Sustainable work

00:00:01    Intro    
                
00:00:32    Mary McCaughey

Hello and welcome to Eurofound Talks. This is Eurofound’s new podcast series where we will be tackling key topics relevant for what it means to be living and working in Europe today. My name is Mary McCaughey, I'm Head of Communication here at Dublin in the tripartite EU agency which is mandated to provide knowledge on social work and employment-related issues for Europe’s policymakers. Over the next period, I will be talking to a wide range of experts, exploring the critical issues on the EU and national agenda, discussing how they affect our individual lives and work, and examining what can be done to shape a better future for us all. Today's podcast looks at one of the key topics on the EU agenda. We call it ‘sustainable work’. For this, I'm joined by our resident expert and guru on this topic and Head of the Working Life unit here at Eurofound, Barbara Gerstenberger. Guten Morgen Barbara. 
                
00:01:29    Barbara Gerstenberger

Hello, Mary. 
                
00:01:30    Mary McCaughey

Barbara, welcome today to talk about sustainable work, which is, you would agree, not entirely intuitive as a term. Can you make it a little bit easier for us? What does the concept of ‘sustainable work’ actually mean? 
                
00:01:46    Barbara Gerstenberger

The concept is relatively close to the idea of environmental sustainability. Environmental sustainability is about not using today's resources to the extent that tomorrow we will no longer be able to live on this planet. If you apply this to the world of work, the working and the living conditions, as two levers or two parts, have to be such that they support people in engaging and remaining in work not only today but throughout an extended working life. To put it slightly differently, we need to make it possible for the needs of the present worker to be met without compromising his or her ability to engage in work in the future. That's what we call making work sustainable over the life course. 
                
00:02:48    Mary McCaughey

The idea of the two levers is interesting. One is essentially about adapting the working conditions and context to the needs of the worker. The other is about adapting the worker in a way that they are primed and ready to respond to the work and the labour market environment. 
                
00:03:15    Barbara Gerstenberger

That's exactly right. This idea of working conditions being adapted is where the concept of job quality comes in. At Eurofound, we are very certain that job quality is not just one thing: it's not just a well-paid job. Job quality has different dimensions, which also means that we have different possibilities to improve job quality. We could improve working-time quality; we could reduce work intensity, which would be good; we could improve the possibilities for using skills, for developing skills. 
                
00:03:56    Mary McCaughey

So specifically, these are the kinds of elements that you're looking to change or adapt in the work context so that we can make the work environment more sustainable. In terms of life, the other lever if you like, what are we looking at there? 
                
00:04:14    Barbara Gerstenberger

One important aspect is, of course, to make it possible to combine non-work responsibilities with work. Non work responsibilities mainly involve our responsibilities either for children or increasingly for elderly parents or people with disabilities, among others. You could argue that providing a good care infrastructure is a measure we can take in the area of the life domain to improve availability for work. As a mother of a young child or a father of school-aged children, if good-quality and affordable care is provided for these children, then my availability to work full time and to concentrate fully on my job is much better than if this care infrastructure does not exist.
                
00:05:13    Mary McCaughey

In fact, we are talking about skills and mapping those skills onto the requirements. But the skills that you and I had when we came into the working environment 20 or 30 years ago are largely redundant now. To keep older workers, like I suppose yourself and myself, in the workplace in a way that we are useful and relevant and that we feel motivated to continue, that requires quite a change in mindset and in terms of policy doesn't it?
                
00:05:41    Barbara Gerstenberger

Mary, are you trying to say that, as older workers, we need to improve our skills? We are absolutely in this category and changing skills requirements is an issue. If we have the wrong set of skills, the labour market will not provide the possibility to work. So there is this issue of providing a good match and that requires continuous upskilling, openness to improve your skills, the availability of training, and employers, for example companies, offering workers the possibility to improve their skills on a continuous basis. 
                
00:06:25    Mary McCaughey

So we've talked about skills, we've talked about training, but coming back to the care aspect, and you and I are also speaking from a position where perhaps personally we are beyond the child-rearing phase to a greater or lesser degree, but we have been there. What do you think the younger generation are experiencing? Do you think it's easier now than it was before? 
                
