's committee and serves on the national
executive of NATFHE (the University & College Lecturers' Union). She is
one of the founder members of the Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee.
Steve Jefferys is Director of the Working Lives Research Institute at London Metropolitan University where he has been Professor of European Employment Studies since July 2000. Previously he worked at Keele University and Manchester Polytechnic, and as a journalist, and after leaving the LSE in 1968 as a car worker. His PhD is from Warwick and his MSc (Computation) from UMIST.
Since becoming an academic he has had four books published: Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité at Work: Changing French Employment Relations and Management (2003); European Working Lives (edited with Frederik Mispelblom and Christer Thornqvist) (2001), Management, Welfare and Work in Western Europe: an historical and contemporary analysis, written with Mick Carpenter (2000), and Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler (1986).
Dr. Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick is Research Coordinator for the Working Lives Research Institute’s project on trade unions and racism (RITU). She is a former official of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), both based in Geneva, and is a former Equal Opportunities Research Officer of MSF in London.
She has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Warwick and specialises in European and international industrial relations, trade unions and equal opportunities. She is fluent in French and Dutch, speaks good German, and reads Italian and Spanish. She is joint secretary of the AUT at Birkbeck College, where she is also a member of the college working party on implementation of the Race Relations Act 2000.
For any Working Lives research query contact us at workinglives@londonmet.ac.uk or telephone 020 7133 3086.
