The Great Recession’s Biggest Losers: The euro area’s jobless. CEPS Policy Insights No 2017-29/July 2017

The euro area continues to recover from the Great Recession, with several recent publications offering optimistic assessments of the euro area’s economic performance. The European Commission’s “Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2017” report, for example, praises moderate economic growth and “solid net job creation” in a “job-rich recovery”. While the European Commission acknowledged ongoing challenges such as youth unemployment, it must also be recognised that the euro area’s recovery has been piecemeal. Economic growth is encouraging, but it obscures the unemployed millions who have not tasted the fruits of the recovery. The euro area’s labour market, while posting gains, remains in a worse state than before the Great Recession. Nearly half of the unemployed in the euro area have been jobless for over a year. In contrast with the United States, Japan and other regions hit hard by the crisis, the euro area’s labour market exemplifies the most enduring damage of the Great Recession. European lawmakers need to soberly acknowledge the job market’s failures and take targeted action, addressing the regions and demographics for whom the recovery is not working

Labour Market and Social Policy. CEPS Policy Priorities for 2019-2024, 4 October 2019

The mega-trends of digitalisation and automation have already changed labour markets and value chains around the world, with their inevitable economic and social consequences. And the pace of change is accelerating; job markets and skills requirements are evolving faster than traditional labour market practices and institutions. But what exactly are these changes, and how will governments, industry leaders, social partners and workers react to them

Employment and Working Conditions of Selected Types of Platform Work

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 are ever-increasing, as are the challenges for existing regulatory frameworks. This report explores the working and employment conditions of three of the most common types of platform work in Europe. For each of these types, Eurofound assesses the physical and social environment, autonomy, employment status and access to social protection, and earnings and taxation based on interviews with platform workers. A comparative analysis of the regulatory frameworks applying to platform work in 18 EU Member States accompanies this review. This looks into workers’ employment status, the formal relationships between clients, workers and platforms, and the organisation and representation of workers and platforms

The Platform Economy and Industrial Relations. Applying the old framework to the new reality. CEPS Research Report No. 2017/12, August 2017

This paper investigates the relationship between the platform economy, industrial relations and social dialogue, as portrayed in the literature. It provides strong evidence that workers in the platform economy are organising into new employee associations (unions) and are also being brought into existing employees associations. None of the evidence surveyed indicates that platforms are organising into employer associations or being incorporated into existing employer associations. Anecdotal evidence suggests that actors in the platform economy are engaging in tripartite dialogue. The authors conclude that i) no overarching framework exists for governing or facilitating social dialogue between the parties involved in the platform economy, and ii) even if the existing framework is applied to parties in the platform economy, it offers a poor fit due to differences between platform workers and employees, and platforms and employers

Government Responses to the Platform Economy: Where do we stand? CEPS Policy Insight No 2017-30/July 2017

The introduction of the platform economy in Europe has sparked debate on the challenges it raises for workers, companies, social partners, governments and other stakeholders, and how these challenges can be addressed. This paper assesses government responses to the platform economy in seven EU countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and Spain. It shows that, owing to the lack of a specific framework governing the platform economy, countries generally attempt to apply existing legislation, regulations and policies to the new challenges that the platform economy brings. This holds for the status of workers, working conditions, and industrial relations and social dialogue. Nevertheless, this strategy is not necessarily successful. The status of platform workers, for example, remains unclear in most member states. Some member states consider all platform workers to be self-employed, while in other member states, their status is much more dependent on the specific circumstances. There seems to be little debate on the idea of introducing a new status in the countries studied. On working conditions, the results confirm that most countries have applied the existing framework to platform work. In many of the member states, this has turned out to be problematic in several dimensions (e.g. taxation and social protection). In the area of industrial relations and social dialogue, there is much less evidence of specific actions or initiatives

Blame it on my youth! Policy recommendations for re-evaluating and reducing youth unemployment. CEPS Research Report No. 2018/01, January 2018

