Parents and carers often have interrupted workforce histories, causing gaps in their pension contributions and hence significantly lower retirement incomes. In some countries, to ameliorate these inequalities, carer credits have been introduced to maintain public pension contributions during periods of workforce absence. But improvements to credits in public schemes have taken place alongside a shift to private pensions that widens inequalities for carers. Introducing carer credits to private pensions is one method of addressing these inequalities. A search for examples of credits to private schemes in OECD countries revealed that, at present, they are rare and limited. This article sets out the design features and principles that should underpin carer credits to private pensions.

Peter Townsend argued that poverty could be scientifically measured as a ‘breakpoint’ within the income distribution below which participation collapses. This paper stands on Townsend's shoulders in measuring the level of poverty and participation by: (1) broadening his original measurement of participation; (2) using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) in conjunction with a new dataset including 40,000 households (Understanding Society, 2011; 2013); and (3) taking into account the multi-cultural/ethnic nature of British society. We find that participation – defined as lack of deprivation, social participation and trust – reduces as income falls but stops doing so among the poorest 30 per cent of individuals. This may be indicating a minimum level of participation, a floor rather than a ‘breakpoint’ as suggested by Townsend, which has to be sustained irrespective of how low income is. Respondents with an ethnic minority background manifest lower levels of participation than white respondents but the relationship has a less linear pattern. Moreover, the floor detected for the overall population is also replicated when combining all respondents from ethnic groups.

To what extent does Malta's social policy support gender equality, in the use of time? How much do state policies assume that men and women both need time to care, as well as for paid work? Does Malta's full-time paid work structure allow time for the equal sharing of unpaid care responsibilities between women and men, that in turn enhances gender equity in the workplace and domestic sphere? Themes that emerge in the study rest largely on women's voices. The study finds that women need to shift their full-time economic activity to shorter and flexible working hours when they become mothers, with negative consequences of loss in income and career regression. Labour market exit and financial dependence on men is also a frequent occurrence. The findings of the study suggest that strong pressure to assume traditional roles is embedded not only in Maltese culture and social norms, but also in the state's own social policy.

This article focuses attention on explaining and understanding state intervention into the lives of families deemed ‘troublesome’ with specific attention on the Troubled Families Programme. Launched in 2011, in part as a response to the London riots, the Troubled Families Programme represented an escalation and intensification of state intervention into the lives of families. Policy analyses have provided important perspectives on how we should explain and understand this government agenda as part of a process of neoliberal state crafting. This article offers a critical yet productive examination of these perspectives, arguing that their utility lies in how they can be employed, and therefore modified and adapted, in conjunction with studies of local practice which emphasise the messy realities of policy enactment and, with that, the possibility for contestation and challenge. Such an approach, based broadly on the tenets of critical realism, is founded on an alternative conception of state power, one that sees state power as having a more complex quality that is dependent on the agency of local actors.

This article is based on a qualitative study exploring reasons for ill-being and well-being among twenty participants in a Norwegian activation programme. The Qualification Programme aims to enhance participants’ overall life situations and employability by offering work training to long-term social assistance recipients, among other things. As an analytic framework for discussing ill-being and well-being, this article employs Amartya Sen's capability approach, which assesses the individual's ability to live a good life, and Martha Nussbaum's conceptualisation of that approach. The findings indicate that hardship was demonstrated in the respondents’ lives: participants could not cope financially and suffered from mental and physical health problems, while shame worsened their circumstances. However, participants also showed signs of enhanced well-being as they experienced increased individual agency. The study indicated a disparity between the intended and the actual direction of change in the lives of programme participants.

Recent major political developments, including Brexit and the US presidential elections, have been strongly associated with public concerns around levels of immigration. Much of this has centred on the role of migrants in the low-skilled sectors of the economy and concerns that they have displaced members of local communities from jobs and depressed wage levels. This is despite compelling evidence that immigrants rarely take jobs from native workers in OECD countries (Constant, 2014) and that in the long run, the wage and employment effects of immigration in the 1990s and in the 2000s were small and always positive for less educated workers of all OECD countries (Docquier et al., 2014). Recent UK specific studies have found that the impact on wages is considered to be relatively small (Dustmann et al., 2013; Nickell and Salaheen, 2015). Notwithstanding this evidence, hostility to migrants and migration more generally has become increasingly overt, as reflected in a substantial rise in ‘race’ hate crimes before and following the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU in 2016 (Burnett, 2017).

