Publications

The EU strives for the upward convergence of its Member States, where their performance improves and gaps between them decrease. Nearly a decade after the Great Recession, the COVID-19 crisis has again put this objective under pressure. This policy brief focuses on convergence in material well-being in Europe. Trends in several indicators largely follow the economic cycle, with upward convergence in good times and downward divergence in bad times.

This programming document describes Eurofound’s planned work over the programming period 2021–2024. It sets out the policy and institutional context for the programme, describes the multiannual programme for the four-year period and sets out the work programme for 2021. Eurofound’s priorities for 2021–2024 are shaped by the key challenges for social cohesion and just transitions in a changing environment in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. The Agency focuses on issues where it can draw on its core expertise in the areas of working conditions, industrial relations, employment and living conditions, to support its stakeholders, by providing evidence that can assist their policy action.

Whatever the benefits of telework – and there are many, including more flexible working time, increased productivity and less commuting – there are drawbacks, as many of the one-third of Europeans who were exclusively working from home during the pandemic will attest. Primary among these is the ‘always on’ culture that telework engenders, encouraging workers to respond to emails, phone calls and texts from work long after the working day or week has ended. This situation may be aggravated if the organisational culture at work incentivises employees to accept heavy workloads and put in overtime, often unpaid. All of which upsets work–life balance, leading to conflicts between work and home life, insufficient rest and health problems like work-related stress and sleep disorders.

An ageing Europe and rising public expenditure on long-term care have signalled for some time that the fundamentals of care provision need to be addressed. However, the shocking death toll in care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that many long-term care services were ill-equipped to protect their vulnerable users have lately focused the public mind on the issue. Most people in the EU will need such care for themselves or someone close to them at some stage in their lives. Demand is already escalating, as the rise in the long-term care workforce – by a third in just a decade – testifies. Calls for a European care strategy rightly insist that care users be listened to, but here we highlight others in the system whose needs deserve attention too.

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.

As Europe braces for a winter wave of the Coronavirus, behind the public health indicators that rightly dominate the headlines, a revolution in working life is under way. In early spring, millions of people throughout Europe took their work home and tried to rapidly adjust to the new world in which they found themselves. The unfolding changes in working life from this sharp shock look set to be a 'révolution tranquille', where longstanding principles and practices could be fundamentally changed for decades to come. The decisions that are made now will ultimately determine the nature of how this revolution will unfold, and what it will mean for workers and employers alike.

This study provides information allowing for an assessment of the representativeness of the actors involved in the European sectoral social dialogue committee for the human health sector. Their relative representativeness legitimises their right to be consulted, their role and effective participation in the European sectoral social dialogue, and their capacity to negotiate agreements. The aim of Eurofound’s studies on representativeness is to identify the relevant national and European social partner organisations in the field of industrial relations in the EU Member States.

This report has a dual focus. First, it reviews recent restructuring activity in the EU, from January 2019 up to and including the first impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. The second part presents an analysis of transnational restructuring cases – those that affect workers in more than one country. The main source for both analyses is the European Restructuring Monitor events database, which has collected details of over 25,000 large-scale restructurings since it began in 2002, including nearly 2,000 since the beginning of 2019.

Following a sluggish response by many Member States to introduce or modify gender pay transparency measures, as it recommended in 2014, the European Commission intends to table a proposal for EU-level legislation on pay transparency later in 2020. In this context, a new Eurofound study investigated whether key people at company level see these measures as useful or beneficial. The results show that the richer pay audits are favoured over the simpler pay reports in terms of their perceived usefulness. Both managers and employee representatives agree on this.

Megatrends, such as digitalisation, globalisation, demographic change and climate change, are transforming the world of work, with knock-on effects for working conditions and job quality. Against this background, this report examines working conditions and job quality from a sectoral perspective, using data from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS). The report first outlines the sectoral characteristics underpinning employment – economic structure, demographics, occupational level and employment status.