Research

Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production 

The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) studies what happens to workers as production and supply chains become increasingly global. Its research covers issues such as insecure employment, labour standards, worker representation, unpaid work, child labour and the environmental impact of production.

Researchers also look at the policies that can improve conditions, including trade agreements, employment regulation and the purchasing power of public organisations. This brings together expertise from development studies, geography, political economy, management, history and anthropology to examine not only how jobs are created, but also whether those jobs are fair, secure and sustainable. 

Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity  

Queen Mary’s Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity (CRED) studies inequality in workplaces and labour markets, including who gets hired, who progresses and who reaches leadership positions. Its researchers have contributed to long-running work on women’s representation on the boards of major UK companies.

Women now hold 43.4% of FTSE 350 board positions, but Queen Mary research has also shown why headline representation figures do not tell the whole story. Women can be well represented on boards overall while remaining less visible in the most powerful executive roles, such as Chief Executive or Chair. That distinction helps shift the conversation from simply counting representation to understanding progression, influence and access to decision-making.

Globalisation, development and inequality

The Centre for Globalisation Research examines how international trade, financial systems, migration and labour markets shape economic development. Its work explores why the benefits of economic growth are distributed unevenly and how global economic changes affect jobs, wages and opportunities in different countries and communities.

This research complements Queen Mary’s work on workplace equality by placing individual employment experiences within the much larger economic systems that influence them.

Case study: Queen Mary and the Living Wage movement

Queen Mary has been closely connected with the Living Wage movement since its early days in East London. Research carried out at the University helped document the experiences of people living on low pay and insecure work. That evidence fed into a community-led campaign arguing that wages should reflect what people actually need to live, rather than simply meeting the legal minimum.

Queen Mary went on to become the first UK university accredited as a Living Wage employer in 2006 and has been a Principal Partner of the Living Wage Foundation since 2008. In 2026, the University marked 25 years since the beginnings of the East London Living Wage campaign, which grew from a local movement into a national campaign involving employers across the UK. It is a good example of research having a practical effect beyond academia: evidence about low pay helped inform campaigning, which in turn influenced the way Queen Mary and other employers thought about wages and working conditions.