Transforming European Work and Social Protection: A New Proactive Welfare State Fit for the Future World of Work

Project Information

TransEuroWorkS

Grant agreement ID: 101061198

DOI

10.3030/101061198

EC signature date 9 June 2022

Start date 1 November 2022

End date 31 October 2026

Funded under

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Total cost

€ 2 637 258,75

EU contribution

€ 2 637 258,75

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TransEuroWorkS (Transforming European Work and Social Protection: A New Proactive Welfare State Fit for the Future World of Work)

Reporting period: 2023-11-01 to 2025-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Global challenges such as digitalisation, the green transition, and the international mobility of workers have substantial effects on European labour markets. Some sectors grow as a consequence of these phenomena, while in others the demand for labour is decreasing. These changes have important implications for workers, households and businesses. In this Horizon Europe project, we explore how these challenges affect Europe's labour markets. We also investigate how welfare states can help mitigate the potential negative effects of these large transformations.

TransEuroWorkS focuses on specific aspects in different Work Packages:

- Green transition, technological change, and social policy recalibration.
- Flexible work and well-being.
- Work-life balance and gender equality.
- New forms of work and social dialogue.
- Inequalities of social protection.
- Reskilling workers in the digital age.
- Future of social policy in European countries and at the EU-level.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first two years of the project, we have focused on gathering an extensive set of data that will be the foundation for our research in the final two years. These include:

- 12 interviews with experts and key policy providers of digital skills training programs in Catalonia.
- Work Life Balance Directive Dataset.
- EU Social Policy dataset.
- Access to Eurostat microdata for their major surveys: European Community Household Panel (ECHP),Labour Force Survey (LFS),European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC),Structure of Earnings Survey (SES), and Continuing Vocational Training Survey (CVTS).

In addition to that, the project is currently finishing two other data collection efforts. The first is a dataset on the quality of national unemployment systems, which will cover data on access, duration, and benefit levels. The second is the TransEuroWorkS survey, which will cover the following topics:
- Background information on respondents’ employment, gender, education, income, household composition, and migration status.
- Perceptions of employment insecurity and income inequality.
- Political attitudes on several issues, including EU fiscal integration, migration, climate change, and digitalisation.
- Social policy preferences at national and European levels.
- Perceptions about work-life balance.
- Attitudes towards remote and flexible working conditions.

The survey also includes three experimental modules exploring:
- The influence of digitalisation on political attitudes, preferences, and behaviour.
- Stigma against home and hybrid workers, investigating which demographic groups experience or harbour greater stigma, and how this varies across organisational and cultural contexts.
- The impact of economic contexts, employment prospects on migration attitudes, welfare chauvinism, and unemployment preferences.

TransEuroWorkS already has run the pilot in November 2024. Fieldwork was carried out in late March/beginning of April 2025 across 15 countries (around 36,000 respondents).

Apart from data collection, we have also worked on deliverables that establish the foundation for our research. In August 2024, our first peer-reviewed paper stemming from the project was published in "Social Indicators Research": "Flexibility Stigma Across Europe: How National Contexts can Shift the Extent to which Flexible Workers are Stigmatised".

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The impacts of the project are threefold:

- First, from an academic point of view, a major contribution of the project is the linking of three major labour market transitions, i.e. green transition, digitalisation, and the internationalization of the workforce, to better understand new labor market risks and how to address them successfully through new social protection schemes. In that sense, it advances existing academic literature by providing a more encompassing theoretical framework of shifts in employment risks in European economies and new social protection needs that they imply.

- Second, for this purpose, the project will gather new data and information through individual-level survey (experiments), interviews, and the revision of the existing EU legislation and policy documents. In addition, the project involves a novel field experiment to assess the impact of active labor market policies such as reskilling and digital training on employment and political outcomes.

- And finally, based on these new data and tools, the project then suggests potential new pathways for policy adjustments that reflect both gaps in the existing EU protection schemes and new policy needs of the workforce in transitioned labor markets.

Project logo