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Europe is today facing several major challenges. These go beyond the future of the euro and the instability of the financial system to some of the underlying issues concerned with the work activities that underpin the European economy. How can Europe retain manufacturing and production as restructuring and relocation towards lower-wage costs economies gathers pace? As demographic change lifts the proportions of older workers in society and in employment, how can Europe both maintain decent levels of pensions and provide decent jobs for younger workers? As cross-border migration becomes ever easier how can migrant workers be fully integrated and accepted into the European labour market? How can aspirations for decent jobs be squared with the nearly pan-European progression of precarious work? Europe’s future depends in large part on the answers it can provide to these questions within the context of the vision of a competitive, technologically-innovative economy bolstered by a high road social model that was captured in the Europe 2020 strategy. The aim of the ChangingEmployment programme is to train a cross-European and interdisciplinary network of policy-focused social scientists comprehensively skilled in understanding, analyzing, and responding to social and institutional employment changes. Overall, it will:
1.Explore, societal differences, national variations in employees’ experiences of working life.
2.Examine historic and changing relations between management and employees.
3.Develop a comparative understanding of the changing quality of work, organisation and employment in the context of the (above) changes.
4.Consider patterns and consequences of workplace inclusion-exclusion in relation to migration, employment and unemployment, shifting inequalities in terms of gender and ethnicity and the implications for older employees of new patterns of work and retirement.
5.Assess impact of the current economic retrenchment on these forms of employment in Europe
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