<![CDATA[jheSOLUTIONS - Blog]]>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 02:45:17 +0100Weebly<![CDATA[NI Good Jobs Bill: Bigger Questions Left Unheard and Unanswered]]>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:17:49 GMThttps://www.jhesolutions.com/blog/ni-good-jobs-bill-bigger-questions-left-unheard-and-unansweredNorthern Ireland's Good Jobs Employment Rights Bill is heading toward Assembly scrutiny, and the positions are hardening in the way these things do. Business organisations, understandably, are coordinating around concerns about cost, complexity and timing. Trade unions are pressing for stronger enforcement and broader collective rights. Both camps are increasingly talking past each other, and increasingly talking at government rather than to it.

I understand why. Business genuinely fears cost and loss of flexibility over how it engages with its workforces. Trade unions genuinely fear that, after a long wait for reform, the Bill could be diluted or delayed before it ever reaches the statute book. Both fears are rational. Both positions are defensible on their own terms.
But both positions share a weakness: neither side has been asked, and neither side has answered, what Northern Ireland's labour market should look like in 2030, with or without this legislation. Until that question is on the table, we are negotiating the present while the future arrives anyway.

The loss frame, and why it produces small thinking
When people feel they are at risk of losing something, whether money, control, leverage, protections, they become defensive. That's not a flaw in either business or the trade union movement. It's how negotiating positions form when stakes feel high and trust is low. The difficulty is that a loss frame narrows the conversation to who wins and who loses on the Bill as drafted, rather than what either side wants the world of work in Northern Ireland to look like a decade from now.

That's worth sitting with for a moment, because neither side currently has a good answer to it. If the Bill passes broadly as planned, which worker's working life will be materially better in 2029, and how? If AI and automation continue reshaping roles at their current pace, and the evidence says they will, which provisions of this Bill will still be doing meaningful work by 2030, and which will have been quietly overtaken by a labour market that has moved on?

An engagement forum should be debating this, a genuine social dialogue and partnership would be building trust and engagement. In this dialogue some of the answers will be uncomfortable for everyone, and that discomfort is exactly where a more useful conversation begins. How this bill emerged and the gestation period has been bad for everyone and the Department for Economy need to reflect on this.

What the Bill does, and what it leaves unfinished
To be clear: the Good Jobs Bill addresses real problems. Insecure hours, fire and rehire, weak pay transparency, and especially miscarriage leave, these are legitimate issues and the Bill deserves serious scrutiny rather than reflexive opposition or uncritical support.

But it appears to have been substantially shaped by labour market conditions as they stood over the past decade. And one of its most structurally significant provisions, a new right for trade unions to access workplaces, including digitally, alongside a lowered recognition threshold, sits at the centre of a much bigger question that I don't think has had the attention it deserves: why is voice and representation the dimension of "good work" that legislation has chosen to prioritise, when frameworks like Carnegie's Measuring Good Work identify seven dimensions, including job design, wellbeing, and management quality, that arguably shape people's day-to-day experience of work just as much, if not more?

There's a coherent argument that voice and representation is the dimension where legislation is the right tool, because it's about institutional architecture, rights and access, which law does well, while job design and management quality are shaped by culture and practice, which law struggles to mandate directly. There's also a less comfortable possibility: that this is the dimension with an organised constituency pushing hardest for legislative change, while the dimensions that may matter more to people's daily experience of work were left to guidance and codes of practice because no one was pushing as hard for them.

What New Zealand actually tells us
The Department has explicitly looked to New Zealand's Employment Relations Act 2000 as a model for the access right. It's worth understanding what that Act actually was, and what it actually did.

The 2000 Act was a deliberate course correction after a decade of extreme labour market deregulation under the 1991 Employment Contracts Act, a reform explicitly framed by its architect as "a statutory framework for balance in the workplace." It went well beyond access rights: good faith obligations between employers and unions, mediation as the first port of call for disputes, a dedicated Employment Relations Authority and Employment Court. Access rights were one part of a much larger institutional ecosystem.

And a quarter-century on, the evidence is sobering for anyone expecting legislative architecture alone to transform outcomes. Collective bargaining coverage continued to decline for years after the 2000 Act came into force, the opposite of what the reform intended. Research in the early 2000s found no sustained growth in collective bargaining despite the new framework. And going back further, the deregulation of the 1990s, which removed union influence and collective bargaining from much of the economy, produced no clear evidence of improved productivity either.

Neither direction of travel, on its own, appears to have been the dominant driver of New Zealand's economic outcomes.

