Session 3 of Discovery Days 2024 features the following talks:
00:01:31 – 00:16:37 Professor Shamima Haque: Unethical working practices in the global supply chain
00:17:33 – 00:32:59 Professor Trish McCullough: Imagining justice: Stories from the inside
00:34:06 – 00:49:33 Professor Sanjay Singh: The Great Resignation: Causes and consequences
Discovery Days offer a fascinating exploration of a wide range of important topics, from health and wellbeing, human rights, and our ground-breaking scientific research and arts practice. All our speakers are helping us to transform lives locally and around the world.
https://www.dundee.ac.uk/engage/events/discovery-days
So. Good afternoon, everyone. I am indeed, Wendy. Vice principal international. So no mid-afternoon slumps here. We’re going to have a really exciting session, which has a particularly strong international flavour. So I’m particularly delighted to introduce the session. We have – you will know the format now – three wonderful
Speakers who will speak for about 15 minutes each and then we will have the opportunity for questions at the end. So our speakers are Shamima, Trish and Sanjay and we’re just about to turn to them. The first speaker is Shamima Haque, who has been with us exactly 12 months.
She joined in January ‘23 and she is a professor of accountancy. Her doctoral studies and her early career were in Australia, in Melbourne and Brisbane respectively. So you must be feeling it’s slightly cold here compared to Australian summer, but her primary interest is in corporate social accounting
Reporting – That whole and incredibly topical area. So today she’s going to talk to us about unethical working practices in the global supply chain. And I was thinking, am I wearing any fast fashion today? We may all get more guilty as the session goes on. But Shamima, we’re delighted you’ve joined Dundee,
We’re delighted to hear from you. Over to you. Thank you so much, Professor Alexander, for the introduction. And good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, the organiser, for inviting me today. And also thank you, all of you, for being here. As already, Professor Alexander mentioned that my research area is in corporate socio-environmental accountability.
So my presentation today is also related to that, to the broader corporate social responsibility. I would be basically focusing on the unethical practices in the global supply chain. So my research area is Bangladesh and its readymade garments industry are in this sector, its clothing sector. Bangladesh clothing industry –
It is the second largest garments exporter globally just after China. And it is the most export earning sector for Bangladesh. So over 80% of its export earnings come from this sector. About 85% of export earnings. 4 million people are directly employed by this sector,
Whereas over 40 million people are indirectly dependent on this sector. So you can understand the importance of this sector for its economy. It accounts for 20% of its GDP and Bangladesh exports to the countries like the US, UK, European Union countries, Australia, Canada and many more. Many global brands, retailers, they source product
From Bangladeshi factories, including H&M, Marks and Spencer, Zara, Walmart, Gap, Primark, Adidas, Nike and many more. Now, despite the importance of this sector, you would find that this sector has been under scrutiny for a long time. And this is because of the incidents, the catastrophe
That has been happening in this sector over the years. It’s not a one off incident, but there has been many incidents like that. One such incident that we observed in back in 2013, the Rana Plaza collapse. It was an eight storey building and there were five factories owners which
Employed 5000 workers working at that time. And the factory, this building collapsed on 24th of April 2013, which killed about 1200 workers and another 2500 workers were badly injured and some of – many of them actually- were paralysed for the rest of their life. So and this incident, this tragedy, basically,
Would be considered as the second largest industrial catastrophe in the corporate history, just after the Phobal gas tragedy in 1984. In the aftermath of the collapse, when the journalist, the media and Indian activist workers, when they managed to enter to the rubble, the ruins of Rana Plaza, the factory,
They found that they found the labels and the communications linking to the major brands such as Primark, Matalan, Mango and many more. So it shows, you know, that these big brands and retailers who source product from this factory, from this supply chain,
You know, but they do not really care that much about the working conditions and the health and safety conditions in this sector. To give you some more information about the overall situation in the clothing industry in Bangladesh, the minimum wage, it was 8000 Taka, which is equivalent to £65.
Recently, the workers had been protesting against it and they were asking for a better minimum wage, which is 22,000, which is also only equivalent to £160. But they ultimately got only 12,500 taka, which is about £90, something like that, which came into effect in December 2023.
So you can see that this sector is already vulnerable. The workers in this sector is already vulnerable to exploitation that is going on. So we wanted to see in our research that what is the condition, especially during the COVID times. So we have done survey and interviews and we wanted to see
That during the COVID time, you know, how that retailers practice, their purchasing practice or buying practice actually has an impact on the suppliers and the workers in the supply chain in the clothing industry. So we did a survey and this project was funded by the Scottish
Funding Council and interviews, which was funded by AHRC. Our research team comprised of the team from University of Aberdeen Business School and the School of Education, and also we had the NGO collaborator across from trade unions, and we also had some local collaborators in Bangladesh who helped us with that data collection.
