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Employment and labour markets

Employment and labour markets is one of Eurofound's main operational activities for its 2025–2028 programming period. Building on the past 50 years of research, Eurofound continues to provide knowledge to identify structural changes in the labour market and to inform employment policies to improve the functioning and inclusiveness of a rapidly changing labour market. 

Eurofound’s work is shaped by the opportunities and challenges arising from four mega-drivers: demographic change, climate change, technological change and re-globalisation. The research investigates labour market dynamics, company practices, restructuring and social partner involvement in addressing these changes to provide evidence to inform the understanding of the EU’s competitiveness and to reinforce socioeconomic resilience.

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Recent updates

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Employment in the EU’s automotive sector

In 2024, the automotive sector in the EU came to the fore in public and policy discussions. The focus was on the slowdown in electric vehicle (EV) sales, rising global...

Article

Eurofound research 2025

During 2025, Eurofound continues to collect relevant evidence concerning labour market trends in the EU and its Member States by means of the European Jobs Monitor (EJM), the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) and the platform economy repository.

The findings of several research projects are due to be finalised in 2025:

  • assessing the gender pay gap and the link to the educational gender gap
  • comparing jobs in terms of their task requirements, highlighting the implications for job mobility and employment reallocation in the labour market
  • company adaptation and restructuring practices in relation to the twin transition and changing work arrangements

Research commences on a number of other topics.

  • Sectors in focus in the twin transition: Looking at sectors, initially ICT, where the mega-drivers are expected to create large-scale changes or where significant policy responses to the mega-drivers will affect the EU economy and society
  • Caring for care services: Analysis of the employment shifts in the care sectors
  • New forms of work: Analysis of labour market trends and working conditions to provide evidence on the employment arrangements and forms of work that are emerging in the context of the ongoing transformation of the European labour market
  • Labour market dynamics: Looking at the impact of minimum wage policies on low-paid jobs from a comparative perspective, complementing Eurofound’s ongoing monitoring of minimum wage developments in Europe
  • Telework: Examining the impact on labour market access and working conditions, focusing on identifying and assessing the enabling factors for and barriers to remote work in general and for certain groups of workers in particular

What our experts say

Tina Weber, Senior Research Manager, Employment Unit

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Linking in with EU priorities

2025 marks the first year of the five-year period of the EU policy and legislative cycle for 2025–2029. Labour market policies and industrial policy initiatives will be informed by Eurofound’s evidence on structural change in the labour market, including knowledge on the potential upgrading or polarisation of jobs, on how task requirements in jobs are changing, and on whether shifts in the employment structure are accelerating or slowing.

Research focusing on sectors will help with understanding the impact of the progress to meet the EU’s carbon-neutrality objectives, the adaptation to new technologies and the possible changes that will occur as a result of the changes to global value chains.

Investigating new forms of work will help in assessing their prevalence over time, and how the opportunities or risks they create affect the employment and labour market prospects of the people involved.

The assessment of evidence on the impact of minimum wages on employment will provide insights on the impact of the Directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union. The EU’s initiatives in the area of gender equality, such as the Directive on Pay Transparency, will be informed by research on the determinants of gender differences in wages.

Key outputs

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The post-pandemic recovery of Europe continued in 2023, with strong job creation despite subdued economic growth, against a background of rising geopolitical tension. Eurofound’s research over the year brought to...

2 Μάιος 2024
Publication
Annual report
Publications results (602)

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 flagship publication provides an overview of developments in Europe

16 April 2020

Gender inequality at work persists across Europe, despite the long standing attention paid and efforts made to tackle it. This Eurofound report presents a closer look at women’s and men’s working conditions, using data from Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) and complementing

03 March 2020

Innovation and technological advancement are natural features of developed economies, and they are necessary to maintain and improve sustainable competitiveness in an era of globalisation. However, while most innovation tends to be incremental, some has a disruptive effect on production and service

22 January 2020

The European Pillar of Social Rights is designed to act as a compass for a renewed process of upward convergence among Member States towards better working and living conditions. It is accompanied by a Social Scoreboard to monitor the progress made by Member States. This policy brief presents the

10 December 2019

This report sets out to describe what labour market segmentation is and why it is problematic for the labour market and society, as well as disadvantaged groups. It takes a broad view of the term to examine the situation that arises when the divergence in working conditions between different groups

02 December 2019

Employment statistics consistently show that having a foreign background has an influence on people’s employment prospects. Less is known about the types of jobs workers with foreign backgrounds hold and their working conditions. This policy brief contributes to filling this gap.

27 November 2019

This report maps developments in the size of the middle class in the EU between 2004 and 2015 using Eurostat’s SILC survey, and analyses life satisfaction by income quartile (using Eurofound’s European Quality of Life Surveys). Before the crisis, the middle classes had expanded in around two-thirds

30 October 2019

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

07 October 2019

Upward convergence is a process whereby the performance of EU Member States in a given domain or range of domains is seen to improve while gaps between Member States reduce. Achieving upward convergence is of crucial importance to the EU, as the increase of disparities among Member States threatens

25 September 2019

Cooperatives and social enterprises are recognised for their resilience to cyclical and structural economic changes and their capacity to contribute to local and regional economic development, including social inclusion. In recent years, attention has increasingly focused on their ability to further

12 June 2019

Online resources results (963)

Fashionable flexibility?

