Would you know if you or a colleague were being exploited at work? How would you describe decent work, and would you recognise if you weren’t in it?

Labour exploitation is not always easy to identify, and we are about to discover how both workers and employers can partake in these practices without realising – and how they can stack up from underpayment or zero-hour contracts to become something much worse.

Dr Ophelia Chidgey, from the Pentland Centre, is co-author along with our own Professor Jan Bebbington of the report Decent Work: A Review of Evidence for Effective Prevention and Detection of Labour Exploitation. The report played a role in the establishment of the UK Government’s Fair Work Agency.

Ophelia tells us about the continuum of exploitation concept, with decent work at one end and modern slavery at the other. We talk about the various steps along the scale, and what happens to move workers along it, and how the whole concept of labour exploitation needs to be addressed at a systems level.

We talk about which sectors might be most exposed to exploitation, the foundation of the Fair Work Agency, what it might mean moving forward for the UK, how we have previously suffered from looking at the symptoms rather than the case, and how Ophelia and Jan’s work helped shape the way forward.

Plus, we discuss whether Jan is a good employer, see how Australia is ahead of the UK in certain areas, look at loopholes that might allow employers to avoid complying with certain regulations, and consider if you can ever tell the truth about your boss if they are sat next to you!

Two previous Transforming Tomorrow episodes that tie in with this one are Do You Know Your Employment Rights and Human Trafficking.

To access the report discussed in this week’s podcast see here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/pentland/activities/hubs/modern-slavery-and-justice/decent-work/

And find out more about the Fair Work Agency here: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/fair-work-agency

The software and aviation industries have similar carbon footprints globally – and that was the case even before AI became the behemoth it is now. So, we really need to know more about how software and programming can change, and what we can do about our footprints.

Software engineer Annie Freeman ups the Kiwi quota on the show as she joins us to share her experiences and knowledge working in sustainable IT, green software – and code pruning.

We discover just what those terms mean, how software designers and programmers can influence their products’ impact on the environment, and how green ops and fin ops (but not special ops) fit into the picture.

Annie tells us how more efficient software can lead to the need for fewer servers, and thus benefits both the bottom line for a business and the environment, and how webpages can be built to have a similar impact.

We consider how AI can help with these tasks, but has also led to firms drawing back on commitments to reduce their climate impact, and the effects it has had on both coding and editing code.

Plus, why did some airlines take a single olive out of each salad on board their planes? Why do data centres in Australia have different footprints from those in the USA? And what would happen if you were to get rid of that legacy code embedded deeply into your website?

Discover more about Annie here: https://anniefreeman.co/

Find out more about the Green Software Foundation here: https://greensoftware.foundation/

And you can listen to our previous episode AI, Data Centres, and The Great Energy Problem here: https://pod.fo/e/3403ed

‘Conflict is costly’ – yet we see it arising around the world on a constant basis. And climate change can create the conditions for conflict and violence.

So, just how many of these conflicts are related to climate change and weather shocks – and why? And what can we do to break the climate-conflict cycle?

Professor Jean-François Maystadt, from UCLouvain in Belgium and Lancaster University Management School, brings his expertise as an economist specialising in conflicts, natural disasters and forced migration to show us the connections.

We learn that between 5% and 20% of all conflicts globally in the last century had a link to climate change, and see the regional variations in causality across South Asia, Africa and the Middle East in recent years, with some surprising revelations.

We look at the effects of economic shocks in countries such as Somalia, low rainfall monsoon seasons in India, and drought in Syria. And we discover often it is those with more resources who are able to leave a region following a natural disaster, leaving behind those with little to begin with.

We see how many countries choose to intensify practices rather than adapt when it comes to coping with the effects of weather and climate on agriculture and other industries; and come to understand how having nothing to lose can influence the actions of those entering conflict.

JF explains the importance of strong national and regional institutions in helping to prevent conflicts arising, why some communities can cope with shocks when others cannot and collapse into violence, and the importance of agriculture in the big picture.

Plus, how refugee camps can have a positive economic effect on the area around them, how farmers in Kenya benefit from weather-based insurance policies, and why Jan has inner conflict over doughnuts.

Read more about Jean-François’ work here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/people/jean-francois-maystadt