Thomas Hastings

An Economic/Labour Geographer by training, my research interests span the related subject areas of Political Economy, Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management. Since completing my PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2011 (a labour geography of call centre work) I have worked in different schools of Management/Business in Oxford, Sheffield and Belfast respectively (in addition to a short spell at the School of Geography at Plymouth University). Over the course of this journey I have gained a broad repertoire of teaching and research experiences and areas of interest, and have undertaken numerous research projects which link (one way or another) to work experiences, labour rights and the politics of labour market regulation. Themes include:

The political economy of labour market institutions. This has included research on behalf of the International Labour Organisation into labour administration and the critical appraisal of the EU Flexicurity agenda with Professor Jason Heyes (University of Sheffield).

Labour inspection and the enforcement of worker rights. In 2015 I co-authored a toolkit on labour inspection on behalf of the ILO (with Jason Heyes). Extending Labour Inspection to the Informal Economy is available online and is intended as a tool for training labour inspectors throughout different regions of the world.

Institutional approaches to regulating unlawful work arrangements. This has included a focus on bogus self-employment and the use of fraudulent letterbox companies in the EU for publication on the EC’s European Platform Tackling Undeclared Work.

I also maintain a longstanding interest in exploring worker agencies and experiences of modern work, drawing and contributing to debates in the Labour Process Theory (LPT) tradition and Labour Geography.