EU workers have much to be thankful for, according to Mary Parkinson, assistant professor in management at UCD Michael Smurfit Business School.
“The EU continues to be a good place to work because worker protection is treated as a critical component of healthy organisations and labour markets," she says.
Recent initiatives such as the EU Platform Work Directive on gig workers’ rights and the new Pay Transparency Directive demonstrate this commitment by expanding protections for vulnerable workers and aiming to improve pay equality.
“But a key strength is Europe’s commitment to occupational health and safety. In a time when protections for workers have been politically contested elsewhere in the world, the EU has continued to address the evolving challenge of keeping workers safe,” Parkinson says.
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Historically, the most prominent and regulated risks to workers have been visible but recent heatwaves show risk comes in all forms.
“The recent heat dome across Europe has highlighted the urgent social and economic need to adapt worker protections to climate change,” she says.
One in five workers were exposed to extreme heat at work in the previous 12 months, a report by the European Agency for Occupational Health and Safety at Work has found.
“While some European countries have introduced or strengthened heat protections, a more systematic approach will be needed as extreme heat becomes a predictable occupational health risk,” she says.
Other less visible harms are also increasingly being felt by workers in Europe. “Psychosocial risks such as long working hours, bullying and poor work design can damage mental and physical health and cost 1.37 per cent of global GDP annually,” says Parkinson.
“While under the EU occupational health and safety framework employers are responsible for assessing and preventing risks to their employees’ occupational health and safety, in practice member states vary substantively in how explicitly this is addressed,” she says.
“A key opportunity now is for employers to recognise these explicitly as organisational hazards to be prevented, rather than hazards of the job for the individual worker to manage.”
Europe already leads the way in many aspects of worker protection.
“In comparison to other large countries or groups of countries, we have a very good system of collective bargaining. We have very clear legislation that ensures work-life balance for workers, and that promotes equality in the workplace and access to employment,” says Daphne Ahrendt, a senior research manager in the Social Policies unit at Eurofound, the European foundation for the improvement of living and working conditions.
However, there are gaps that need to be bridged, including access to work for people who have or acquire a disability.
“Some groups in the population do not have that same access to employment, or that same ability to continue being in employment when something happens to them, despite all this legislation that’s in place,” says Ahrendt.
“A lot of guidance is still needed for employers, and also for governments and social partners, to ensure that this very valuable resource is given the opportunity to participate, which is their official right.
“Our take is that employment is not only good for the individual, it’s good for society as a whole in terms of social cohesion. So it’s very important that everybody has that opportunity to participate.”
Most disability occurs in adulthood and people impacted should have the same opportunity to participate as before, with employers making reasonable accommodation to support them.
“That doesn’t just mean a desk that’s adjustable or what you might think of in the strict sense of accommodation. It can also mean providing transportation or having a personal assistant,” she says.
Many employers are unaware of their obligations and unaware of the financial supports they can avail of.
Meanwhile, people who have a disability often worry they risk losing their disability allowance by working. All this needs sorting.
“The problem is that we keep having a significant portion of the population with disabilities that is out of employment. The worry is that this is only going to increase because our population becomes older. So it’s a growing imperative,” Ahrendt says.
