In September last year the G20, including the US and UK, signed the Ankara Declaration that explicitly and formally recognised the importance of job quality. The Declaration committed the governments of the advanced economies to strengthening job quality as a route to achieving strong, sustainable and balanced economic growth that might also deliver inclusiveness and improved standards of living.

This declaration forms part of a trend in which supranational and inter-governmental organisations such as the OECD and European Union have introduced a number of initiatives to promote job quality and its economic and social benefits. The background is often concerned about the effects of the global economic crisis but in the context of recognising that there is no necessary clash of policy outcomes in wanting both more jobs and better jobs.

These international initiatives are welcome but need to translate into national government actions. However at national government level the explicit championing of job quality is less obvious.

The Scottish Parliament is bucking this trend.In 2015 it established an Inquiry into Work, Wages and Wellbeing that explicitly sought to understand the social, economic and health impacts of precarious employment, and which, at its heart, had an overt concern with the quality of Scottish jobs.

The Inquiry has just published its report: Taking the High Road. Borrowing directly from the arguments outlined in the introduction to Are bad Jobs Inevitable? by Françoise Carré and her colleagues, it recommends that the Scottish Government paves the high road and blocks the low road.

The Scottish Government wants to improve job quality by raising and setting employment standards, with a key role to be played by public agencies. It also wants better research on job quality, the monitoring of job quality and the development of a fair work index for Scotland.  The full report can be found here.

Image: Joe Diaz via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)