So we surveyed 1000 suppliers and it was carried out in December 2021 for the period that covers March 2020 to December 2021. This sample represented 25% of all suppliers in Bangladesh that supplies goods to the global brands in the global North. And then our interview took place with 37 key
Stakeholders, including representatives from NGOs, trade union bodies, UN and ILO representatives, and also 87 workers for the factories that sell products to brands in the global North. So these interviews were carried out between November 2020 and July 2021. All right. So as I say, that from our research, we wanted to know
The buying or purchasing practices of the retailers, how these big brands, these retailers’ behaviour are – their purchasing practices, how it was during COVID 19, how it has an impact on the suppliers and that lead to have an impact on the workers in turn.
So what we have found from our survey is that there are some practices that has been identified as unfair by the suppliers. So, for example, cancellation of orders, then the reduced price for the goods that have already been contracted, retailers refused to pay for goods that has already been dispatched
And there are delayed payments for goods already being delivered. So these are some of the practices identified as unfair by our suppliers of the 1000 factories that we have surveyed. And the suppliers also reported that – over 50% of the suppliers reported that they were subject to one
Or more of these unfair practices. The suppliers also reported to over 100 specific companies, which actually were involved in three or more of these unfair practices. So what we have done afterwards, we out of this 104 companies that was involved in unfair practices, 27 of them
Were involved in three or more unfair practices. So we contacted those 27 brands or retailers and we emailed them. We let them know that this is what we have found and this is the unfair practices that has been identified by the suppliers. Only four of them came back to us with some responses,
But the rest of them didn’t really get back to us with any response. And the responses that we have got from the four brands, it was also very general response that we have got. And then we wanted to know, because of these unfair practices by the buyers or retailers, how it actually impacted
The suppliers or the factories in Bangladesh clothing sector? What are the challenges they face because of these unfair practices? And what we have found is that the suppliers struggle to pay the minimum wage. Buyers reduced the price paid for the garments since March 2020.
There was a reduction in demand from the brands and suppliers were selling at the same price in December 2021 as of March 2020, and suppliers were selling below the cost of production in December 2021. So because of the unfair practices that we have observed here,
It has an impact on the suppliers in turn. And then it actually had an impact on the workers because of the retailer’s unfair practice, it has impacted the suppliers, which ultimately in turn has an impact on the workers’ livelihoods, their working conditions.
So for example, some of the direct impacts on workers in terms of job loss, over 25% of the workers lost their job during the period of analysis. Low wages because the price didn’t pay them, even the minimum wage. Unpaid overtime and not paid for work done,
Forced labour and exploitation because they are forced to do unpaid overtime and forced to meet unrealistic production target. And there was also increased verbal and sexual abuse. Some of the indirect impacts on workers, for example, included increased workers’ financial burden to look after their family. Poor living conditions in slums.
Health impact because of tiredness and depression, and there was no social security, if unemployed. Now, over the years we have seen that there are some regulations that actually came in place in different countries. The 2010 California Supply Chain Act in in US, the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015,
French Duty of Vigilance Law Act 2017, Netherland -they have their Child Labour Due Diligence Act 2017, Australian Modern Slavery Act 2018. Germany recently introduced their due diligence Supply Chain Act 2023. European Union – they have their Due Diligence Act 2023. And
There are other countries who are actually in the process of, you know, developing their own standard. The key question, however, remain that whether this regulation is really bringing any change in the supply chain practice, whether it has really an impact or not.
And what we have found from our investigation that it is still not. There are a lot of things, many more to do at this stage. The Modern Slavery Acts still is not bringing any change. So we have actually disseminated our findings in different ways. Our findings has been published in
Some of the mainstream media, like BBC, The Guardian and many more. We had one session that we did the was with the UK Parliament and also in the Scottish Parliament. The UK Parliament we did in 2022, Scottish Parliament we did this year, 2023. We disseminated this information in front of the MPs and
MP Liz Truss back in 2022 in private. Our bill, she introduced a recommendation in the House of the Commons, which was accepted and still waiting a second reading on that. So we have some specific recommendations for the UK Government. And the main recommendation that we have provided
Is that we need a garment’s trade adjudicator, our fashion watchdog that would compile of the regulatory bodies, personnel governing bodies as well as the stakeholders who will oversee, monitor, enforce and penalise the companies if there are any unethical practices going on in the supply chain. That was our specific recommendation for them.