00:06:50    Barbara Gerstenberger

To some degree it is or should be, for the simple reasons that, for example, the provisions on the right to take leave, maternity leave, parental leave or leave when a child is sick, have generally improved. So there are more possibilities and more rights to do that. I would also argue that companies have become much more aware of the need to make it possible to combine care responsibilities with work. Even rather small company-level practices can really help. To give you one example, a key element for combining work and care responsibilities and achieve a better work-life balance is the possibility to take an hour or two off work at short notice if the kindergarten calls because a child is sick and needs to be picked up. A parent who can do this will report a much better work life balance and find it much easier to combine care and work than somebody who cannot.

On the other hand, we also see that the very unequal division of care work between men and women is something that has unfortunately not changed. Data on how work and care were shared during the pandemic now confirms this: there is no big shift. Of course, if the responsibility of caring for children still remains mainly with mothers, not with fathers, the possibility to take leave and to stay with children and to reduce working time remains theoretical. It's therefore mainly women who take this up, with all the potential disadvantages that they then might experience in their careers when it comes to progression. 
                
00:08:44    Mary McCaughey

Barbara, in this day and age where we have more women at work than ever before, where we have greater access to childcare and other care services, where there's a greater share of domestic responsibilities between men and women in the home, are you actually saying that gender still remains the critical issue at play here? 
                
00:09:07    Barbara Gerstenberger

Maybe not the critical issue, but a critical issue definitely. We all know about the segregated labour market, in which women are concentrated in specific sectors and occupations. If I remember correctly, it's only around 40% of occupations where you see a balance between male and female workers, with a 40-60% gender balance. All the others are either male or female dominated, with female-dominated sectors very often in the lower wage segments of the labour market compared to male-dominated sectors. So yes, from a labour market perspective there is still a large degree of segregation. The job quality experienced by men and women is also different. It doesn't always mean that men experience better job quality. There are a few dimensions, for example exposure to physical risks, where men fare worse than women, but then there are other areas, for example pay and career opportunities, progression and prospects, where women fare worse than men. So there are still big differences between men and women in the area of job quality, very often to the detriment of women. 
                
00:10:34    Mary McCaughey

That's very worrying, Barbara, because it would seem that a lot of progress has been made, we've closed a lot of the gender gaps, but plus ça change… when it comes to gender inequalities. To come to the end here in terms of the longer term sustainable aspect of sustainable work, looking at COVID and the pandemic and the way it has changed the way we work, the way men and women experience work, remote working, the increase of flexible working time, etc. how do you see that as having impacted on the concept, debate and development of sustainable work? 
                
00:11:12    Barbara Gerstenberger

I think the pandemic has to some degree led to a change in attitudes towards work. First and foremost, the need for a balance between work and life has been confirmed and has become even stronger during the pandemic. Perhaps this is because we have experimented with a new form of organising work that allows a better balance between work and life, namely remote working. There are also risks involved, but overall the possibility to work from home at least some of the time gives workers a better chance to balance work and life. I think attitudes towards work have also changed in the sense that people are looking for more meaningful work, and that again is a part of job quality. Going home with the feeling of a job well done, of having helped and made a difference, is a very important aspect of job quality. 
                
00:12:24    Mary McCaughey

Thank you, Barbara. At the end of each of these Eurofound Talks, we turn to the expert and ask them to talk in three. Can you give me three key takeaway points that you would make to policymakers on the issue of sustainable work, which could lead to actual improvement in this area for the next generation? 
                
00:12:49    Barbara Gerstenberger

Job quality matters. If we want people to engage in work, we have to offer good quality jobs; that's my first point. The second point is about gender equality. As we have just discussed, we are not there yet. A lot of improvement has been made, but there is still a need to tackle the highly unequal division of unpaid care work between men and women, between fathers and mothers, mainly; that needs to be addressed. The third point is that we need to keep an eye on how new forms of employment are developing. There are new forms of employment, such as platform work, that attract quite a bit of attention these days. We need to understand that job or employment quality in these new types of employment can be different from what we experience and see in our standard types of employment. 
                
00:13:54    Mary McCaughey

Thank you, Barbara, that makes sense. We have covered a wide range of issues to do with living and working conditions at EU level, national level, company level, but you've managed to distil this into three points: job quality, gender equality and tackling the issues raised by new forms of employment. Thank you, Barbara, it’s always a pleasure and thanks to our listeners. Of course, feel free to comment or question or query anything that you've heard today. You can find us online at #EurofoundTalks and on our website, which contains all the information on sustainable work on our topic pages. Tune in to our next podcast which will cover the future of Europe and the challenges we are facing. Another podcast will look at the specific issues which are facing young people today. Until next time, when Eurofound talks to you. 
                
00:14:52    Outro