Publications

​​​​​​​The decades-long trend of a narrowing gender employment gap in Europe has halted in recent years. Now the COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting low-paying service sectors with a high share of social contact, including many with a majority of female workers, risking forcing them out of the labour market. Do these developments threaten to reverse the progress on gender equality achieved so far?

Der Abbau geschlechtsspezifischer Diskrepanzen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt durch die Verwirklichung der gleichberechtigten Erwerbsbeteiligung von Frauen gehört zu den wichtigsten Zielen der neuen Strategie für die Gleichstellung der Geschlechter 2020-2025. Doch trotz deutlicher Fortschritte beim Abbau der geschlechtsspezifischen Beschäftigungsunterschiede ist diesbezüglich in den letzten Jahren ein Stillstand eingetreten. Darüber hinaus ist Segregation in der Beschäftigung über alle Branchen und Berufe hinweg noch immer allgegenwärtig.

​​​​​​​With remote working becoming the new normal for many workers, it is surely the case that many employers are anxious to ensure that their employees are putting in full working days. Companies are likely to be investing in and deploying digital technologies for tracking employee performance much more than before the pandemic. The pervasiveness of new digital technologies – whether for working remotely or in the workplace – has raised a host of new issues and concerns around privacy and data protection as well as work organisation, control and autonomy. When it comes to tracking what employees are doing, there is a balance to be struck between the legitimate business interests of the employer and employees’ right to privacy.

New digital technologies have expanded the possibilities of employee monitoring and surveillance, both in and outside the workplace. In the context of the increasing digitalisation of work, there are many issues related to employee monitoring that warrant the attention of policymakers. As well as the often-cited privacy and ethical concerns, there are also important implications for worker–employer relations, as digitally enabled monitoring and surveillance inevitably shift power dynamics in the workplace.

Die EU strebt die Aufwärtskonvergenz ihrer Mitgliedstaaten an, wonach sich deren Leistungen verbessern und die Unterschiede zwischen ihnen kleiner werden sollten. Fast ein Jahrzehnt nach der großen Rezession hat die COVID-19-Krise dieses Ziel erneut unter Druck gesetzt. Dieser Kurzbericht konzentriert sich auf die Konvergenz in Bezug auf das materielle Wohlbefinden in Europa. Die Entwicklungen bei mehreren Indikatoren folgen weitgehend dem Konjunkturzyklus, mit Aufwärtskonvergenz in guten Zeiten und Abwärtsdivergenz in schlechten Zeiten.

Die Prioritäten von Eurofound für den Zeitraum 2021–2024 werden von den zentralen Herausforderungen des sozialen Zusammenhalts und gerechten Übergängen in einem sich verändernden Umfeld nach der COVID-19-Krise bestimmt. Die Agentur konzentriert sich auf Themen, bei denen sie auf ihre Kernkompetenzen in den Bereichen Arbeitsbedingungen, Arbeitsbeziehungen, Beschäftigung und Lebensbedingungen zurückgreifen kann, um ihre Interessenträger durch Bereitstellung von Fakten, die als Grundlage für deren politische Maßnahmen dienen können, zu unterstützen.

Whatever the benefits of telework – and there are many, including more flexible working time, increased productivity and less commuting – there are drawbacks, as many of the one-third of Europeans who were exclusively working from home during the pandemic will attest. Primary among these is the ‘always on’ culture that telework engenders, encouraging workers to respond to emails, phone calls and texts from work long after the working day or week has ended. This situation may be aggravated if the organisational culture at work incentivises employees to accept heavy workloads and put in overtime, often unpaid. All of which upsets work–life balance, leading to conflicts between work and home life, insufficient rest and health problems like work-related stress and sleep disorders.

An ageing Europe and rising public expenditure on long-term care have signalled for some time that the fundamentals of care provision need to be addressed. However, the shocking death toll in care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that many long-term care services were ill-equipped to protect their vulnerable users have lately focused the public mind on the issue. Most people in the EU will need such care for themselves or someone close to them at some stage in their lives. Demand is already escalating, as the rise in the long-term care workforce – by a third in just a decade – testifies. Calls for a European care strategy rightly insist that care users be listened to, but here we highlight others in the system whose needs deserve attention too.

According to the dictionary, an organisation is an organised group of people with a particular purpose. To achieve this purpose, tasks are divided between the members of the group, and the task of some of those people is to manage the others. Interestingly, whereas most tasks are allocated based on competence and qualifications, the allocation of the task of managing people is often based on a different rationale. Many managers are appointed to their role because they exceled at the tasks that are carried out by the people they are supposed to manage. Many business owners take on the management of their staff, regardless of whether this is where their strengths lie. But people management is not easy and requires skills that, contrary to what is often assumed, are not just learned by doing.

As Europe braces for a winter wave of the Coronavirus, behind the public health indicators that rightly dominate the headlines, a revolution in working life is under way. In early spring, millions of people throughout Europe took their work home and tried to rapidly adjust to the new world in which they found themselves. The unfolding changes in working life from this sharp shock look set to be a 'révolution tranquille', where longstanding principles and practices could be fundamentally changed for decades to come. The decisions that are made now will ultimately determine the nature of how this revolution will unfold, and what it will mean for workers and employers alike.