Rising energy prices are putting more people under increased financial pressure and at a greater risk of energy poverty, according to Eurofound report 'Living, working and COVID-19 e-survey: Living in a new era of uncertainty'
Trust in national institutions has declined across the EU over the past two years. Driven by increasingly difficult economic circumstances and unreliable news sources, even people who previously expressed higher trust levels – such as those in financially secure positions – have become less trusting. We take a closer look at e-survey data to explore this decline in trust.
While 2020 may come to be seen as the year platform work gathered pace and started to go mainstream – thanks in large part to COVID-19 containment measures sparking an increase in food and grocery delivery – 2021 could be the year that regulation of platform work is set in motion.
In the most successful businesses, managers were found to facilitate employees to work independently rather than to focus on controlling whether they carried out their tasks. Closely monitoring employee behaviour might indeed ensure that workers do their job but is unlikely to motivate them to go beyond their job description.
We hear more and more about the platform economy, with the debate often revolving around the potential long-term implications of its growth on the labour market and the impact on traditional and established businesses and industries. There has been increasing calls for a legislative response at European and national level, but what information do we have for evidence-based policy making?
Platform work is still small in scale in Europe, but it is increasing – and this not only in terms of the number of platforms, workers and tasks, but also the diversity of business models, matching mechanisms and types of tasks that are mediated through an online platform or an app.
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.
Manual jobs in European manufacturing are being transformed as blue-collar workers take on more intellectual tasks. This is a consequence of the increasing use of digital tools and the growing importance of quality control in production.
Platform work is neither good nor bad – it just is. We need to adapt to this reality by finding ways to capitalise on the positive while at the same time counteracting the negative. This needs to be done in a differentiated way, taking account of the great variety in platform work. One-size solutions simply will not fit all.
Digital technologies are transforming work, but the implications have not yet been fully grasped. In a recent Eurofound report, we focus on three main vectors of change to discuss the effects of digital technologies on work and employment and the policy responses such change demands.
In the following blog piece, originally posted on Social Europe, Eurofound Head of Information and Communication Mary McCaughey takes a look at what it was like to live and work in Europe in 2016.
