EMCC European Monitoring Centre on Change

The European Monitoring Centre on Change (EMCC) is an information resource established to promote an understanding of changes in the world of work, employment and restructuring. Its work is supported by a Network of Eurofound Correspondents across all EU Member States and Norway.

The EMCC focuses on two main topic areas.

Employment and labour markets

Employment and labour markets is one of the six main activities in Eurofound’s work programme for the 2021–2024 period. Eurofound operates as a centre of expertise for monitoring and analysing labour market developments, particularly as European labour markets are faced with major challenges in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its research will focus on the consequences of the pandemic for work and employment and how to maintain the functioning and inclusiveness of the labour market.

Anticipating and managing the impact of change

Anticipating and managing the impact of change is one of the six main activities in Eurofound’s work programme for the 2021–2024 period. Eurofound will provide evidence on structural developments affecting the EU economy and labour markets, driven largely by digitalisation and the transition to a carbon-neutral economy, but also by the COVID-19 crisis. The research is intended to assist policymakers in anticipating and preparing European labour markets and workplaces for these changes.

COVID-19

Eurofound’s work on COVID-19 examines the far-reaching socioeconomic implications of the pandemic across Europe as they continue to impact living and working conditions. A key element of the research is the e-survey Living, working and COVID-19, launched in April 2020, with five rounds completed at different stages during 2020, 2021 and 2022. This is complemented by the inclusion of research into the ongoing effects of the pandemic in much of Eurofound’s other areas of work.

Featured - Digital technologies in the workplace: also a question of ethics

New digital technologies are slowly but surely entering the workplace, bringing fundamental changes to the nature of work, potentially making workers’ skillset obsolete and raising a host of new ethical dilemmas. These go well beyond legal and compliance issues. 

Of all digital technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) raises the greatest concerns and fears for the future of jobs and the meaning of work itself. Invocations to ethics are recurrent in the EU level policy debate on AI and this growing interest is also apparent, to varying degree, in national debates. Policy responses to address ethical issues arising from the use of digital technologies are however slow to emerge. 

A new Eurofound report delves into the issue of ethics and digital technologies in the workplace. The research points to the potential impacts of technologies – such as advanced robotics, the internet of things (IoT) and wearables, and AI – on quality of work, human rights, and ethical principles, and maps concerns most debated in EU Member States and policy initiatives linking with ethics.

Even if technologies such as AI are still at development and experimental stage, the time is ripe for policymakers to support an ethical digitalisation of the workplace, with a view to preventing any ethical pitfalls and risks in the use of digital technologies. 

Latest restructuring cases

Arvato Supply Chain Solutions
Poland
08/Aug/2022
300 jobs created
Calida Holding
Romania
08/Aug/2022
100 jobs created
Odelo Bulgaria
Bulgaria
08/Aug/2022
100 jobs created
Optima Telekom
Croatia
06/Aug/2022
120 jobs lost
LPP Logistics
Poland
03/Aug/2022
1000 jobs created
28388 cases recorded since 2002

EMCC Publications