Living, working and COVID-19 - Eurofund:
This report tries to capture the far-reaching implications of the pandemic for the way people live and work across Europe. The report is divided in three parts focusing on the impact of the pandemic on people´s lives, working during the COVID-19 pandemic and support measures and their roles. Major findings were:
- Increases in working hours and lower levels of job insecurity reported in July compared to April. However, large inequalities between specific groups across the EU have emerged.
- Over half of unemployed respondents did not receive any official financial support since the outbreak of COVID-19, forcing many to rely heavily on informal support.
- Young people are emerging as some of lockdown’s biggest losers who, along with those out of work, report the lowest levels of well-being.
- The pandemic has also affected the work–life balance of women more than men, with women impacted more in terms of reduced working hours and young women more likely to lose their job than men.
Remote working –The new normal:
How will working from home affect the world of work after the pandemic? More and more companies across the globe are already planning for permanent remote working (cnn business, business insider). This opens a discussion on salaries, which are likely to change in order to match local costs of living (facebook pay cuts). A recent publication “Teleworkability and the COVID-19 crisis: a new digital divide?” discusses the extent of teleworking in the EU before and during the COVID-19 outbreak, develops a conceptual analysis to identify the jobs that can be done from home and those that cannot, and on this basis quantifies the fraction of employees that are in teleworkable occupations across EU countries, sectors and socio-economic profiles.
Impacts of minimum wages, review of the international evidence:
More and more countries are discussing and/or introducing minimum wages. This review comparing wage and employment changes across demographic and regional groups, finds small impact on employment and hours from the 2016 introduction of the National Living Wage. Overall, existing research therefore points to a muted effect of minimum wages on employment, while suggesting that minimum wages significantly increase the earnings of low paid workers. Especially for the set of studies that consider broad groups of workers, the overall evidence base suggests an employment impact of close to zero. These ex post evaluations point to a much more modest impact on employment than often assumed in prospective simulation studies.