James Thornton

About James

James Thornton is a labour economist with 13 years of experience in European workforce analytics and comparative employment policy. His work covers wage benchmarking, minimum wage policy, employer cost structures, gender pay gap analysis, and the dynamics of ICT talent markets — the EU-wide analysis that hiring managers, HR directors, and operators need when making workforce location decisions across EU member states.

Before joining Eunomist, James spent six years at Eurofound — the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions — in Dublin, where he contributed to the institution's biennial European Working Conditions Survey and specialised in comparative analysis of wage-setting mechanisms across EU member states. He subsequently joined a London-based human capital consultancy advising multinational employers on European compensation benchmarking and employment law compliance.

At Eunomist, James covers labour market and workforce topics across all 27 EU countries. His analysis connects wage data, employment rates, ICT specialist availability, gender pay gaps, and employer cost structures into decision-relevant intelligence for businesses evaluating where to build or scale their European teams. He holds the view that salary benchmarks without employer-side cost data are actively misleading — and writes to correct that gap.