The lesson I take from this isn't that voice and representation rights don't matter. It's that legislative architecture, transplanted without the wider ecosystem that gave it meaning in its country of origin, and without a parallel strategy on skills, productivity and firm capability, is unlikely to be transformative on its own. That's not an argument against the Good Jobs Bill. It's an argument against treating it as sufficient.

The bigger shift neither side has reckoned with
While the debate over the Bill continues, something larger is already underway. AI and digital technology aren't coming for "jobs" as abstract categories, they're reshaping tasks and roles from the inside, in factories and offices, across every sector. The data is unambiguous: the fastest-changing occupational profiles are concentrated in exactly the sectors that matter most to Northern Ireland's growth ambitions. Skills demand is shifting faster than training systems can respond, and training participation drops away precisely when workers most need it, after the first few months in a job.

In that context, a Bill focused primarily on terms, conditions and representation, without a parallel commitment to a Right to Learn, to genuine social partnership infrastructure, and to shared ownership of how work itself is redesigned as technology changes it, risks being a regulatory response to the world as it was, just as the world moves on.

For business, the redesign of roles driven by AI and automation is happening now, regardless of what this Bill says. The choice is whether that redesign happens unilaterally, with the resistance, turnover and risk that tends to follow, or with structured employee input, which the evidence consistently shows produces better outcomes for everyone, including the bottom line.

For trade unions, a model of influence built around bargaining over terms and conditions in stable job descriptions is increasingly inadequate when the job description itself is what's changing. Being in the room when roles are redesigned is, I'd suggest, more consequential for members' futures than recognition thresholds alone.

Where this leaves us
The Bill could be described as a floor. Elements are absolutely essential and necessary, and it deserves to proceed to serious, evidence-led scrutiny. But a floor is not a strategy, and the question that should be occupying everyone involved, government, business, unions, and the Assembly committees now beginning their work, is what sits above it.

A Right to Learn. Social partnership body with a genuine mandate, something Northern Ireland has never had. A shared commitment to co-designing how AI and automation reshape work, rather than leaving that to happen unilaterally or fighting it after the fact.
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None of that requires anyone to give up their current position on the Bill. It requires everyone to recognise that the Bill was wrong answer to the question. Start, now, on the conversation about what the right of the answer looks like. The alternative is a labour market settlement built for 2024, defended fiercely by everyone, while 2030 arrives regardless.
 
 
]]><![CDATA[Good Jobs – Why Enhanced Rights Won’t Turn the Curve]]>Wed, 20 May 2026 08:44:03 GMThttps://www.jhesolutions.com/blog/good-jobs-why-enhanced-rights-wont-turn-the-curveThe Good Jobs Bill is built on a good instinct. Work should be fair. People should be treated with dignity. Employment rights matter.

But good intentions do not automatically make good policy. And right now, Northern Ireland is not just risking but directly confusing more regulation with better work. Having worked and led businesses over the past two decades in both unionised and non-unionised environments, I have seen what creates genuinely good jobs in practice.

I have seen the value of consistency, structure and worker voice. I have seen union-led learning transform confidence and capability. I have also seen how flexibility, trust and responsiveness in smaller organisations can unlock productivity and innovation at speed. Businesses where the partnership and personal bond between owner and their team is the secret sauce no formal structure can ever replicate.

Good work is rarely created by legislation alone.

It is created when employers, employees and government work together to shape jobs that are productive, adaptable and developmental.

This is where this Bill falls short.

It strengthens process but says too little about performance. It creates obligations but offers no institutional support for partnership. It talks about fairness but says too little about the skills and health challenges holding back participation and growth. This matters because Northern Ireland’s labour market is not fundamentally suffering from a lack of employment law.
It is suffering from deeper structural weaknesses:
  1. persistent skills shortages across key sectors  
  2. high economic inactivity linked to long-term sickness  
  3. weak productivity growth  
  4. rising concern around youth unemployment and labour market entry
These are not issues that procedural reform alone can solve. There is a real risk that if implemented without broader reform, the Bill delivers three unintended consequences.

First, it could push employers, particularly SMEs, toward defensive compliance rather than workforce investment. The impact of this will be stark, NI is a SME economy and lack of growth in these businesses will suffocate supply chains, regional balance and productivity.

