Foden, David

Despite the well-known adverse effects of regular long working hours on workers’ health, well-being and performance, many workers in the EU continue to work beyond their normal hours. Part of this additional working time is classified as ...

As part of its mandate to promote dialogue between management and labour, Eurofound has monitored and analysed developments in industrial relations systems at EU level and in EU Member States for over 40 years. This flagship report is based...

The aim of this report is to add to the discussion on how Eurofound can contribute to supporting capacity building of social partners for effective social dialogue. The report includes a review by Eurofound aimed at identifying the capacity...

The European Commission continues to consult on the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights, with a focus on assessing the EU social acquis, reflecting on new trends in work patterns and societies, and getting feedback on the outline of Pillar itself. Eurofound has generated a wealth of evidence on topics central to the Pillar including minimum wages, gender equality, youth employment, platform work, and an ageing society, and provides an essential knowledge source for the EU institutions, Member States and social partners as they implement the Pillar in 2020 and beyond.

Job quality is a major focus of policymakers around the world. For workers, the enterprises that employ them and for societies, there are benefits associated with high-quality jobs, and costs associated with poor-quality jobs. This report – the result of a pioneering project by the International Labour Organization and Eurofound – provides a comparative analysis of job quality covering approximately 1.2 billion workers in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

This paper looks at wages from two different angles: from the perspective of individual employees, discussed in conjunction with their working conditions, and from the perspective of the industrial relations system. After a brief overview of EU-level policy developments with a potential impact on national level pay determination, this report gives a comparative overview of the levels of collective wage setting and how they are set throughout Europe and goes on to report on reforms, changes or debates linked to these processes between the different actors at both the Member State and the European level in 2011 and 2012. See related publications on wages.

Across Europe, diverse forms of employee representation structures have developed, providing workers with differing opportunities to voice their interests and to be consulted by their employers directly, at their workplaces, on matters such as economic and human resources developments, working conditions and health and safety measures. This report focuses on the workplace dimension of institutionalised representation of employees. At this level, representation involves only workers of a single undertaking or establishment, and the counterpart on the employers’ side is one single employer rather than an employers’ organisation or group of employers at higher levels of the industrial relations system, such as the sectoral level. The report is based on two sources of information: The findings of the 2009 European Company Survey (ECS); and country fact sheets produced by the national correspondents of the European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO).