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This report is based on desk research and a survey of 106 firms in Oman, carried out between May and June 2022. The research was commissioned by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and was carried out in collaboration with the Omani Chamber of Commerce and Industry (OCCI). The results will help Omani businesses, policymakers, workers organizations, and employers and business membership organizations (EBMOs) to better assess policy options, especially as they pertain to skills development of nationals and to skills-based international recruitment. If conducted regularly, this survey can help assess the skills and competency gaps of the Omani workforce with a view to identifying the resulting skill and labour shortages or surpluses and recommending effective measures with respect to reskilling and upskilling.

Following the introduction, Section 2 of the report analyses the skills needs and trends in Oman based on desk research. Section 3 presents key findings from the employer survey. Section 4 highlights insights based on the analysis. Section 5 concludes.

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This research project tracked a cohort of nine female trainees as they completed their apprenticeships as line mechanics or cable jointers in the electricity supply industry in New Zealand. The key findings relate to how the women negotiated their way as trainees in a traditionally male trade, and also to the human resource practices that were used by their employers through this process. The findings draw attention to the skills that women bring to these non-traditional trades that differ from those usually offered by male trainees. They also identify a need for work and family networks to support women working in non-traditional trades, and for work practices to address health and safety concerns that may be specific to (or more likely to be experienced by) women. The attitude of women trainees to health and safety practices were described as an asset. Some teams were unsure how to work with the women and a protective attitude did at times hinder the women's progress. Rough patches were able to be navigated in large part through good support from whanau and family, other trainees and workplace mentors. However, levels of resistance to having women in these roles did not wane considerably among operational staff. Good human resource practices helped to integrate the women but some challenges remain, for example, in how women can reconcile long and unpredictable hours with family responsibilities.

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Achieving work environments that make work sustainable over a lifetime is a key facet of the promotion of longer working lives. This study considers the dimensions of work that have proved essential to the understanding of work sustainability: working conditions; physical and psychological health; the expressive dimension of work; reconciliation of working and non-working time; and socioeconomic conditions. It examines the influence of these factors on how older workers perceive the sustainability of their work, taking account of differences between workers in terms of age, occupation and gender. In addition, the working conditions of the ageing workforce across Member States of the European Union are compared.

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This book is dedicated to the role of work organizations when it comes to the realization of an active fatherhood. Firstly, it deals with barriers for active fatherhood and its correlating mechanisms of inequality: Which aspects of discrimination and social closure do fathers face today if they assert a claim for active fatherhood, and with what kind of barriers are they confronted? Secondly, capabilities of fathers are addressed: Which is their possible scope of action, and which factors lead to differences in capabilities at the workplace? Finally, the book analyzes the meaning of organizational rationalities, and the effects of policies and programs on change and organizational learning with respect to fatherhood.

Summary from publisher's website.

Contents: 1. Introduction: Fathers in work organizations: introduction and overview / Brigitte Liebig and Mechtild Oechsle; 2. Life conduct, strategies and capabilities: Work organizations and fathers' lifestyles: constraints and capabilities / Annette von Alemann, Sandra Beaufays and Mechtild Oechsle; Devoted workers, breadwinning fathers: the case of executive men in the United States / Mary Blair-Loy and Stacy J. Williams; Fathers' parental leave and work-family division in Norwegian elite professions / Sigtona Halrynjo and Selma Therese Lyng; Changing fatherhood? The significance of parental leave for work organizations and couples / Benjamin Neumann and Michael Meuser; 3. Cultures, rationalities and management ambivalent benevolence: The instrumental rationality of father-friendly policies in Swiss organizations / Brigitte Liebig and Christian Kron; Fatherhood in transition: from standard to precarious archetypes in Italian contemporary work organizations / Annalisa Murgia and Barbara Poggio; Of ikumen and ikuboss: an inquiry into Japan’s new fathers as consumers, employees and managers / Christoph Schimkowsky and Florian Kohlbacher; 4. Policies and politics of fatherhood constructing male employees as carers through the Norwegian fathers' quota / Elin Kvande and Berit Brandth; The 'daddy months' in the German fatherhood regime: a step towards an equal share of work and care? / Johanna Possinger; Reconciliation: The different political goals of organizations, governments and lobbies for fathers and children in Germany / Stephan Hoyng; 5. Issues and challenges in research: Research on work and family: some issues and challenges / Suzan Lewis and Bianca Stumbitz. Show less

This report examines four scenarios of social partner cooperation in the hairdressing sector, aimed at improving the quality of work and employment. The scenarios are based on trends that reveal high impact and high uncertainty qualities, such as the re-evaluation of the sector as a craft sector, technological change, the effects of climate change, and the polarisation of the sector due to the dominance of shopping malls. These scenarios, which were developed on the basis of desk research, interviews with national social partners and focus groups of the sectoral social partners, are then mapped onto the four main quality of work indicators, as defined by [European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions] Eurofound (career and employment security, skills development, reconciliation of working and non-working life, and health and well-being), in order to formulate policy pointers for how the social partners could develop strategies to improve the quality of work and employment in the future.

