Better work and life

EU Presidency conference on:

Better work and life: Towards an inclusive and competitive enlarged Union - 12-13 May 2003, Alexandroupolis, Greece

Co-organised by the Greek Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions

Speech abstract - Pascal Paoli

Research coordinator, European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions

Monitoring quality of work and employment in Europe

The paper will review the context, objectives and main implications of monitoring the quality of work and employment, and discuss the main issues and challenges highlighted by the European surveys on working conditions. The context of these surveys is the European Union objective to increase employment participation rates. Achieving this objective requires not only the creation of jobs, but also the creation of better jobs. Thus debate has focused on what are better jobs and how to monitor progress in this area.

The EU wide surveys have taken place every five years since 1990 to provide overviews on quality of work and employment. They are questionnaire surveys based on face to face interviews of workers. In 2000, 21,500 people were questionned. In 2001 the survey was extended to 13 countries which have applied for EU membership. In 2005, 28 countries will be covered. A company survey is now being developed to complement workers' reporting with corporate reporting.

The EU surveys have contributed to putting quality of work back on the political agenda. In fact, throughout the 1990s it was frequently assumed that quality of work was improving naturally. The surveys, complemented by more analytical research, have showed that this was not the case. Among the key issues which have been highlighted and which will be further described in the presentation are:

• the increase in flexible time patterns

• the increase and impact of contingent work

• gender segregation

• increase in work intensity

• uneven distribution of working hours in the context of overall time reduction.

These changes and issues lead to the need to reconsider OHS policies, in particular the need to develop multidisciplinarity, internal control and more prevention-oriented insurance systems. Beyond these policy aspects, consideration should also be given to several issues including:

• the need to develop key synthetical indicators to support policy making

• the difficulties of international comparisons

• the difficulties of interpreting the figures, due to different cultural, socio-economical contexts, and the necessary link between quantitative and qualitative research.

Pascal Paoli is Coordinator of the Working Conditions team, in charge of the European Surveys on Working Conditions. Pascal was previously a programme manager in the French National Agency for Working Life (ANACT) and the Labour Inspectorate in France.