13. Decent Work and Economic Growth

Sustainable Development Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, focuses on promoting sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. 

Professor Ito Peng is a Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. Her research and teaching focuses on gender, migration and care policies, and comparative welfare states. She has written extensively on social policies and political economy of care in Asia Pacific, often in comparison with North America and Europe. She just completed a SSHRC funded international partnership research project entitled Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care (2013-2020). She is currently engaged in a new research project, Care Economies in Context: Towards Sustainable Social and Economic Development, funded by SSHRC, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Open Society Foundations (PI – Ito Peng). 

Juyeon Lee is a PhD student in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences program at Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on health inequities, precarious employment, and the political economy of health. Her doctoral research deals with the issue of work-related injuries and deaths in South Korea, centring on critically probing the political economy of occupational health and safety regulatory system in the country. She is currently engaged in a variety of projects in addition to her dissertation work that include Health and the future of work, globally, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and Excess mortality and its inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea, funded by National Medical Center, Seoul, Korea. 

CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the DLSPH, U of T, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Sylvia Lorico. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at U of T.