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This article contributes to feminist debates that seek to shed light on the politics of the contemporary neoliberal academy, contributing insights into experiences of early career academics on teaching-only contracts. Through collaborative autoethnography it explores configurations and intersections of the temporal with precarity, class and gender. We draw upon experience(s) of navigating academia as early career academics, reflecting on our journeys from doctoral study to and through the academic labour market, from fixed-term precarious contracts through to securing 'permanent' full-time academic contracts. We focus on ways in which temporalities have served as a structuring force in our working and personal lives, shaping experiences of navigating academia on both a micro and macro scale. We grapple with themes such as everyday experiences of time, precarious timelines, 'working against the clock', 'staying afloat' and 'finding the time'. We further consider way(s) in which our experiences have been further compounded by socio-historical positions, attending to intersections of class and gender given our differing class backgrounds, circumstances, life stage and the timeline of history and biography.

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This report sets out to map and analyse legislation and collective bargaining on telework in the 27 [European Union] Member States and Norway. It highlights the main cross-country differences and similarities regarding telework legislation and recent changes to these regulations. It also examines the current situation regarding collective bargaining on telework. The analysis highlights many of the drawbacks and challenges of telework, focusing on provisions relating to access to telework, flexible working time, continuous availability/connectivity, isolation, occupational and health risk prevention and the costs incurred by the employee while working remotely. With [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 having been an accelerator for regulating telework both in legislation and through collective bargaining, the report sheds light on how the future of telework could be regulated at national and EU level to improve working conditions and the well-being of workers.

Key findings include: (1) Telework is here to stay. Monitoring developments in Member States must remain a priority for policymakers, particularly on issues such as different types of telework arrangements, the organisation of working time, the right to disconnect, the right to request telework, the relationship between telework and gender equality, work–life balance and psychosocial risks. If teleworkers across the EU are to be protected equally, shared standards will also be necessary; (2) There is no one size fits all approach to regulating telework as remote working requires different combinations of regulation, policies and work culture. Social dialogue can play a critical role in implementing telework regulations to protect employees and create positive outcomes for both employers and workers; (3) A significant number of collective agreements on telework were introduced during the pandemic at company and sectoral levels, particularly in sectors with existing arrangements, such as in financial services, manufacturing and information and communications. New agreements were developed in the public services and administration, education, and health and social work activities sectors, highlighting how telework is fast becoming an established way of work organisation across the EU; and (4) The number of countries that have included the right to telework in national legislation has doubled since the beginning of the pandemic. Employees with teleworkable jobs in several countries are now entitled to request telework, including in France, Lithuania, Portugal and the Netherlands, with legislation being developed in Germany and Ireland.

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This paper operationalises the OECD Guidelines for Measuring the Quality of the Working Environment (OECD, 2017) to describe job characteristics among European countries, the United States and Korea in 2010 and 2015. The analysis extends the range of aspects of quality of the working environment beyond those featuring in the Job Strain index presented by (Cazes, 2015), which is used to monitor implementation of the OECD Job Strategy, but at the cost of a more limited country coverage. While the two indices of job strain are largely consistent both across countries and over time, all of the job characteristics included in the 'extended' index turns out to matter for workers' well-being. The framework uses the job demands-resources model (Demerouti, 2001) that stresses the importance of balancing the demands of the job and the resources that are available to workers to meet those demands. Workers are classified as (heavily) strained when the number of job demands they face (largely) exceeds the number of job resources they benefit from, and conversely, they are classified as (very) well-resourced when their job resources (largely) exceed their job demands.

On average among 28 OECD countries, about one third of employees are (moderately or heavily) strained at work, while one half are well-resourced. The share of employees that are heavily strained is close to 10 per cent. Job strain is relatively more frequent among employees with low education and low occupational skills, and it is relatively less frequent in the service sector and in the public sector. Due to composition effects, women hold on average slightly less strained jobs than men. The share of strained workers has slightly declined on average over the 2010-2015 period, falling in a majority of countries. The improvement in working conditions is related to better prospects of career advancement, higher take-up of training, stronger social support and organisational participation at work, higher flexibility of working time, as well as lower exposure to physical risk factors, hard physical demands and unsocial work schedule. On the other hand, perceptions of job insecurity, intimidation and discrimination, as well as work intensity have been on the rise. Finally, quality of the working environment is strongly associated with workers' well-being as measured by mental and physical health, days of sickness, job satisfaction as well as job motivation, and the associated effects are potentially large. For most outcomes, perceived intimidation and discrimination at work is one of the most powerful predictor of workers' well-being.

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This paper considers the debate over ‘good and bad jobs’, first exploring the very concept itself, particularly by which criteria a good job can be defined. Making use of this conceptual framework, the stock of jobs in Queensland and Australia is compared, so as to assess how Queensland is performing in providing good jobs for its workers. Objective evidence comparing Queensland and Australia are presented but these data are not definitive.

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Protecting healthcare worker wellbeing is a priority for attracting and retaining the workforce. This has always been true, but [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 has shone a spotlight on the critical importance of healthcare worker wellbeing for our health system. The healthcare system is a shared responsibility between the federal and state governments. Both governments and health service providers have a duty of care towards healthcare workers' health and safety, which includes protection of their mental health and overall wellbeing. Failure to protect healthcare worker wellbeing will lead to an unsustainable workforce that will have wider implications for the quality and sustainability of all service offerings within the health services. While this perspectives brief considers healthcare workers employed in the context of hospital health services, wellbeing is an issue affecting the broader healthcare workforce, and consideration of the sector in its entirety will be needed to address this pressing issue.

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