We had a couple of reports that we have published out of this with this a specific recommendations. You can have more information here. Thank you. The joys of the microphone. Thank you very, very much, Shamima. So now we come to the second of our three speakers,
And this is the one that has a slightly more domestic focus. But I am delighted to introduce momentarily Professor Tricia McCulloch. And Trish is the professor of social work here. She’s been with us some time. So I want to ask you about say how long, but has a distinguished career,
Both as a practitioner in the social work field and as an academic. And she is today going to talk to us about imagining what justice should look like in modern societies and our own part in securing it. So, Trish, welcome and over to you. Thank you, Wendy.
Good afternoon, folks. Nice to see you. Okay. Much of my research has focussed on questions of justice. And specifically, what does justice look like for people who offend? It’s motivated by my experience of a disconnect between expert and top down approaches to justice and the lived experience of people with convictions.
Very briefly, Scotland has one of the highest imprisonment rates in Western Europe and re-conviction rates post custody sits stubbornly at around 43%. Meanwhile, our prisons continue to be filled with people with significant experiences of multiple deprivation, trauma and loss, while providing little meaningful help with the problems
That sit at the heart of their offending. In an attempt to bridge this disconnect, my research employs a participatory research method, which essentially means involving and hearing from people with lived experience of the problem and challenges that we’re trying to understand. There are good ethical reasons for a participatory method.
Everyone has a right to participate in the social sphere, but it’s also good social science. If we want to understand and achieve change in a social problem and there are few as challenging as re-offending and reducing re-offending. We need to understand it from the experience of those who live it.
So what do we mean when we talk about justice? For most of us, justice is about fairness. It’s about getting what we deserve. It’s about equality and equity under the law. On a broader level, it’s also about access to fair and equal opportunities to live a good life. This is where justice starts
To get complicated because life isn’t fair or equal, and we don’t all enjoy equal access to opportunities. My interest in these questions really began, I think, as a child, and I grew up in St. Mary’s – if you know the city of Dundee, I grew up in St Mary’s,
Ahousing scheme in the north west of the city- and experiences of difference of inequality and of poverty were everyday. And I have quite vivid memories, unusually, of travelling on the bus. This is one of the buses I would have travelled on as a child with my mum
And I remember observing on those journeys acute experiences of poverty and of inequality and life seemed to me to even then to be deeply unfair with some people carrying more than their fair share of troubles. I also, however, experienced how human and community acts
Of love, of kindness and of compassion could be transformative in that space. Moving forward. One of the key findings from my work is that if we want to advance justice for all, including people who offend, we need to understand the problem. As researchers, often we want to rush past the problem
And onto the solutions for understanding. And sitting with the problem of offending and re-offending and the inequality that sits behind it, emerges as a critical boost to individual journeys of change and social journeys of change. Offending in Scotland is broadly understood as a problem of individual criminality.
People offend, give or take, because they’re bad or because they make bad choices. Justice systems operate on the basis that individuals are responsible for their behaviour, and if we get the punishment right, we will achieve deterrence and compliance with the law. The problem is a crime data tells a different story.
Put simply, this theory and practice works for many of us in this room, but it doesn’t work for everyone. And it specifically, it doesn’t work for people who find themselves lost and locked into our justice systems. There’s a long line of research studies, including my own, that make clear
That offending is more than a problem of individual criminality. The messages on this slide speak to this, and I’m not going to tick, go through these one by one. I want instead to illustrate these messages through sharing one person’s story, a story of their journey into and out of offending.
And all that goes with that. It’s a typical story, and I’m only going to share with you parts of it, but the words that I will be reading are the individual’s words themselves. And it’s a kind of narrative approach very much reflects the kind of research that I do.
And the invitation simply is to listen and understand. “I’ve been institutionalised from quite an early age. I believe I was institutionalised. I was. From the age of 17 to 23, it was one prison sentence I was locked up on. You know, I hadn’t even reached adolescence. Previous, here was a lot of care
Homes, early family breakdown. My mum had addiction issues. My old man had died when I was young. The social work department brought me up. I despised the social work department. There was only one gang I hated more than the police. And it was the social work. One of my earliest memories:
Maybe I was five or six year old and my great granny stayed with my gran. I used to ask for money for the van and see if she didn’t give me it, I used to boot her. That was me at five or six. Warning signals must have been there.
My first arrest was for stealing a bike. I can still remember it. My legs were too wee so couldn’t reach the ground. That was how I got caught. My legs couldn’t reach the ground. That was age seven. That was me starting to get arrested. I could never understand it.
It was as if dishonesty, manipulation, all that was built into me from a dead early age. Fast forward to many years later. I had been through the prison system and that environment. Something took place mentally and emotionally for me in the prison.