Youth unemployment has ranked high on the agenda of European policymakers since the onset of the crisis. Ten years later, youth unemployment remains stubbornly high in a number of member states. This paper offers policy recommendations for rethinking and reducing youth unemployment in Europe. To this end, it filters and summarises the results of the STYLE research project on youth unemployment in Europe, and supplements these with additional literature. The paper explores three sets of questions: i) How to define and measure youth employment? ii) What are its causes and effects? and iii) What can be done about the phenomenon? The findings indicate that youth unemployment is poorly understood and the most common measurements are insufficient. Its causes are diverse, arising from both the inherent disadvantages suffered by younger people in the labour market as well as from structural changes occurring in the labour market. The effects of youth unemployment are detrimental and significant at both the societal and individual level. Based on our analysis, we put forward 13 broad policy recommendations to address youth unemployment in Europe

The Future of EU ATM Markets. Impacts of digitalisation and pricing policies on business models. CEPS Research Report, October 2018

ATMs constitute a critical component in today’s infrastructure for facilitating cash payments. However, ongoing digitalisation (cashless payments, e-commerce and online banking) is challenging the role of ATMs and putting pressure on the cash infrastructure in the EU. The shift from cash to cashless payments reduces the need for cash withdrawals and the rise of online banking challenges the bank branch as the traditionally most prevalent location for ATMs. Moreover, the introduction of pricing policies might also change the dynamics in EU ATM markets. Transparency and price caps on the so-called dynamic currency conversion (DCC) as well as potential reductions in interchange fees will put pressure on the revenues of certain ATMs. Against this background, this report assesses the sensitivity of EU ATM markets to ongoing digitalisation and pricing policies. The impact of these developments is assessed across business models in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, which are representative of the ATM markets in all EU member states. Location characteristics are determined and costs and revenues estimated for the 146,821 ATM locations across these eight EU member states in mid-2018

An overview of European Platforms: Scope and Business Models

The platform economy has become an important consideration within the European Commission’s Digital Economy agenda. By mapping the platform economy within the 28 European Union (EU) Member States, this report draws on a database of 200 service platforms active in Europe, and aims to serve as a resource for the development of a European policy response. It identifies a huge diversity of platforms within the EU in terms of size, geographical scope, services offered and business models. Further, the innovative potential of platforms is confirmed, notably the way in which they employ technology to facilitate socially beneficial activities, such as volunteering or ridesharing. At the same time, we note the tendency of a number of platforms to withhold information about their functioning. There are also inconsistencies in the treatment of service providers, whose autonomy in organising their work is quite limited even though their status is almost universally that of independent contractors, which raises questions about the protection of workers. The European platform environment comprises both domestic and international actors, with the latter usually being the market leaders. These platforms often operate across national boundaries, strengthening the case for EU-level intervention.JRC.B.4-Human Capital and Employmen

Digital Age. Employment and working conditions of selected types of platform work. National context analysis: Austria. CEPS Special Report, 2 July 2018

Focusing on Austria, this report provides an overview of online platforms matching supply and demand for paid work, looking at different platforms and activities, working conditions, legal developments, and trends and changes in the labour market. It discusses the different concepts and definitions of platform work and describe how platforms operate. Furthermore, it will look at the characteristics of platforms, reflecting the extraordinary heterogeneity of this new form of employment. In addition, it discusses the composition of the platform workforce, their working conditions and their legal employment status based on case studies of workers and expert interviews

Index of Readiness for Digital Lifelong Learning Changing How Europeans Upgrade Their Skills. CEPS FINAL REPORT NOVEMBER 2019

Digitalisation – or the transformation of processes through new digital technologies – is changing the skills required to work and live, but also how we acquire, assess, and demonstrate our skills and education. This broad trend is known as the digitalisation of learning. The Index of Readiness for Digital Lifelong Learning (IRDLL) attempts to shed light on the issue by creating a scoring system and ranking EU Member States. The Index is composed of three ‘pillars’ – composite indicators developed to capture the different dimensions and challenges of digital learning: 1) Individual’s learning outcomes; 2) Availability of digital learning; and 3) Institutions and policies for digital learning. The report details the Index’s construction as well as results, alongside current trends in digitalisation of learning in Europe, providing timely policy pointers to European- and national-level policy makers. The Index of Readiness for Digital Lifelong Learning (IRDLL) is a result of collaboration between the Jobs & Skills Unit of CEPS and Grow with Google. It arose from a long-standing interest of both parties in digitalisation of education and the labour market