Second, it could make labour market entry harder for younger and less experienced workers at precisely the wrong moment. We have seen violence on our streets in Londonderry / Derry, East Belfast, drug deaths, suicide and a despair, even anger, in young people not seen for decades. At a time when parts of Northern Ireland are already grappling with deep social strain, from mental ill-health to disengagement and reduced economic participation among younger people, any reform that inadvertently narrows labour market entry routes would carry consequences well beyond employment statistics.

Third, it could create more formal process without creating the trust and partnership needed to reduce workplace conflict. Legislation can establish minimum standards, but most of the legislation just extends the reach rather than supporting an outcome. That is not good legislation.
At best and broadest the legislation creates a new base with no ambition or insight as to how it will deliver change. That is a low bar for success and impact.

The remainder will need to be built through:
–    co-created job design  
–    investment in learning and progression  
–    social dialogue that builds trust rather than procedural confrontation

This is why Northern Ireland needs more than a bill with the term “good jobs” tagged on. It needs a Good Jobs settlement. That means embedding a Right to Learn. It means creating stronger routes for union learning and workforce upskilling. It means building  social partnership infrastructure, building understanding, trust and long-term planning for activity. It also means an economic plan for Northern Ireland.

The original principles that founded the trade union movement were protection of workers from exploitation, helping people access learning and progression, resolving disputes constructively and acting as a stabilising influence in difficult organisational change. This legislation does some of this but also moves toward some of the areas that concern employers, and this must be recognised:
  • overly procedural rather than relational – focused on process and not problem solving
  • adversarial by default, assumes conflict over partnership
  • aligned too closely to philosophical positions than delivering improved workplace outcomes
  • protection of existing structures at the expense of adaptation that risks missing the need to enable workforce redesign, innovation or productivity reform 
  • does not address inconsistency in representative quality, this is vital, excellent local reps build trust, poor one’s damage relationships, often permanently
Where trade unionism is strongest, it builds capability, trust, learning and constructive challenge. Where it becomes overly procedural, reflexively adversarial or resistant to adaptation, it risks drifting from the principles that made it relevant and impactful in the first place.

Northern Ireland cannot afford to build labour market policy around the assumptions of the economy we have left behind, shaped by post-pandemic adjustments, demographic changes and sustained energy cost volatility.
Energy volatility, technological disruption, demographic pressure, youth disengagement and global competitive strain demand something more ambitious than procedural reform.

This Bill may strengthen baseline protections, especially in things like ‘fire and re-hire”. But unless it is matched by a serious settlement around learning, productivity and social partnership economic growth will at best stall, or worse shrink. 

We are legislating for the last decade not the next decade.
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That would not be good enough for workers, employers or Northern Ireland’s future.
]]><![CDATA[Education for Engagement: Time to Rethink How Schools Can Shape Economic Engagement Opportunities for Students]]>Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:13:42 GMThttps://www.jhesolutions.com/blog/june-10th-2025
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Northern Ireland stands at a crossroads, a famous comment, often overplayed, overused and overemphasised. Having flagged the extent of not building policy that can have positive impact, education loomed large into view. The second largest budget, after Health, neither can be said to be delivering the outcomes we need.
 
With economic inactivity costing the economy up to £9 billion per year, we must ask difficult but necessary questions about our education system. Are we preparing our young people not just to pass exams, but to engage meaningfully with the world of work, training, and enterprise? Or are we inadvertently contributing to the very problem we seek to solve?
 
The answer may lie somewhere in between. But one thing is certain: the current trajectory of secondary education is not aligned with the economic needs of Northern Ireland or the potential of our young people. The default to reforming multiple sectors is not going to change the outcome, playing academic verses technical and vocational is not the answer, it is about rebuilding a sector around the learners needs.
 
The Disconnect: Curriculum vs Capability
For too long, the structure of secondary education has prioritised academic pathways, often at the expense of practical skills, vocational insight, and real-world readiness. This system suits some, but fails many, particularly those from lower-income backgrounds or with different learning styles. It's no coincidence that NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) rates remain stubbornly high among 16–24-year-olds.
 
Students disengage because what they learn feels irrelevant. They don’t see the connection between their maths lesson and a future in software engineering, or between their science class and a role in advanced manufacturing. And when they leave school, often without clear direction, they risk becoming part of the economic inactivity statistics we must do more to reduce.
 
Is Current Policy Helping?
The Department for Education has made strides, with programmes like Engage, Restart, and enhanced careers guidance. But these interventions often come too late, tacked on at Key Stage 4, when disengagement has already taken root. A sharper focus is needed at Key Stage 3 and transition years (14–16), when young people begin to shape their identity and ambition.
 