It took me from the kind of drugs that made me sick, to… I don’t know. It’s like the drugs started to become more what was going on for me. I think from a personal point of view, prison desensitises you at a mental level, at an emotional level,
And if you’ve got enough insight, at a spiritual level. I remember arriving in Barlinnie. It was a corn stew. It was before the riots. It was sink or swim. You don’t walk into that without feeling fear, apprehension, all these things.
But you quickly learn that these are not feelings that you can allow yourself. They’re not feelings you can show. You can see it in people and they make you vulnerable in that environment. So you quickly – and I had learned this from an early age through other through children’s homes and things
– I’d learned from an early age to hide these things, these feelings. But you can only hold this stuff together so much before it starts spilling over. It’s like coming through adolescence, coming through childhood. Being nurtured. Being protected. I don’t believe I got any of these things. And then coming into
A prison system, not just had I not had it. I really didn’t want it by then. And so I had a lot of romance, a lot of full committals. I had no ability to. I remember coming out, I was 23 and I had no ability to live a life.
The biggest area: I had no ability to form relationships, had a lot of resentment towards family members. I can only describe myself emotionally as a ball of pain and of anger. I took a lot of drugs. I had no ability to deal with anything at an emotional level.
I can remember coming out of jail. This was before I got the help that I needed. I had got out of Barlinnie and it was the usual scenario. You got out of Barlinnie in the morning. Somebody had phoned the drug dealer the night before
And we were all just getting into taxis and going to his house. I remember getting out that morning and not doing that, and the funny thing was it was a shorter sentence I’d done. I was still in withdrawals.
So for me to not go into that taxi and do the things I usually did, something was going on that I didn’t understand. And I remember I was standing at a bus stop and it was freezing cold in the middle of winter.
I was shivering and I was standing crying at that bus stop and looking back, I wasn’t crying. It wasn’t emotional pain. I was crying because I knew I was going back to what I didn’t want to go back to. But I didn’t know anything different. I went back in.”
He’s returned to custody at that point and spent a further six years in and out of custody before he found his way into something good. If this is the problem, how do people who offend frame the solutions? This slide reports some more recent work with criminalised young adults in Ayrshire.
We set out to understand what does justice mean and look like for you? We used a co-design method and a framework of real utopias and we invited these young adults to imagine better than they’ve known through their own experience. This is what we found.
First of all, we found that they struggled to imagine beyond their lived experience. We have that in common. Repeatedly, they expressed “It’s all on me. The only person that can help me is me.” And there was a hugely internalised sense of responsibility and hopelessness. We pushed gently through that.
And what we heard consistently was that justice and a good life involves three things. It involves a safe and secure home. Each of the young adults we worked with hadn’t experienced a safe or secure home in the past or in the present. It involves belonging and inclusion within families,
Within communities and within society. It involves paths through life, fair and equal opportunities at key points of transition instead of the stigma and exclusion often experienced. And it involves personalised support, particularly at points of difficulty rooted in understanding and empathy for the experience that they brought with them.
I’m not sure how this sounds to you, but two things struck us about these findings. The first was how basic and underwhelming this utopian vision of justice was, and yet how challenging this vision is to deliver for children, adults who experience offending, multiple deprivation and harm. The key
Takeaway from my work is that justice on these terms requires us to look beyond our existing models and systems. There are various frameworks exist that can help us with this. Nancy Fraser argues that we generate justice by attending to cultural recognition, economic distribution and political representation.
For Fraser, this can be distilled into parity of participation, encouraging and enabling participation in the social sphere. Axel Honneth argues that we need to address issues of recognition and mis-recognition. What he’s talking about there is the stigma that follows social inequalities through a person’s life, even when they manage
To move out of some of the difficulties they experience. He argues that we do this through paying attention to love and belonging. So it connects with some of the things we’ve heard. Joan Toronto argues that we need to move beyond ideas and concepts of justice
And pay attention to values and practices of care and compassion. The problem is that these more expansive visions of justice haven’t taken hold in our society, whether in our formal social systems or our informal social relationships. Instead, I suggest justice has become a very limited and limiting concept,
Constrained as it is by our frames of social separation and privilege. The image on the right is something I came across in Glasgow. It was on a billboard. You’re not able to read the words, I’m sure, but it captures some of the messages that have come through in some of the ways forward.
It says: “if we are more involved, then we will become more forgiving, more proactive, more grown up.” So thank you, Trish. We come now to our third speaker, which is Professor Sanjay Singh. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sanjay when he came to join us. We were just comparing:
“When was that?” And Sanjay and his family arrived at just about nine months ago. So he is the newest of our joiners for this panel. He works here in Dundee, but also serves as the editor in chief for the Journal of Asian Business Studies. That’s fantastic that it’s edited from here, from Dundee.
