Nobel Prize Economic Sciences laureates Christopher Pissarides, Joseph Stiglitz and Abhijit Banerjee will be joined by Physics laureate Brian Schmidt and Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus to discuss the questions and challenges facing present and future generations of workers and what working life will mean in the future during a Nobel Prize Dialogue to be hosted by the University of Pretoria (UP) on May 18.

UP will host and broadcast the event, which is free and open for anyone to attend online.

Questions that will be raised during the dialogue include what the ‘new normal’ for working life is, what benefits diversity brings to the workplace, how an ageing global population changes the labour market and how the Covid-19 pandemic is changing the nature of work.

“Partnerships such as this one with the Nobel Prize Outreach help in the sharing and co-creation of knowledge. Covid-19 has meant a change in the way we work, with mental health issues on the rise. The workplace is also changing in the face of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” UP Vice-Chancellor and principal Professor Tawana Kupe says.

Kupe looks forward to robust discussions around the benefits of diversity in the workplace and the contribution of ageing populations to the workplace.

The UP Senate is also set to consider the approval and launch of a Centre for the Future of Work two days after the event, he points out.

The event is organised by the Nobel Prize Outreach and UP and aims to bring science and society closer and stimulate creative thinking by gathering Nobel Prize laureates, key opinion leaders, policy makers, students, researchers and the general public, UP says.

The Nobel Prize Dialogues were inspired by the Nobel Week Dialogue, which has been taking place in Sweden since 2012 on the day preceding the Nobel Prize award ceremony. Since then, the dialogues have been organised in many countries across the world, but this will be the first time one takes place on the African continent.

“We are very much looking forward to this cooperation with UP and the first Nobel Prize Dialogue in Africa. We will be joined by five Nobel Prize laureates and several other speakers, sharing insights that will help us understand the challenges we are facing for working life in the future,” says Nobel Prize Outreach CEO Laura Sprechmann.

Other speakers include African Development Bank Group president Dr Akinwumi Adesina, Murdoch University professor Eeva Leinonen, and lawyer and former JSE CEO Nicky Newton-King.

Interested persons are invited to register at www.nobelprize.org/future-of-work.