Suchergebnisse

As the average age of the European population and of the European workforce rises, more people of working age will have to combine employment with the provision of care, especially to elderly relatives. There are many actors and institutions involved in organising such care, and many institutional frameworks governing the issue of reconciling care and employment. This study shows the challenges involved in combining work and care, and what measures are available to working carers to allow them to balance these demands. Such measures may be contained in national labour legislation, collective agreements or company initiatives – or in a combination of the three. While a few EU Member States are much further along than others in terms of enabling people to combine working life with care, a great deal remains to be done in all countries to enable working carers to remain in the job market while meeting the demands of looking after a relative at home

How to combine work with life is a fundamental issue for many people, an issue that policymakers, social partners, businesses and individuals are seeking to resolve. Simultaneously, new challenges and solutions are transforming the interface between work and life: an ageing population, technological change, higher employment rates and fewer weekly working hours. This report aims to examine the reciprocal relationship between work and life for people in the EU, the circumstances in which they struggle to reconcile the two domains, and what is most important for them in terms of their work–life balance. The report draws on a range of data sources, in particular the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) and the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS).

This report aims to improve understanding of the true cost of inadequate housing to EU Member States and to suggest policy initiatives that might help address its social and financial consequences. The full impact of poor housing tends to be evident only in the longer term, and the savings to publicly funded services, the economy and society that investment in good quality accommodation can deliver are not always obvious. While housing policies are the prerogative of national governments, many Member States face similar challenges in this field. In some, projects to improve inadequate housing have already provided valuable practical experience that can usefully be shared, and this report presents eight such case studies. While improving poor living conditions would be costly, the report suggests the outlay could be recouped quite quickly from savings on healthcare and a range of publicly funded services – in the EU as a whole, for every €3 invested in improving housing conditions, €2 would come back in savings in one year