And his research interests are in the whole field of human resource management. He is a chair also in our School of Business of Human Resource Management and has a particular research interest in how talent can support innovation and sustainability. And so today he’s going to talk to us about the great resignation,
That phenomenon where people decide they’ve had enough of the world of work. So can I invite you to welcome Sanjay? Sanjay, over to you. Thank you so much for the invitation. And thank you so much for introducing me. So I will be talking to
You on the topic, which is of interest to us here and to the world beyond this room, which is the ‘great resignation’ that we’ve been part of since COVID- 19. So we will take you through what are the main causes and consequences of the great resignation. Great resignation is basically a mass
Turnover, employee turnover, employees leaving voluntarily their jobs. So I will take you through and these are the key pointers that my presentation will be on. It will be on what the great resignation is, what it is and what are the causes, impact, and consequences of the Great Resignation. ‘Great resignation’,
The word, okay, was coined during 2019, COVID-19. It’s basically associated with great fear – mind that the world witnessed. So this great resignation that the people were leaving organisation for several reasons. Those reasons could be personal, social or organisational in nature. And this trend has been all across the globe,
Whether it is North America, Europe, Asia or Oceania. But we do not know for sure at this point of time – yes, there has been research going on, some publications, but there’s still are more to uncover- the causes and consequences of the great resignation.
The great resignation, okay, if you look into the literature, if you come across okay, we’ve been talking about the ‘Big Quit’. And the big quit is basically associated with – kind of all this terminology – because of big data so that we can really associate with the Great Reshuffle.
The second thing is that it’s not just the blue collar jobs or the white collar jobs or the low paid or high paid jobs – jobs across the continuum that the people who’ve been working during the Covid and after, that people started leaving the job voluntarily. We have a literature which states
That all in the US around 47 million workers- they left their job. They quit their job. Okay? And so were the trends in Asia as well as in Europe for this Great Resignation. Okay. So when we looked into the industry, we got to see that, yes, great resignation affected
Several industries, across industries, but the most affected of them were technology, healthcare industries and mid-career employees. And when we looked into the data here in UK, okay, we found that there is high percentage of employee in the UK healthcare sector who are quitting in mass. So it’s not just the number of employees
But also the quality of employees, the talent. There has been a talent leakage, okay, in the UK health industry, which the UK health sector does not want. But it’s been happening. So having said that, well if we look into all these things
That I just shared with you, it’s just like a kind of general strike. So when you have a kind of general strike, the word on your screen. Okay, So many things come up. So it could be because of the workload ,would be because of some kind of dissatisfaction with the pay
Or flexibility, lack of flexibility at workplace or burnout or so many stress related factors which has led to this great resignation, which is more akin to general strike that the world has witnessed. So this is one part. And the second part is that there has been a cost associated with the great resignation.
The cost would be at an employee level, the cost could be at a department level or at an organisational or industrial level. So it’s basically like a kind of lose-lose situation rather than win-lose situation, okay, for employees and the employer. So as a result of that,
So there are three themes that the people, those the researcher and the practitioners have been working in the area of late for the last couple of years because this great resignation is a new phenomena. It is here to stay, but it will be manifested in different form
Then the form that we had during the COVID 19 situation. Yes, the literature also says that we are also having, okay, our kind of phenomena called ‘Great Regret’. What is the ‘Great Regret’? During the great resignation, it was a kind of peer pressure.
It was a kind of social pressure that: “My friend left. Why not? I should be living okay, my job…” – citing these reasons. But once they came off and they are not getting jobs. So it’s a kind of guilt, a kind of regret that is also being experienced
By the employee who left during the great resignation era. So these are the three themes that I thought I should speak on. The first one is about what are the drivers of great resignation. The second one is the impact of the great resignation. And third one is the
Strategy that organisations can have to arrest great resignation or convert great resignation into great reticence era for the employee. So looking into theme one, which is about the driver or the causes of great resignation. So what I found that there can be a three set of factors.
The first is associated with the metrics, the HR metrics may be associated with the compensation and incentives or the time between two promotions that the employer had. The employees were expecting promotions, but organisation or the boss was not going for that, or could be a kind of leadership style
That these days we are talking about diversity, equity and inclusion. Most of the employees, they are interested in having a kind of inclusive leadership, maybe from the team lead to the department lead, to the organisation lead. The second factor is about the changing nature of the working conditions. So it’s not just a
9 to 5 job coming to the office – the employee wants are different : format of the working conditions are like remote working or a hybrid working or flexible work. So it’s not that you should come at 9:00 or 8:30 and leave by 5pm or 5:30. The third factor that
We looked into was the demographic factors. So this great resignation, if somebody looks into the dataset of the employee leaving the organisation so it can be categorised on the parameter age or gender or education or class, for example, Generation Z and Y as compared to baby boomers.
