Hurley, John

The employment fallout of COVID-19 has been a story of two types of service work. Office-based knowledge workers have largely kept their jobs and incomes while participating in the huge and apparently successful ad hoc social experiment in working from home. Client-facing service workers have borne the brunt of the lockdowns and the steep declines in demand for in-person services in restaurants, hotels, leisure and the arts. The upshot is that, unlike the ‘mancession’ following the global financial crisis, the first impacts of the pandemic have fallen disproportionately on low-paid female workers. But to see this in the statistics, we must start by looking beyond the unemployment rate.

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 cas...

This report presents the findings of the Living, working and COVID-19 e-survey, carried out by Eurofound to capture the far-reaching implications of the pandemic for the way people live and work across Europe. The survey was fielded online,...

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of individuals and societies, including on the economy and labour markets, is unprecedented. The impact of the global health emergency has placed a growing number of businesses under threat, ...

What have been the major trends and policy developments regarding the flexibilisation of employment in recent years? Eurofound’s work programme for 2017–2020 set out to document and capture these changes in the world of work. This flags...

It is less than four weeks since the first large European Coronavirus-related company bankruptcy (Flybe, a British regional airline, on 5 March), but it is clear already that the pandemic is going to disrupt labour markets as seriously as the global financial crisis, if not more so. A large majority of large-scale restructuring reported in the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) in recent weeks have cited the Coronavirus outbreak as the proximate cause of announced job losses.

The coronavirus disease (Covid-19) is having drastic consequences for the world of work. In most European countries workers who are not delivering essential ‘frontline’ services are being asked to stay home. Unfortunately many are out of work, while many of those who are not are minimum-wage and low-pay workers, including those working in retail and food-supply chains. How can we ensure that these workers, so essential to our daily lives, are adequately and fairly paid?

This compendium of articles presents a snapshot of some of Eurofound’s most recent research, and highlights important 21st-century trends in quality of life and working conditions throughout the EU. It is organised around the six priority areas set out by the new European Commission for a transition to a fair, climate-neutral and digital Europe.

Economic disparities have been decreasing between EU member states over the past decade, but at the same time inequality has been growing within member states. Despite national level convergence, the gap in wealth and income between the rich and the poor is growing in most of Europe. Some of this rise has been attributed to increasing returns to education pushing earnings up faster for those in jobs requiring higher levels of education – while wages stagnate for the rest.

Accumulating evidence indicates that large metropolitan centres are faring much better than other regions within the Member States of the EU. Such interregional inequality contributes to disenchantment with existing political systems, which in turn can weaken the social bonds that ground democratic systems. This is the context for the 2019 edition of the European Jobs Monitor, which analyses shifts in the employment structure – meaning change in the distribution of employment across occupations and sectors – of the EU regions.