Sue Konzelmann and Frank Wilkinson

16 August 2015

Tony Blair’s assertion that the Labour Party faces “annihilation” if Jeremy Corbyn is elected leader, is little short of astonishing. Just three months ago in Scotland, Labour actually was annihilated – by the rise of the SNP, a left-of-centre party, opposed to austerity and strongly supported by young people. Currently, the Scottish Labour Party is being rejuvenated by the prospects of Corbyn as leader. It is clearly fanciful to suppose that Labour faces crushing defeat simply because opposing austerity will make it look too left wing.

28 January 2015

By Sue Konzelmann and Frank Wilkinson.

Osborne argues that the economy is on the road to recovery. Cameron claims that the government is well on the way to reducing the national debt. So how come most people still feel under-paid, over-charged and living on the edge? In the second of a series of blog pieces, Frank Wilkinson and Sue Konzelman expose the fiction behind the government’s financial arguments. Analysing the UK’s history of economic performance, they conclude that austerity doesn’t work. It hasn’t in the past and it won’t in the future.

Dr. Frank Wilkinson

founder member of Institute for Employment Rights,; Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; Emeritus Reader, University of Cambridge; and Visiting Professor, Birkbeck College, University of London.

Qualifications: Diploma in Economics, University of Oxford; BA, MA and Ph.D. University of Cambridge.

Career: Left school at 15 in 1949. Worked as farm worker, army cook (national service) and ironworker. Ruskin College, Oxford, 1961-63. Kings College, Cambridge, 1963-1969. Researcher, in University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Economics 1969 to retirement.. Currently teaching on trade union degree course at Birkbeck College. Chairman of the Cambridge Political Economy Society, Editor of Cambridge Journal of Economics; Founder member and executive committee member of the Institute for Employment Rights.

Research: Concerned mainly with the effects of institutions and organisations on economic performance.
There are four broad fields:
¹ the effects of institutions and organisations on work organisation, wage systems, employment relationships and labour market structures;
² the interaction between trends in real wages, collective bargaining, incomes policy and inflationary processes;
³ the economic and socio-legal analysis of labour regulation and social security systems and their effect on income distribution, economic and social deprivation, social exclusion, job security and; work intensity and
⁴ the effects of differences between productive systems in organisations and institutions and their influence on inter- and intra-firm relationships and industrial performance.

17 December

By Sue Konzelmann, a Reader in Management at Birkbeck, University of London and Frank Wilkinson, a founder member of the Institute for Employment Rights and Emeritus Reader, University of Cambridge.

Both Government and Opposition spokespersons offer the same dire warning. They claim that anything other than persistent austerity will “return the country to the 1930s”. Such claims demonstrate their complete ignorance of what was actually achieved in the 1930s.