van Houten, Gijs

The COVID-19 pandemic compelled governments to take exceptional measures to monitor and control the spread of the Coronavirus. Among them was the introduction in most EU Member States of tracking apps to gather data on citizens who have contracted the virus and to trace their contacts, a measure that inevitably traded off privacy protection for effective infection prevention.

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.

This report is based on the fourth edition of the European Company Survey (ECS), which was carried out jointly by Eurofound and Cedefop in 2019. It describes a wide range of practices and strategies implemented by European co...

Occupation is a critical factor in determining the type of working conditions a person will experience during their professional life. This report explores the working conditions of workers – particularly medium-to-low skilled and unskilled – in occupations that are found to have low levels of job quality as measured by four key indicators: earnings, prospects, working time and intrinsic job quality.

The third wave of Eurofound’s European Company Survey was carried out in 2013. It surveyed management representatives in over 24,000 establishments; where available, employee representatives were also interviewed – in 6,800 of these establishments.

Job quality indexes are constructed on the basis of such aspects of working conditions as earnings, prospects, working time, and intrinsic job quality. Occupations where job quality is consistently low are labelled ‘occupations with multi...

This report and the accompanying 33 sectoral information sheets aim to capture the diversity prevalent across sectors in Europe in terms of working conditions and job quality. The information sheets indicate how workers in each sector compa...

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.

Work plays a pivotal role in people’s lives, in the functioning of companies and in society at large. Improving the quality of work and working conditions has long been at the forefront of EU policy, most recently in the Europe 2020 Strat...