Pay Transparency in Europe: First Experiences with Gender Pay Reports and Audits in Four Member States

In light of the limited action in many Member States to introduce or review gender pay transparency instruments as recommended, in November 2017 the European Commission announced the possible need for further targeted measures at EU level. This report reviews experiences in four Member States – Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Finland – based on their company-level gender pay reports and audits. Evaluations point to a ‘bumpy ride’ in terms of compliance – at least in the initial phase of rolling out the instruments in some countries – and highlight room for improvement in engaging employee representatives and in raising employees’ awareness. The need to tackle knowledge gaps around the instruments right from the start is a lesson to be learnt from the experiences of the first movers. Soft measures to accompany enforceable mandatory requirements seem to be in demand and to be working well. Ultimately, the success of the instrument depends on the attitudes of the actors, the extent to which they acknowledge the existence of unjustified gender pay gaps and their willingness to engage in a meaningful dialogue and follow-up

Inter- and intraindustrial Job-to-Job Flows. A Linkage Analysis of Regional Vacancy Chains in Austria

Nine Austrian NUTS 2 inter- and intraindustrial job-to-job worker flows for 33 indus- tries are analysed by means of input-output techniques, with these job-to-job flows being an intermediate input in the production of filled vacancies. A new dataset on individual labour market episodes allows for the tracing of individual careers. A linkage analysis of the Leontief multiplier shows that business services, wholesale&retail and the metal- industry are 'key' industries in for- and backwarding employment, whereas construction and tourism exert an impact on other regional industries by absorbing workers upon aggregate external shocks. These findings can be incorporated in industrial employment forecasts or utilized in regional labour market impact studies.worker flows, sectoral labour reallocation, regional labour markets, vacancy chains, vacancy chain table, linkage analysis, Leontief multiplier, impact evaluation

European Region Types in EU-25

In this paper a categorization of 1,212 European NUTS 3 regions is conducted by means of factor and cluster analysis according to economic structure and spatial characteristics. Subsequently the hypothesis is tested that these region types do explain differences in level and growth of regional income. The resulting 14 region types (10 non-urban and 4 urban) do show differences in regional income per capita and some of them are expected to converge to different steady state levels. In particular, region types with low employment rates obtain lower per capita income on average than others, while those with productivity differentials in favour of industry obtain higher GDP p.c. when judged against region types comparable in their degree of accessibility. In estimating regressions on conditional beta-convergence, the inclusion of national dummies shows a reduced speed of convergence (in the total and the western sample) and even divergence in the sample of (former communist) new member states, while the additional inclusion of region type dummies points again to a still low but higher speed of convergence. The estimates indicate significant lower steady state incomes in the peripheral agrarian regions, peripheral industrial regions with a lower productivity differential in favour of industry, peripheral tertiary regions and both types of central regions with low employment rates. A higher steady state income is estimated for metropolitan areas and big agglomerations.Region Types; Cluster Analysis; European Regions; Convergence

Developments in Collectively Agreed Pay 2012

EIRO’s annual analysis of collectively agreed pay for 2012 finds that although average nominal agreed increases were slightly greater than in 2011 in many countries, the rise in prices diminished people’s purchasing power. In real terms, only a handful of countries had positive collective pay increases on average – and, if so, then very modest. In 2012, these were Sweden (+1.7%), Austria (+0.8%), Germany (+0.6%), France (+0.4%) and Belgium (+0.4%, already including indexation). In the case of Austria, this was a return to positive figures after two years of real decline on average. In countries where some form of pay indexation mechanisms are in place, the increases set via these mechanisms did – by and large (with the exception of Italy) – compensate for the rise in prices in 2012, while they had failed to do so in 2011. The report also examines collectively agreed pay increases in three selected sectors (metal, banking and local government) and developments in statutory minimum wages

Highlights of the Science and Life of Peter Varga (1946—2018)

Peter Varga has passed on October 27, 2018. His pioneering discoveries of chemical resolution at the atomic scale on surface alloys, atomic resolution of ultrathin alkali halides, nucleation of bcc iron in ultrathin films, and the microscopic structure of ultrathin alumina films stimulated worldwide research. In recognition of his outstanding scientific contributions, in December 2017 the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) awarded him a prize for his distinguished contribution on the clarification of surface phenomena by atomic level investigations and the development of novel functional materials. This contribution highlights the life of Peter Varga as a scientist and as a person. With his elegance, his energy, his wit, and his generosity he was a close friend and role model to many of us, and showed us how to combine scientific curiosity and creativity with the lightness of being

Burnout in the Workplace: A Review of the Data and Policy Responses in the EU

This report looks at the extent of burnout experienced by workers in the EU, based on national research. As a starting point, the report sets out to consider whether burnout is viewed as a medical or occupational disease. It then examines the work determinants associated with burnout and looks at the effects of burnout, including psychosocial and physical work factors, work intensity and work organisation. It also reviews national strategies and policies regarding this issue, the involvement of the social partners in the current debate, as well as preventive actions currently in place

Inter- and intraindustrial Job-to-Job Flows. A Linkage Analysis of Regional Vacancy Chains in Austria

Nine Austrian NUTS 2 inter- and intraindustrial job-to-job worker flows for 33 industries are analysed by means of input-output techniques, with these job-to-job flows being an intermediate input in the production of filled vacancies. A new dataset on individual labour market episodes allows for the tracing of individual careers. A linkage analysis of the Leontief multiplier shows that business services, wholesale&retail and the metal industry are ‘key’ industries in for- and backwarding employment, whereas construction and tourism exert an impact on other regional industries by absorbing workers upon aggregate external shocks. These findings can be incorporated in industrial employment forecasts or utilized in regional labour market impact studies

Parental and paternity leave - Uptake by fathers

Produced at the request of the European Commission in the context of negotiations on a work-life balance package for families and carersIn the context of ongoing negotiations at EU level on adopting a work-life balance package for families and caregivers, Eurofound was requested by the European Commission to provide an update of the available data regarding paternity and parental leave for fathers. This report presents the currently available national statistics on the uptake of family-related leave by fathers over time across the EU28 and Norway, based on information compiled by the Network of Eurofound Correspondents

A Concurrency-Agnostic Protocol for Multi-Paradigm Concurrent Debugging Tools

Today's complex software systems combine high-level concurrency models. Each model is used to solve a specific set of problems. Unfortunately, debuggers support only the low-level notions of threads and shared memory, forcing developers to reason about these notions instead of the high-level concurrency models they chose. This paper proposes a concurrency-agnostic debugger protocol that decouples the debugger from the concurrency models employed by the target application. As a result, the underlying language runtime can define custom breakpoints, stepping operations, and execution events for each concurrency model it supports, and a debugger can expose them without having to be specifically adapted. We evaluated the generality of the protocol by applying it to SOMns, a Newspeak implementation, which supports a diversity of concurrency models including communicating sequential processes, communicating event loops, threads and locks, fork/join parallelism, and software transactional memory. We implemented 21 breakpoints and 20 stepping operations for these concurrency models. For none of these, the debugger needed to be changed. Furthermore, we visualize all concurrent interactions independently of a specific concurrency model. To show that tooling for a specific concurrency model is possible, we visualize actor turns and message sends separately.Comment: International Symposium on Dynamic Language