Mandl, Irene

Imagine you’re at work and something happens: you have to leave to visit a client, you have to go home to let in the plumber, or you have to collect the kids from school as the football training has just been cancelled. If you’re lucky, your employer gives you the flexibility to do this. If you’re even luckier, it is YOU who decides upon your schedule and place of work.

Over the last decade, European labour markets have seen a surge in the number of older workers in work and a continuous decline in their unemployment rates. A lot of young and middle-aged workers lost their jobs in the Great Recession, but not so the older age group. This favourable state of affairs means they receive less policy attention, which is unfortunate for older workers who suddenly find themselves without a job.

In the abstract, platform work is the matching of supply and demand for paid work through an online platform. In practice, most people are likely to have encountered it through big online platforms such as Uber, Deliveroo or Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is a new form employment that began to emerge in Europe about a decade ago.

Platform work is a form of employment that uses an online platform to match the supply of and demand for paid labour. In Europe, platform work is still small in scale but is rapidly developing. The types of work offered through platforms ar...

Across Europe, new forms of employment are emerging that differ significantly from traditional employment. Some of these forms of employment transform the relationship between employer and employee while others change work organisation and work patterns.

This overview report synthesizes and compares industrial policy capacity within nine European case study regions which have been analysed as part of the pilot project Future of Manufacturing in Europe.

Although standard employment is still dominant in European labour markets, an increasing range of new employment forms is emerging that differ in their implications for working conditions. This study explores strategic employee sharing, an employment form for companies that have specific HR needs that do not justify a permanent full-time position, but are often recurring, by hiring one or several workers who work on assignments, and whose skills and time are shared among a group of companies.

The European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) annual report for 2015 explores the issue of job creation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are increasingly recognised as a job engine for Europe. However, given the heterogeneity of the vast SME population, not all contribute equally to employment growth. This study seeks to identify which SME types are more or less dynamic job creators and to determine their main drivers and barriers for job creation.

Across Europe, new forms of employment are emerging that are different from traditional standard or non-standard employment in a number of ways. Some transform the relationship between employer and employee, some change work organisation and work patterns, and some do both. This report identifies nine forms of employment that are new or have become increasingly important in Europe since the year 2000.

While restructuring is increasingly acknowledged as an inherent characteristic of economic development and receives substantial policy attention at European and Member State level, the regional perspective on it is rarely discussed. However, most large-scale restructurings affect the regions and employment areas where they take place, not just the company and its employees. Based on secondary data analysis, a literature review and five in-depth case studies, this research project aims to identify the effects of large-scale restructuring at regional level. It also describes examples of successful regional management directed at maintaining and improving labour markets and living conditions following an important restructuring event. An executive summary is also available.