Okay, they have a different behavioural response when the things happening during the COVID 19 situation and currently. So these are the three set of factors are into theme one, which is the driver of great resignation. The second one is that if that are the drivers which affect employee to think and leave organisation,
So what could be the impact of that greater integration? So the impact could be at several level, it could be at an employee level. When I was talking to you that because of some pressure, social pressure, a person from peer group or many of the workers,
Employees, they left and they found later on that they should not have. Some of them, a certain percent, they are under a kind of guilt or regret. So that’s the great regret. So in fact, on, employee level, in fact, is also on the organisational level because when an employee’s leaving, hiring an employee
And retaining the employee is the most critical thing. So if the talent is leaving, if your organisation is bleeding out talent, the talent takes away the knowledge that was co-created at workplace. And when you hire somebody, it takes at least one full cycle, one full academic year or one full financial year
To have him functioning or have her functioning at 100% level. The statistics say that for first six months, the employee whom you have hired, okay, they work 50% less than what he or she has been paid. But when they complete one full cycle, then they start giving to organisation
Back, what the organisation has been doing in terms of salary and compensation. The third impact is on HR and the future of work. What it says that the life that we had before COVID 19, it will not come again. So the life that we will be having in the organisation
Okay, moving forward, it will be leveraging technology, it will be the different working conditions. Thus that will have an impact on human resource when they recruit and select employees when they go for training and having them is still retain some the strategy, the compensation strategy and so on and so forth.
And finally, the impacts on blue collar and white collar workers will be different. So it’s not just what it was before COVID 19, okay? That since the world is now coming back to the normal, the organisation can have the same kind of practices and policies vis-a-vis blue collar and white collar workers.
Finally, the third one is the organisational theme one, which is how to contain? It says that we should have a different kind of focus on employee-employer relations. Gone are the days when organisation was dictating the terms. We are in a different world, hence we should listen to the people,
We should have them part of the process while formulating the policies and practices that will be laid out in future for the manager and the employee to practice. The second one is about strengthening the recruitment and retention strategy. See, the retention of the employee, the retention of the talent
Is dependent upon the recruitment that we did in the first stage, because recruitment has a kind of close linkage between the retention one. If you have not found a right person for the right job, then having them stay in the organisation will be a difficult time, especially moving into the world,
Which is a technology oriented okay nature of the work. The third one is the role of leaders in HR and departments. A leader has to have – we say that we have diversity, equity and inclusion. It should not be just on the wall, it should be experienced by the employee.
For example, when we conduct a meeting, the leaders should not just come and speak out. Leaders should be there and have the people speak out. Thus, this way the people feel that they are being included into the scheme of things and the leader is listening to them this way.
The leader can also have some innovative ideas coming from the people and that innovative ideas can be implemented or can be again can have an influence on the policies and practices. So inclusion or inclusive leadership. And the last one ‘is the is the gig economy a viable option?’ means that
Should we go for a contractual job or should we go for non-permanent job? The organisation will have to think in a different way depending upon the nature of the business that the organisation is in. The last but not the least, the organisation should put employees front and centre.
If we have employees on the front and the centre, the policies that will be formulated will be pro-employee. The reason is that organisation exists to cater to the needs of the society and to cater to the needs of the society, organisations need people, whether the organisation is an education industry,
Or from fashion industry, we need people. It’s not just machine and technology – it’s the people. So putting people front and centre is the key going forward and that’s all from my side. Thank you. Thank you. Better this time.
So thank you to our three speakers and can I invite you to join us? So Shamima, Trish, Sanjay, come and join us and I now turn to our audience for questions on three extraordinarily interesting talks. Excellent. I will come to the lady in the centre. We got the microphone. Fantastic. Thank you.
Can you hear me okay? Thank you to all three speakers. For the really fascinating presentations. I learned so much. Thank you for that. I teach American, Contemporary American literature here at the University. And listening to your thoughts. There’s at least one novel
That I have taught that deals with the issues that you’re describing. And I guess that got me thinking. Could maybe all three of you tell us a little bit more about how interdisciplinarity might play a role in your research. Thank you. I think we’re going to do it in reverse order.
Sanjay, you’ve been on stage, we’re keeping you so – interdisciplinarity. How does it influence the issues you’ve been drawing on today? I see. Going forward, I can answer this. Okay. As a researcher, as an editor. So I work at several journals as editor. So interdisciplinarity is the future going forward. It’s happening.
