The Job Quality Side of Climate Change
Abstract
Climate change is having a profound and transformative impact on the way we live and work. These impacts are direct, through the great shifts in temperatures and weather patterns which are being growingly felt across the globe, and indirect, through the measures and policies that are being deployed in order to tackle it. The Council recommendation on ensuring a fair transition towards climate neutrality confirm the endorsement of EU Member States towards “the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and job quality”, which have been established in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. This idea motivated Eurofound in a recent report, “the Job quality side of climate change” to investigate how climate change impacts job quality through a literature review, the consultation of its European network of correspondents and some statistical analysis of the European Working Conditions Telephone Survey of 2021.
The article will first set the scene by describing job quality, and its main components, depicting the relationship between Green House Gas emissions (GHG) and the employment levels by sector of economic activity. The latter can suggest priorities for decarbonisation. Changes in jobs also occur as result of greening which is the process through which occupations adapt the content of their tasks to climate change with a significant impact on changes in the work performed and job quality in these occupations. It will then explore how job quality is expected to change due to climate change risks, and as a result of the greening of tasks and occupations. It will finally consider climate change as a possible driver to reinventing work, by changing the work processes involved in the current extraction, production, distribution and consumption systems which would also impact on the job quality of workers.
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