Storrie, Donald

This report examines developments in non-standard employment over the last decade. It looks at trends in the main categories of non-standard employment – temporary, temporary agency and part-time work and self-employment – based mainly on data from the European Union Labour Force Survey.

The 2016 annual report from the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) provides evidence of the employment impact of recent restructuring activity in Europe based on the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and the ERM events database. The thematic part of this year’s report centres on trends in both the offshoring and reshoring activity of companies in Europe, with a focus on the manufacturing sector.

The European Restructuring Monitor’s annual report for 2014 explores the rapid transformation of the public sector in Europe since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. Initially, employment expansion in the sector helped to stabilise Europe’s economy while the private sector suffered severe job losses. However, subsequent austerity measures (or fiscal consolidation) have brought in their wake widespread restructuring in the public sector.

The 2013 annual report from the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) presents a retrospective of over a decade of measuring the impact of large-scale restructuring activity in Europe. Based on a database containing details of over 16,000 large-scale restructuring events– each generally involving at least 100 job losses or gains – it paints a picture of restructuring trends across the EU Member States. The report sets out to compare activity in the period leading up to the economic and financial crisis (2003–2008) with the post-crisis period (2008–2013), in order to identify changes in restructuring practices and to pinpoint the sectors that have been disproportionately affected, in employment terms, by the global recession. Also included is a critical assessment of all ERM activities, including the two newer policy-oriented databases: public support instruments and restructuring legislation. Finally, the report places the spotlight on the phenomenon of offshoring, charting the decline in offshoring activity by European firms since the onset of the crisis.

This report describes recent structural shifts in employment in European labour markets before, during and after the 2008–2009 recession. It finds that employment destruction across Europe in the recession was strongly polarising in terms of the wage structure, while there was less polarisation in 2010–2012. A jobs based approach identifies how net employment shifts at Member State and EU level have been distributed across jobs in different quintiles of the wage distribution.

The ERM Report 2012 focuses on the consequences of restructuring for employees. It examines which employees lost their job at the onset of the economic crisis, which of them found a new job and how both job loss and subsequent re-employment impacted on their overall life situation and satisfaction. It also looks at the impact on working conditions for employees who remain at the restructured firm. Both these studies, of those who lost their jobs and those who stayed at the restructured workplace, have never before been analysed by using common, EU-wide and representative, datasets. The report also provides an overview of recent restructuring using the ERM database. While restructuring cases reporting job loss have fallen since the peak of 2009, they still outnumber announcements of job gain. Several recent cases testify to serious problems in the once very promising alternative energy sector in Europe. The findings show that much of the recently announced job creation is in the hotels and retail sectors.

Of all the future challenges facing labour markets in Europe, none is more certain than the demographic imbalances resulting from the lower birth cohorts after the post-war ‘baby boom’ and the continual increase in life expectancy. Indeed, this has already led to a significant shift in the age structure in practically all European countries. This paper was produced as a discussion paper for the European Commission’s thematic review seminar on ‘Employment policies to promote active ageing’, which took place in Brussels on 11 June 2012.

This national report examines the main trends in temporary agency work and the problems and challenges it poses in Sweden. It puts the spotlight on the working conditions of temporary agency workers, and the specific features of such work that might help explain these conditions.

The report provides an overview of the literature on innovative work practices and starts with an inventory of the many practices have been identified as innovative. The analytical part of the paper is based on Eurofound’s own European Co...

This report describes the impact of the ‘great recession’ on employment and the job structure in the EU27. It finds that despite a net loss of over five million jobs between 2008–2010, employment continued to grow in top-paying jobs, largely in knowledge-intensive services and business services. Meanwhile, sharp losses in medium-paying jobs in construction and manufacturing led to a shrinking of employment in the middle of the wage spectrum. More jobs were lost to men than to women and employment levels of older workers grew while those of core-age and, in particular, younger workers declined. Part-time work expanded across the wage spectrum while levels of temporary employment began to recover quickly from 2009 onwards after having borne the brunt of the early-recession job losses.