As a researcher, I do interdisciplinary research at the intersection of HR, knowledge, innovation for sustainable performance. Okay. So the presentation that we were having of some email and Trish, I can see, okay, that we all were talking about justice. Justice in a different form. So, so we can really explore
And understand and expand and advance the discipline of justice if we have interdisciplinarity as a lens put together. So, that’s the future and we are working, and if we have good research, okay, from interdisciplinary perspective, there is high probability of that research going forward,
In the journal being getting published after some reviews and revisions. Fascinating. The weightings of Justice . Shamima, over to you. Thoughts on interdisciplinarity. Thank you. I agree completely with Sanjay. I think the presentations all of us have done today, it all has a part of interdisciplinarity.
Personally my research area, as I say that is in CSR, social, environmental accountabilty and sustainability. So it has interdisciplinary in it as a theme. It’s not just business school, but the other schools. If you look at the social perspective, it involved perspective issues like climate change.
All has interdisciplinarity in a lot of Schools that we can do together. We can work together in a collaborative way to bring some really meaningful change. And submission in this area. So yes, completely agree with Sanjay. Trish. I think probably one of the key messages I was bringing
Is that we will not advance justice on a social level, on an individual level through technical solutions. So it’s not simply about kind of experts understanding the problem and proposing the solution. It’s really about how we as a society take these things forward.
And my understanding of these issues been greatly influenced by literature. And Young Mungo a very recent kind of fictional text by Douglas Stewart gets absolutely to the heart of everything I spoke about there. So for me, these kinds of stories allow us to engage with these ideas
Sometimes more meaningfully than research statistics do. So I think we need to use the different medias to help us understand and help us change. Thank you. I was thinking you started with one of your sentences at the end was the safe and secure home.
And in one sense it’s such a simple, simple idea of the safe and secure home, but the kind of interdisciplinarity of what it takes to build or create that… extraordinary. So on our colleagues questions, yes. Can I take the gentleman at the back? Thanks.
I’ve got a question just for Trish to which I hope the answer is no. Do you think the Scottish Government’s aspiration to ensure that all children are brought up to feel loved and cared for is an unattainable utopia? No. No, I mean,
If we had more time, I might have spoken about the promise and some of the recent Scottish Government work around the “Keeping the Promise” and around centring love. A children’s need to be loved. And it’s actually absolutely what we heard. You know, I was working a reference work with young adults there.
You know, they weren’t 17, they were 23 and 24. And that sense of not having worth because not having an immediate and obvious sense of having been loved was absolutely critical to their experience. So I think, you know, I was listening there was a Radio 4 programme
On the promise quite recently and was listening. And I really applaud Nicola Sturgeon’s ambition and tenacity through that. But the challenge is how do we, you know, a politician can’t deliver that, we deliver that in our communities and our relationships. So I think it is achievable.
I think we have to believe it’s achievable, but it’s on us. I’m going to follow up the question’s example and push Trish a little harder because as some of you will know that this was the promise that, you know, every child to look after in a safe home.
Quite a lot of the commentary in the press in the very recent past has been it’s all the fault of the professional social workers. They didn’t want to make it happen. So give us a couple of sentences on why is it been so hard to make progress,
Given the commitment and the aspiration, but I suppose – enlighten us. Yeah, this is a conversation I have because of course I have friends who are teachers, social workers. I think one of the most significant challenges is that there are many instances and F’s story was one of them,
Where the home environment is not positive, nurturing, safe or secure environment, and sometimes you’re not able in the short term to make that safe and secure. So what we do then is we often remove the child from the home and we place them in another home and we want that to fix it.
But it doesn’t always fix it. Sometimes it does. Great. We’ve got a journey that’s positive and good. And we don’t hear about those stories. But the problem is you can provide the physical safety but not the interior sense of “I’m OK”. And so that’s why it’s so difficult.
And my view and it’s far too simplistic to say sometimes in those situations, the social worker can’t get it right because they’re taking you from the family, which is maybe the only place you feel that you belong, and they’re putting you somewhere where you may not ever feel that you belong.
And of course there are positive accounts there. But so I think why in the press it’s all the social workers’ fault, because they will be the ones key to those decisions of removing children. And if you talk to children who have been removed, F had a huge amount of resentment towards his family.
He did not grow up in a safe place, but he still resents the social workers for removing them because it’s party to all sorts of trauma. Okay, You can you can grab Trish after. Any other questions? I’m going to one here good and then come to one of the questions online.
The lady at the back. Thank you. Thank you to each of the speakers for some really fascinating stories and insights into your research. I want to – I wonder, maybe an unfair question to each of you. What’s the one thing that you would like
To see that you think could improve justice and equity in your respective domains, whether that’s suppliers, manufacturers, political and social justice or employment? Shamima, let’s start with with you. What’s the one thing that moves us forward? Because you did also- I’ll let you answer the question and we’ll go right to that.
