Newsletter January 2021

Fractures in the Austrian model of long-term care

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights limitations of long-term care (LTC) systems in Europe, which continue to be divided between health and social care, and between formal and informal care. This article focuses on Austria’s LTC sector and its critical features that became visible during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more ...

Findings of the Con3Post project

The findings of the Con3Post project investigating mobility and posting flows between third countries, EU-sending and EU-receiving countries indicated that immigration of third country national (TCN) workers is driven largely by economic discrepancies and wage disparities between the third countries and EU countries, as well as political and economic instabilities in the third countries. We found that

• some companies have become quite active in the wider European markets providing services through posting of TCNs, which has in many cases become a business model for profit maximisation;
• the intersection of the migration and employment regimes may enhance the vulnerabilities of posted TCN workers, who tend not to defy or report their employers, on whom they depend not only for employment but also for the renewal of their work and residence permits in the sending country;
• despite the mechanisms for control and enforcement of national/EU standards, the vulnerability of TCN posted workers persists due to the cloaking effect of the posting employment characterised by subcontracting, cross-border mobility and temporary service provision.

 

New Project: European policy options for long-term care

This study, coordinated by EFTHEIA and CEPS (Belgium), is setting out to fill some knowledge and analytical gaps in the area of LTC in order to support the identification of policy relevant problems and related options with a view to more

New project: Enhancing the collection and analysis of national data on intra-EU posting

Posting.Stat brings together a consortium of universities and research centres from 10 different Member States to promote the evidence basis through the collection and analysis of national micro-data. The geographical scope of the project covers the more

New article in Social Policy & Administration: Informal care and pensions in Austria

A new peer-reviewed article by Ricardo Rodrigues and Stefania Ilinca investigates the effects of reforms to the Austrian pension system in the early 2000s on informal care provision of older working age women. Results show that the increase in more

New report: Putting Quality First – Contracting for long-term care

This report is based on a collaboration of the European Centre with the European Social Network (ESN) to examine how public procurement and quality assurance policies can improve (or decline) access to quality long-term care more

EESPN newsletter: November 2021 issue

We would like to introduce the November 2021 issue of the EESPN newsletter. We feature new projects, calls & publications on new social policy measures relevant to the Bridge Building (BB) region. Read more more

New report: Ageing in Europe – From North to South

This white paper report edited by elf (European Liberal Forum) covers three parts: (1) synthesising EU-wide statistics of key indicators related to the ageing population, (2) describing and comparing country-specific cases from Finland, Austria and more

International Seminar: Birgit Riedel talked about opening the market for childcare in Germany

Birgit Riedel’s team empirically studied the new agents and policy articulation in childcare at a local level. Despite the paradigmatic shift in national legislation local patterns were identified which suggest a complex picture of more

Final conference on 11 February 2021: Register for Social Work and Policing

The European Centre will host the Final Conference of the project SWaPOL on 11 February 2021 online. At this conference, the project partners from Austria, Portugal and Belgium will present the curriculum for a joint training for social more

ELA training: EU labour mobility regulatory framework

Our colleague Sonila Danaj delivered a lecture on 'The posting of third country nationals via EU Member States' at the training module on the EU labour mobility regulatory framework organized by PWC on behalf of the European Labour more

Validation meeting: Findings of the situation analysis of children and adolescents in Croatia

The European Centre, contracted by UNICEF Croatia, conducted the Situation Analysis of Children and Adolescents in Croatia. The scope of this report is to examine the degree of realisation of children’s rights, to investigate the unequal more

Radio feature: Michael Fuchs talks on the fairness of pensions in Austria

Future challenges of the Austrian pension system relate to the financial sustainability of public finances, issues of (intergenerational) fairness and labour market conditions in flux. A major social challenge relates to the ongoing gender more