From 26 to 28 May 2022 took place in Jūrmala, Latvia, a seminar about “The future of work in the Baltic States and other EU countries: automation, workforce transition and quality of employment”, organised by ECA (European Christian Academy), with the support of EZA and funded by the European Union.
100 representatives of workers’ organisations from Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Russia (as guests), Byelorussia (as guests) and Germany.
What was the most important aspect of the project?
TOPICALITY: The most important aspect of the project topicality was prepared by stimulative reports valuable for understanding all age groups’ of participants the importance and necessity of understanding of how the new trends of the future work that have already cause occupational and skill shifts across all local and international labour markets in EU will develop in future.
Nowadays the nature of work has been changing. Part time work rise substantially in 22 of the 29 European countries. Until the Covid-19 crisis independent work-including freelancers, workers for temporary staffing agencies, and gig economy workers may have contributed 20 to 30% of all jobs. Moreover, reduced employment protection in almost all countries means that working arrangements have eroded.
New trends of work have already contributed to significant shifts in the social contract – the implicit relationships between individuals and institutions – over past two decades. While they have created considerable opportunity for some workers, especially those with advanced skills that are in high demand, and helped to boost employment to record levels before the Covid-19 pandemic, a substantial proportion of Europe’s workers have been negatively affected by more fragile work situations and wage stagnation.
The second aspect of real importance was introduction of new job possibilities and prognosis of future work development analysis from multidisciplinary perspective: Europe may take years to overcome the Covid-19 economic and employment crisis, but governments and companies still need to keep long-term trends in mind. With accelerated automation adaption, demographies could work in Europe’s favour, based on the expected decline in labour supply. Europe may even find it challenging to fill the jobs available. Helping individuals connect with new opportunities and to prepare for the jobs of tomorrow with challenge every community across the EU. Now is the time to think further ahead and reimagine the future of work.
Why was the project important just now?
The Covid-19 pandemics has had a major impact on prompting stringent lockdown measures across all EU countries, leading to a collapse of economic activity. As the economy cautiously reopens after the shutdown, we estimate that nearly 59 million European jobs, or 26% of the total, are at risk in the short term through reductions in hours or pay, temporary furloughs, or permanent layoffs.
Three occupational groups account for about half of all jobs at risk in Europe: customer service and sales, food services and building occupations. Almost 70% of jobs that could be displaced due to automation in the wholesale and retail sector are also at risk due to Covid-19. The crisis may also accelerate some of the displacement projected to take the years. The crisis may also accelerated automation adaption, as robots are not susceptible to the virus, creating incentives to automate.
Conversely, Covid-19 might delay or reduce job creation in jobs that involve human interactivation and have been considered as shielded from digital technologies such as arts.
It was important to speak on the employment impact of Covid-19 may hasten the workforce transitions to new jobs with different skills for many. The crisis could also accelerate existing inequalities within European countries, not just between better-educated and less-well-educated workers, but also young people, as we discussed.
Now automation is amplifying the shift toward more knowledge-intensive sectors, such as education, information and communication technologies, and human health and social work.
Our analysis and reports of potential automation displacement and potential job growth through 2030 indicates that this rebalancing will likely continue in the decade ahead. Some sectors in the Baltics and EU are set to grow strongly, others may expect a shift of occupations within the sector but modest growth overall, and the number of jobs in still others may decline.
Which topic fields were discussed?
Main topics were focused on future of work in the Baltics and EU. Topics of the quality of the remote work were analysed. Development of logics that play together: professional logics, employer’s autonomy, economic integration and state response, formal or real social dialogue, social responsibility, future of work as challenge for TU.
Field trip to the professional and continuing education institution “Magnetic Professional” was a result of reports and discussions, informing how implementation large-scale training programmes and creating new re-employment paths to retrain workers to fill new digital roles or shift some into more facing roles.
Participants saw how building digital capabilities within existing workforce to be able to develop and implement new business models that increase innovation and productivity. Retraining or attracting talent needed to install, maintain and use new technology systems.
Seminar results
- During discussions we established three types of important, resultative analysis: 1) technology is evolving, demographics are changing, for business, for leaders and for employees – unplanned reinvention of the way we work dominated industries as organisations grappled with government guidelines and reacted to constantly changing circumstances.
2022 is the year to start reinvention process, to change intentional decisions and for employees to speak their minds.
Whilst the future remains uncertain, innovation and technology continue to lead instrumental change in the nature of work.
- Seminar committed to delivering key insights into new ways of created common working and discussions platform “Dilemma” for creating discussions and debates for new challenges and solutions – underpinned by the transformative impact of technology.
- International visionary keynotes, data-driven reports and discussions ideas of start-up ecosystem trends; visions of open networking after the seminar – really good result – seminar as ideas portfolio on the platform “Dilemma” for exchange for initiating long-term collaborations among different TU.
- The introduction of new, more flexible work models creates new dimension of human interaction. With embedded real-time communication tools, developers can reimagine the future of everything: four consequences for daily work were summed up:
1) designing your technology strategy for a seamless fit into a user workflow;
2) ensuring a high quality communication session for optimal; productivity,
3) reimagining live events with an engaging interactive platform,
4) accelerating time to market the future of work applications and beyond.
Three most significant workforce challenges, which were cited as important for leaders:
1) identifying the risks of replacing human work with technology,
2) identifying the skills workers will need in future due to technologies,
3) communicating clearly about the effect of automation and future skills needs.
Seminar participants discussions lead to four very significant inhibitors to progress: cost capability, leadership responsibility and capability, organisational culture. Planning is important and difficult, because workers’ organisations face on increasingly uncertain future. Good planning requires the right leaders to build trust in the forms of future work.