Personal Statement
Professor Lydia Hayes is Principal Convenor (together with Prof Helen Stalford) of the £5.8 million Centre for People’s Justice, a groundbreaking new Research Centre to change law and lives through community-led research. It is the largest ever investment in the field of law by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The mission of the Centre for People’s Justice is to bring law and social justice research closer to people’s hopes, interests and needs for stronger, fairer and more inclusive societies. It enables community-led research that explores how law and legal systems can better support outcomes like access to good jobs for all, support for families and healthy lives, building communities where everyone feels safe and where everyone has a warm and comfortable home. The purpose is to:
➢ Connect the public more closely to the ways that law is made.
➢ Improve how law and rights are put into practice in everyday life.
➢ Expand public understandings of law and rights, past, present and future.

The Centre is a built on an alliance of 45 organisations from arts and cultural, civic and NGO, corporate and philanthropic, legal and administrative, and academic sectors. It brings together researchers from seven UK universities who have world-leading expertise in research about children and the importance of childhood; about employment, welfare and care; about corporate social responsibility; and about reducing violence and conflict across society.

Lydia's expertise is in employment law and welfare policy, as well as the regulation of public service provision, especially adult social care. Her research explores how law shapes the lives, livelihoods and life chances of people in low wage work. Lydia's research is co-produced with low wage workers, it blends rigorous analysis of statute, case law and regulatory text with data gathered through community writing methods, story-telling, animation, and narrative production.

Prior to joining Liverpool, Lydia was Professor and Head of Kent Law School and a Principal Investigator for Wellcome Trust. She has won awards for research excellence from the Socio-legal Studies Association (SLSA), Society of Legal Scholars (SLS), University of Bristol and Oxford University Press. Lydia has been a visiting scholar at RMIT, Melbourne and was awarded the first Journal of Law and Society Research Fellowship 2013-2016. She has previously worked at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, at the Transport and General Workers Union, at University of Bristol and at Cardiff University. Lydia is a Vice-President of the Institute of Employment Rights and a member of the Berkeley Centre for Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law. Her research has been funded by Leverhulme/British Academy, Wellcome Trust, ILO, Welsh Government, Journal of Law and Society, Wales TUC, UNISON Scotland, UNISON North West, GMB, All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Care, Oxfam UK, European Commission.

Research Overview
As a professor of labour rights, I study (what I call) working people’s law – a tapestry of rights, duties and processes that are intrinsically connected to economic well-being, democratic participation, politics, social citizenship, and public health. The focus of my work to date is on minimum labour rights, welfare entitlement, equality provisions, occupational regulation, trade union law, and the legal organisation of public services, especially adult social care. Terms and conditions of work have a strong influence over life expectancy, risks of mental illness, physical disability, and on our general health as individuals and across society. Where rights for working people fail or are ineffective, public health deteriorates. Most recently, I have been working with food banks and food pantries across Liverpool to build knowledge about how labour rights could better protect people from food insecurity.

Through my research I’m building a case for working people’s law, especially employment and welfare rights, to be reinvigorated and redesigned for the purposes of protecting health. This would make a strong contribution to social justice, to people’s enjoyment of life, to our national productivity, to our economic and social security. I am building evidence about how that might be achieved and why.

I’m also very interested in social care and its importance for communities and societies. My multi-award winning monograph Stories of Care: A Labour of Law, Gender and class at work (2017) argued that design of labour rights excludes care workers from effective protection and exposes them to a process I call ‘institutionalised humiliation’, through which care workers are persistently judged to be inferior labour market participants. Ive since written many papers and articles about the need to support improvements to the quality of care workers’ jobs and the positive impact this would have for the quality of care provided to older and disabled people in need of care and support. As a principal investigator for Welcome Trust on the project Social Care Regulation at Work, I worked with Dr Alison Tarrant and Dr Hannah Walters to establish that the regulatory law designed to ensure safe care provision in England, Scotland and Wales, is also a source of employment norms that are specific to the social care sector. Drawing on data gathered from care inspectors, care home managers and care workers we concluded that if social care regulation was understood more fully as a source of labour standards for the sector, care quality could be improved, and care workers could be better supported and rewarded.

I am gradually building the manuscript for a new monograph, which is about equal pay law. I advance the case for new forms of law to eradicate sex-based low pay and expand our ambitions for what the principle of equal pay ought to mean in the twenty-first century. I look at over one hundred years of campaigning and court decisions to demonstrate that removing discrimination from pay setting is too narrow an objective for equal pay law in contemporary context. I argue that new law is needed to tackle sex-based low pay. If working-class women in low waged work can achieve equal pay, they will achieve access to sufficient income through work, will enjoy working conditions that support good health, and will secure for themselves the fundamental starting point of equal pay for work of equal value, from which effective political voice can grow.