Since the 1980s, intense product market competition among the industrialised countries has led to a search for new products and new methods of production. At the same time, new technology is changing the ways that labour markets work and UK labour institutions have increasingly come into question

Costs of UK labour turnover increase

Taking a detailed look at the available data on labour turnover in the UK, the independent employment researchers, Industrial Relations Services, argued in 1997 that the economic recovery in the UK is leading to increasing numbers of resignations and skill shortages, which in turn are leading to

Sunday work - recent debates and developments

Work on Sunday is in principle prohibited in Austria. However, the law permits exemptions to be made by the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs for basic necessities or for economic or technological reasons, and by the heads of provincial governments for exceptional regional supply purposes. New

Unions set agendas for collective bargaining in 1998

Spain's UGT and CC.OO trade union confederations want to put employment at the top of their collective bargaining agenda in 1998. Job creation and promoting secure employment are the main demands.

Clash over 35-hour week in Greece

In December 1996, a committee consisting of experts from Greek trade unions and employers' organisations was set up to discuss the effects of reducing working time to 35 hours a week. However, on completion of its task in October 1997, it had become clear that the differences between the two sides

Irish postal service faces major industrial relations challenge

A confidential interim report into industrial and employee relations in An Post, Ireland's state-owned postal company, highlights the adversarial nature of its industrial relations structures and practices and how these are inhibiting the development of a more customer focused business. The report

Employment policy debate focuses on working time

A November 1997 orientation debate on employment policy in Luxembourg's Chamber of Deputies has prompted several motions. The most important of these urges the Government to work towards an agreement between the social partners that contains both the outlines of a framework law on working time and

Labour relations in public transport under pressure from market forces

European and domestic legislation is leading to greater pressure for competition in Dutch public transport. The resulting measures have led during the 1990s to practically permanent disputes between trade unions and works councils on the one hand, and employers and the Ministry of Transport, Public

Benchmarking and information sources in industrial relations decision making

The 1997 /Warwick pay and working time survey/ shows, on the one hand, that formal "benchmarking", or even measurement, of employee performance is not as common in the UK as might be expected. Benchmarking against the international competition is particularly infrequent, even where firms are

Employment Summit: Belgium demands quantifiable employment objectives

The Luxembourg Presidency of the European Union organised a special Employment Summit [1] European Council meeting on 20-21 November 1997 (EU9711168F [2]). In order to prepare for the event, the Belgian Government and social partners organised a conference aimed at formulating the point of view of


Blogs results (56)
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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

2 Φεβρουάριος 2021
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The COVID-19 pandemic compelled governments to take exceptional measures to monitor and control the spread of the Coronavirus. Among them was the introduction in most EU Member States of tracking apps to gather data on citizens who have contracted the virus and to trace their contacts, a measure tha

13 Ιανουάριος 2021
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Standard employment is not simply being replaced by non-standard work; employment is becoming more diverse, and policy must accordingly become more tailored. The last decade has seen much public and policy debate on the future of work. Standard employment – permanent, full-time and subject to labour

15 Δεκέμβριος 2020
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​​​​​​​The decades-long trend of a narrowing gender employment gap in Europe has halted in recent years. Now the COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting low-paying service sectors with a high share of social contact, including many with a majority of female workers, risking forcing them ou

9 Δεκέμβριος 2020
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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

2 Δεκέμβριος 2020
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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

27 Νοέμβριος 2020
Image of woman teleworking

COVID-19 unleashed the pent-up potential for telework. Over a third of respondents to Eurofound’s online survey of Europeans in April had started teleworking because of the pandemic. Never before had so many people been working from home. For people with disabilities, telework has long been viewed a

17 Αύγουστος 2020
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Minimum wages, one of the cornerstone issues for Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission, were a hot topic in the EU at the beginning of the year. Then the COVID-19 public health crisis struck. Now, with an economic crisis and recession looming, the question is not only what impact the crisis has had on m

7 Ιούλιος 2020
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Although EU law guarantees equal treatment for all among its founding principles, discrimination in the EU is not a thing of the past. Across Europe, 2% of workers report experiencing discrimination at work linked to each of the following: race, ethnic background, colour and nationality.

25 Ιούνιος 2020
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Up to the start of 2020, recent EU economic and labour market trends were often discussed in terms of the periods before and after the Great Recession. It now appears likely that, in the short- to medium-term, the repercussions of that economic crisis will be dwarfed by the unfolding impact of the C

21 Απρίλιος 2020

Upcoming publications results (3)

Why are higher rates of female educational attainment, relative to those of men, and an increasing gender education gap not translating into a faster reduction in the gender pay gap? To what extent are different educational choices responsible for this gap? This report analyses the extent to which

January 2026
Forthcoming
Publication
Policy brief

According to one narrative, employment has been polarising over recent decades, with employment growth focusing on the top and bottom of the wage ladder at the expense of mid-paying jobs, and this trend is pervasive. Empirical findings for the EU Member States, however, tend to challenge this accou

July 2025
Forthcoming
Publication
Research report

This Eurofound research paper builds on the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) data and provides an overview of key trends in restructuring in recent years, highlighting the companies, sectors and regions in Europe that experienced the greatest job losses and job gains. It also examines the variou

July 2025
Data results (14)

The European Jobs Monitor (EJM) tracks structural change in European labour markets. It analyses shifts in the employment structure in the EU in terms of occupation and sector and gives a qualitative assessment of these shifts using various proxies of job quality – wages, skill levels, etc.

2 Μάιος 2023

Disclaimer

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