Extensive research in a number of disciplines, including economics, social policy, sociology, geography and management have been undertaken relating to migrant participation in the labour market. Given the highly topical nature of migrant employment in Western Europe and the US, the aim of this brief review is to draw together some of the more recent attempts to theorise on the presence of migrants in the labour market, discuss some of the recurrent themes that have emerged from empirical research in this area, consider some of the main implications for policy-making in what now seems likely to be known as the post-Brexit era and outline areas for future research. In doing so, the intention is to contribute to further inter-disciplinary theory-building and to a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of this highly politicised area and the implications of migrant employment for policy and future research.

In the last ten years, EU migrants have come to play an important role in the UK labour force. They have become increasingly present in low-skilled occupations, where the largest proportional increase has been migration from Eastern and Central European countries. Drawing on research carried out between November 2015 and July 2016 on the employment of EU migrants in the sectors of hospitality, food and drink and construction, we find that EU migrants have met employers’ needs for a flexible labour force but that the use of mobile workers in these sectors is long-standing. The prospect of a reduced supply of EU migrants following the UK's vote to leave the EU and the government's target of reducing net migration poses a challenge for employers. We explore the tension between political pressure and economic need through posing a range of options for new immigration policy post-Brexit.

An ageing population in Europe is currently putting pressure on long-term care services, creating demand for foreign workers. Using a life-course perspective, this article aims to contribute to the understanding of how life trajectories shape decisions about migration and employment in social care. Based on fifty-one life story interviews with migrant care workers in Norway and UK, two typologies are found: a Norwegian migrant life trajectory of downwards social mobility combined with settlement and a British trajectory combining stronger downwards social mobility with further migration. The article contributes to the discussion of contextualised migratory lives involving care work.

This article analyses the labour market integration of newly arrived immigrants in the UK labour market, based on data from the UK Labour Force Survey. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the United Kingdom since 2000 and distinguish different cohorts based on the year of their arrival in the country. We examine the extent to which these new arrivals were able to enter work and move up into skilled jobs, and analyse the sectors of the economy that have proved most amenable to this progression. The analysis indicates that these new arrivals fared relatively well in the workforce. In part as a result of their relative youth and high education levels, many new arrivals (especially those from the European Union and in particular the EU10 countries) moved straight into work.

This article provides a reflection on the period since the May 2004 Central and Eastern European (CEE) accession and subsequent migration to the UK, and on shifting perspectives of and towards CEE migrants in this period. The authors have been researching this phenomenon in the North of England since 2005 through a series of studies as well as ongoing engagement with regional respondents. CEE migration is analysed through the perspectives of government, employers and trade union interests. A central argument is that attitudes to CEE migrants changed following the 2008 financial crisis as funding for local authorities was reduced, obscuring evidence-based arguments for their value to the UK labour market.

This article examines the relationship in the UK between asylum-seeking and the labour market. Since 2002, asylum-seekers have not been allowed to work unless they have waited over twelve months for an initial decision on their asylum claim. This policy change occurred as employment was considered a ‘pull factor’ encouraging unfounded asylum claims. Despite not having the right to work, asylum-seekers – and especially those whose applications for refugee status have been refused by the UK government – interact with the labour market in manifold ways. Drawing on an ESRC-funded study in the UK's Yorkshire and Humber region and related studies, this article argues that both asylum-seekers and refused asylum-seekers form a hyper-exploitable pool of ‘illegalised’ and unprotected workers. As a vital part of their survival terrain, work is largely experienced as for-cash labouring in low-paid labour market sectors where the spectre of exploitation and even ‘modern slavery’ are perpetual threats. Recent policy shifts are deepening such threats through creating increasingly ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘hostile’ environments for certain categories of migrants.

This article examines the institutional arrangements, practices and outcomes related to the recognition of skills, knowledge and competencies (SKC) of non-EU foreign nationals in the Netherlands (commonly referred to as Third Country Nationals (TCNs)) with specific reference to the Dutch healthcare sector. Although the national infrastructure for foreign recognition of educational and professional qualifications is well-developed by international standards, the system has a number of flaws as interviews with TCNs and experts in the field reveal. TCNs often discover that their qualifications are not considered equivalent to the relevant Dutch qualifications. Given the limitations of formally recognising the educational qualifications or work experience of TCNs, Dutch policies have supported other measures, including the accreditation and recognition of prior learning (RPL). However, expert interviews show that it remains a challenge to commit education providers and employers actually to validate these learning experiences. We consider various implications for policy-making and theory from this research.

Networks and projects around the theme of migrants in the labour market can be discussed under the following headings:

1. 1. Trade union-based initiatives

2. 2. Migrant community-based initiatives

3. 3. Issues of acknowledged concern that generate national responses (forced labour, trafficked workers, undocumented migrant workers, etc.).