New Forms Of Employment In Europe

The 'full-time job' is no longer an option for many people seeking employment. It has been replaced by an ever-expanding plethora of 'atypical' employment relationships designed by employers to streamline their operations and/or take advantage of information communications technology. Numerous labour law issues arise, demanding urgent attention. How should law and policy best address these challenges? This incomparable and timely book explores this contentious topic in depth, presenting ten penetrating essays on aspects of the topic by leading European authorities followed by reports on new forms of employment in thirty-five European countries Full-scale analysis of new forms of employment, their characteristics, and their effects on working conditions and the labour market includes such issues as the following: - employment relationships with more than one employer; - discontinuous and/or intermittent work; - work based on networking arrangements; - labour pooling; - crowdworking and crowsourcing; - lack of worker representation; - rights for vulnerable migrant workers; - removal of wage and hours threshold; - false self-employment; - non-payment of 'small' amounts (e.g., holiday pay); - portage salarial; - voucher-based work; - ICT-based mobile work; - organizations offering specific administrative services; - need for safety nets for workers; and - existing and potential monitoring and control mechanisms. Relevant EU Directives and national legal frameworks regarding new forms of employment are fully discussed, with an emphasis on recent trends and proposed solutions. This volume raises awareness of the problems generated by new emerging forms of employment and provides some answers and insights, including lessons to be learned from current developments. In particular, the authors' bringing to light of issues that have not been sufficiently addressed so far under European law will be welcomed by labour law practitioners, company legal counsel, human resources professionals, and academics in the field.

Using a comparative framework, this new volume focuses on how non-standard employment can be regulated in very different social, political and institutional settings. After surveying these new forms of work and the new demands for labour-market regulation, the authors identify possible solutions among local-level actors and provide a detailed analysis of how firms assess the advantages and disadvantages of flexible forms of employment. The authors provide six detailed case studies to examine the successes and failures of experimental approaches and social innovation in various regions in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Recent years have witnessed major changes to the workplace across Europe. The speed of these changes requires constant monitoring and reappraisal. In this book, recent trends are analyzed and their consequences discussed, within a socio-historical context which also reveals underlying patterns of continuity. The trends analyzed include: the presence of high rates of endemic unemployment and underemployment, particularly amongst the young the growth of insecure and precarious employment sweeping changes to the regulation of and organization of work the diminution in the availability of manual work and the growth of white-collar service-sector jobs the growing participation of women in paid employment the introduction of new organizational forms and new forms of management the accelerating use of IT the growth in demand for educational and vocational qualifications by employers the increasing influence of European legislation on work, retirement, health, safety, etc the growing importance of voluntary-sector work The contributors to the volume present both primary research and a wide-ranging survey and analysis of recent major contributions in the field. Detailed empirical material is included from Belgium, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the EU more generally. Thus, the book aims to provide a current overview of the nature of work from a pan-European perspective, illuminated by up-to-the-minute field research.

Since the mid 1990s, the focus of European employment and social policy has shifted from protection to promotion. This book provides a timely analysis of this new form of governance, and the new forms of policy delivery and audit which accompany it. The limitations of the current approach became particularly apparent during the financial crisis of 2008, and it has now reached a turning point. The book offers a new coherent European reform agenda that views easing transitions in employment and promoting the development of individual and collective capabilities as cornerstones. The contributing authors focus on vocational training, life course policies, reflexive labour law and social insurance, from theoretical, empirical and practical perspectives. Transforming European Employment Policy will be of great benefit to policymakers as well as those researching or studying European law, labour law, industrial relations, political science, social policy or international business.