What would – what’s the one thing? I think one word for me: accountability. We all need to be accountable in terms of what we do. It’s the same thing for the retailers, same thing for the suppliers, same thing for the regulators and also for researchers – everyone.
We have to be accountable in terms of doing the right thing. So in terms of my research, I can just simply re-emphasise that it’s the accountability of the retailers. It’s their duty to do the right thing. And as for the regulators as well. Thank you. Okay.
I woud say – in the order that the colleague spoke. So, Trish, you. Probably should use one of the answers the young adults gave? They said, it’s all on me. That was how they understood. And there’s I suppose, what I’m going to do is agree and disagree.
I don’t think it is all in that individual, but I do think it’s on all of us. So I think for me, generating justice, advancing justice is not something for them to do. It’s not something for politicians or professionals. It’s on all of us
In our individual relationships and our contribution to the social sphere. We actually need to call on that responsibility. Big task for the new year. Right. Sanjay, over to you. For me, I would say that we should have inclusive leadership, not as a trait, to be there in a person
With a leader, but should be practice as being experienced by the fellow colleagues. And when we have inclusive leadership in place, the leader listens to and when the leader listens to the employee feels that he or she is being part of the scheme of things that is there in the department.
And if there is inclusive leadership, whatever we have here, for example, at University of Dundee: diversity, equity and inclusion that can be really practised in a real sense of the term rather than there in the book. Okay. Of those chapters of diversity, equity and inclusion, so inclusive leadership practice, not theory is must.
Thank you. So now I’m going to come to one of the questions online and it’s quite complicated, so it’s on me to try and articulate this and it’s to Sanjay and we’re back to the great resignation. Are people sharing their views on institutional loyalty more often? That’s part one. Part two.
Employees ae simply reacting to the deficit that the employers have shown in their embrace of the neoliberal post-war settlement. So employees are giving back what they see from employers. And finally, is this particularly true of Gen Z, younger people who have less experience of employers being loyal to them? Okay, Thank you.
So it’s both side. I would – looking at my own reading of the literature is not just from the employer that are in deficit or the employee side but it is in both sides. But there is a kind of understanding. Okay. Understanding is the problem we get from employees’
Side is of the employers, the limitations of the employer. Right. And at the same time, the employer has a problem to understand the expectations of the employee. Going to the different generation. Okay. It’s not just Generation Z, but it it’s there. But in Generation Z , the percentage is high
As compared to other generation. So going forward, we need to have again, okay, a kind of view in the organisation. That will come back to the inclusive leadership that if we include the people, people will think that the organisation is thinking about me, listening to me.
Okay, maybe not, but have this practice in place. The great resignation, the talent leakage. Okay, can be reduced significantly. A big challenge for the leadership team in the Court members, inclusive leadership to us all but – dangerous territory. We’re moving towards a close for today. Are there any final questions? Yes, Shawn,
One of our earlier participants certainly has the right to ask a question. Thank you. My question is for Shamima. So I wonder what’s the perspectives from the retailers. So I assume it’s about the cutting costs, (…) All right. So what are some of the perspectives of what you would call ethical practice?
So sorry just to repeat your question from the perspective of the retailers, those, the buyer of all those clothes. Why do they do what they do and stay unethical? Great question! Why did Primark and M&S behave so badly and do this that after all these people died?
I have the same question I think that’s… So, from the findings of our research: again, that it’s the profit motive that actually works in here. Why they go to the global South in the first place for sourcing their product, for their production, for their supply chain why they’re going there?
Cost cutting, cheap labour there. So this profit motive is definitely working here which was ctually impacting and we have seen that during COVID 19, it is even intensified and that has an impact on the suppliers, which in turn impacted the workers. So the whole point of the research and the recommendation is that,
You know, that these retailers need to be more accountable and moving away from this for profit motive perspective. That was tthe expectations from them – now whether they would be doing it or not, that’s a different story. And that’s why we ask that the regulators, they should come in place.
They should come forward with more stringent Regulation Act Bill in this regard. Thank you. Great note to finish on. Can I just say a word in the housekeeping space? We are about to finish in these austere times, there are no drinks today. There will be, if you last until Friday.
But we’re about to conclude by a very, very warm welcome to everybody to come like tomorrow or another day in the same vein, there is kind of coffee and croissant from 9:00 tomorrow and we start at 9:30. So can I bring today’s proceedings, the first day of Discovery Days to a close
And invite you to put your hands together and thank our panellists. Thank you.