And while curriculum review and mental health support are welcome, the real test is whether these policies build bridges to the world beyond school gates.
 
A Better Path: Collaboration Is the Catalyst
The good news? The answers are already within reach—and Further Education (FE) colleges are key to unlocking them.
Imagine a system where 14-year-olds can sample real industries, where project-based learning is co-delivered with local employers, and where teachers partner with FE tutors to blend academic and vocational routes without stigma.
 
FE colleges have proven expertise in helping people transition into work. From digital apprenticeships to green skills bootcamps, they are agile, industry-facing and rooted in community need. But too often, they are an afterthought in policy design, when they should be front and centre.
 
What Could It Look Like?
  • Early vocational taster programmes delivered jointly between schools and colleges
  • Employer-led challenge weeks in curriculum time
  • Flexible 14–19 pathways that allow for mixing GCSEs with BTECs, micro credentials, and work experience
  • Incentives for schools to partner with FE providers, not compete with them
 
The Prize: Purpose, Progress, Productivity
A young person who understands their value and sees a future for themselves is less likely to become economically inactive. By realigning the education system to meet both learner potential and labour market need, we give young people the chance to thrive and Northern Ireland the workforce it needs to grow.
 
Let’s not wait for another generation to slip through the cracks. Let’s build a system where education ignites opportunity, not exclusion. It’s time the NI Executive, Education and Economy departments broke out of self-interest and protectionism to support schools, FE colleges, and employers to work in synergy for the future of our young people, and the prosperity of our economy. Pockets of this type of activity, working outside of the system are delivering, it now should be completely mainstream, ending the exam factory system of today.
 
]]><![CDATA[Rebalancing the System: Rethinking Economic Inactivity and Policy Culture in Northern Ireland]]>Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:24:22 GMThttps://www.jhesolutions.com/blog/june-04th-2025In a society where nearly one in four working-age adults is economically inactive, the question is no longer whether we need change, but whether we are structurally capable of delivering it.

Northern Ireland’s economic inactivity rate remains the highest in the UK. Despite decades of policy attention, the underlying causes are well documented: long-term sickness, caring responsibilities, early retirement, and low engagement in adult learning persist. The challenge is not a lack of data or diagnosis. It is a question of political will, institutional agility, and cultural readiness to act.

A System Designed to Sustain the Status Quo?
Northern Ireland’s public sector is large by any comparative measure. The Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) employs over 23,000 people, and public sector employment accounts for more than a quarter of the workforce, far higher than in England or the Republic of Ireland. This scale brings stability, but it also brings inertia.

The NICS is predominantly middle-class, degree-educated, and urban-based. It is a system that, by design or default, reflects the values and priorities of those who work within it. This is not a critique of individuals, but of a culture that prizes process over outcomes, and continuity over disruption.

Too often, policy is shaped by what is administratively convenient rather than what is socially transformative. Investment flows to institutions that already exist, rather than to the communities that need them most. The result is a system that manages disadvantage rather than resolving it.

The Cost of Comfort
This middle-class policy bias manifests in subtle but powerful ways. Funding for Further Education (FE) colleges—those most likely to serve economically inactive adults—is consistently lower than for universities. Health spending prioritises acute care over prevention. Employment programmes focus on those closest to the labour market, not those furthest from it.

The cost of this comfort is hard to properly estimate, if it is extrapolated from wider UK data the cost of economic inactivity to Northern Ireland is between £6.7 and £9.2billion! This is a combination of lost economic output, public spending on welfare and health interventions, foregone tax revenues and the social costs of higher crime rates (sustained by the scourge of so-called paramilitarism) mental health impacts and the burden of caregiving, which impacts women disproportionality. 

Meanwhile, the people most affected by economic inactivity, older workers with health conditions, women with caring responsibilities, young people without qualifications remain on the margins of policy design. Their voices are rarely heard in the rooms where decisions are made. 

Learning from Elsewhere
Contrast this with the Basque Country in Spain. There, economic inactivity among working-age adults is around 15%, almost half the rate in Northern Ireland. The difference is not demographic; it is strategic.

The Basque model integrates vocational education, employment services, and social care. FE colleges are empowered to co-design curricula with employers. Modular, flexible learning is the norm. Occupational health is embedded in job centres. And most importantly, the system is designed around the needs of people, not the convenience of institutions.

