Job quality and labour market performance

10 | Erhel & Guergoat-Larivière

can give a first picture of the heterogeneity of working conditions. Training and education are
partly covered: the European Commission provides data by categories on participation to
training and education through the Compendium. Finally, the dimension of gender equality and
conciliation can be observed through differences between men and women for all the indicators
mentioned above.

We present data at different geographical levels EU15, New Member States, EU25 or EU27, as
patterns in job quality heterogeneity may not be exactly the same in EU older members and in
New Member States (NMS). We will present data broken down by age, gender, education level,
type of working contract and economic activity.

4.1 Lower quality jobs for young workers in Europe

When looking at job quality indicators broken down by age, we observe a rather strong
heterogeneity and it appears that workers below 25 years old are particularly penalised. Young
people have lower socio-economic security than middle-aged and older people. While around
15% of employed people have temporary contracts in the EU25 countries, this proportion rises
to more than 40% for young people. Data on part-time work also reflect disparities among age
classes. Part-time work is much less developed in New Member States (6.9%) than in the EU15
(20.3%) but young people are more affected in both regions (respectively 13.5% and 28.2%). It
is interesting to note that part-time work is more often involuntary in New Member States and
particularly for middle-age workers (35.7% in NMS vs. 22.7% in EU15). Actually, this
difference is mainly due to the smaller proportion of middle-age women declaring involuntary
part-time in the EU15.

Indicators on what Eurostat calls “asocial working hours” give a first picture of differences in
working conditions across age classes. These figures display quite different patterns in terms of
heterogeneity in EU15 and in New Member States. In EU15, people under 25 are more affected
than middle-age and older people by work at weekends, whereas in New Member States people
are equally concerned by work on Saturdays and Sundays, whatever their age. On the whole,
night work remains limited in Europe but it seems that older workers are a bit less exposed to
this kind of atypical working hours.

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