The ideal worker is always available, never ill, and completely unencumbered by care. No one actually is and I want to write about that gap.
I’m Asli, a Senior Policy Researcher at the Work Foundation, where I focus on employment, health, and the labour market. I studied Sociology and Political Science at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, then took my masters at Cambridge — two cities that taught me to ask very different questions about how societies organise work and who gets left behind.
I’ve lived in London for over eight years now, which means I get to watch British labour market policy up close, from the inside, with the useful outsider instinct of someone who didn’t grow up assuming this is just how things are.
On The Ideal Worker, I write about work as a policy problem, a human experience, and occasionally a philosophical puzzle. You’ll find analysis of what government is actually doing, research I’m conducting into the people policy tends to overlook, and the occasional detour into why the GDP debate reminds me of a scene from Veep.
If any of that sounds like your kind of thing — subscribe. I’d love to have you here.