A Call to Leadership
Northern Ireland does not lack talent, compassion, or creativity. What it lacks is a system that rewards boldness and centres lived experience. We need a civil service that reflects the diversity of the society it serves. We need policymaking that is co-designed with communities, not just consulted after the fact. And we need investment that is judged by its impact, not its alignment with existing structures.

This is not a call for revolution, but for rebalancing. For shifting the gravitational pull of the system away from the centre and toward the edges. For recognising that the status quo is not neutral, it is a choice. And it is a choice we can no longer afford to make.

The Conversation Starts Here
This note and thoughts contained is not a conclusion. It is an invitation, an invitation to everyone in Northern Ireland,  politicians, civil servants, educators, and citizens. An invitation to ask harder questions and imagine better answers. What would it take to build a system that truly works for everyone? And what are we prepared to change to get there? 

The measure of who we are, is what we do, with what we have – Vince Lombardi

]]><![CDATA[Is Purpose a Business & Personal True North?]]>Wed, 14 Apr 2021 08:40:17 GMThttps://www.jhesolutions.com/blog/is-purpose-a-business-personal-true-northOur “true north” is said to be the internal compass that acts as a guide towards success and achievement. It is your orienting point – your fixed point in a spinning world, that helps you stay on track as a leader. As we face uncertainty and paradigm shifts never experience or faced before personally or in business. In these stressful, surreal times, it is understandable for directors to fixate on the urgent business priorities at the expense of the more intangible or personal considerations. How important is it to ensure we and those in our organisations think about purpose?
 
The Rush Memory & Aging project, which began in 1997, finds that when comparing patients who say they have a personal sense of purpose with those who say they don’t, the former are:
  • 2.5 times more likely to be dementia free
  • 22percent less likely to exhibit factors for stroke
  • 52percent less like to have experienced a stroke
 
What is seen in personal experience of purpose can also be said of purpose in a business setting. Purpose can be an important contributor to employee experience, which in turn is linked to higher levels of employee engagement, stronger organisational commitment, and increased feelings of well-being. People who find their individual purpose congruent with their jobs tend to get more meaning from their roles, making them more productive and more likely to outperform their peers. McKinsey research finds a positive correlation between the purposefulness of employees and their company’s EBITDA margin.
 
In boardrooms real and virtual, frantic questions have the floor. How long will this last? How will we pay furloughed workers? What are our peers doing? What should we do first? In moments of crisis, the default expectation is that businesses will hunker down and focus on bottom-line fundamentals. But in this crisis, stakeholder needs are already so acute that the opportunity for businesses to make an indelible mark with human support, empathy, and purpose is greater than it has ever been.

  • Understand Stakeholder Needs – Examine exactly what is at stake for your employees, communities, customers, partners, and owners. All will have urgent, rapidly evolving needs that you should fully understand and prioritize. Some of these needs will be new and require creative thinking. Listen carefully to stakeholders that are well placed to inform you.
 
  • Utilise Your Greatest Strengths – What strengths does our businesses possess that you can apply to make the biggest difference for your stakeholders? Strong balance sheets have been used to sustain workers through the crisis. Unique logistics networks have been used to bring aid to people in need. Many manufacturing facilities have shifted production to creating urgently needed medical supplies or PPE. Resist going it alone. Collaborate closely with your ecosystem of suppliers and customers—they might identify strengths you didn’t even know you had.
 
  • Involve Your Team – Many employees and their families are suffering from isolation and loss of income, leaving them thinking about what is truly important. Crisis leaders’ actions now can foster collective unity and a sense of belonging. When those decisions derive from the principles and purpose that a business stands for it will make it easier to convey confidence in positive outcomes, even when decisions are painful ones.
 
  • Lead from the Front – communicate early and frequently, even with incomplete information. Remember that, right now, suffering stakeholders seek empathy but are also looking to leaders to face facts bluntly, without sugar-coating them. Stay nimble as situations change, which they certainly will. Adapt to changing conditions and new information rather than returning to a static playbook
 
Finally, decisions about purpose may be some of the more difficult decisions of your career. There will be a cacophony of opinions; adjudicating them will take discipline and conviction. There may be thinner evidence to guide your actions than you would like. Don’t let yourself be rushed. Establish a fact base to help you weigh trade-offs and mitigate risks. 
 
Above all, don’t settle for “generic” on purpose. You do have a “true north” to discover, and unique impact to deliver. Each company’s role stretches far beyond the confines of your employees and customers. Our suppliers will look for guidance, peers will look for inspiration. And society will hold us as directors accountable for leaving the world a better place than it was when we started.]]>