IER News & blogs

IER, together with Copenhagen Business School and FAOS, University of Copenhagen, organised the 42nd conference of the International Working Party on Labour Market Segmentation (IWPLMS), which took place at Copenhagen Business School on 5-6 September. The conference was well attended and both international academic scholars and practitioners took part in the conference.

IER’s Trine P. Larsen and Anna Ilsøe (FAOS, University of Copenhagen, Denmark), have edited a special issue for the European Journal of Industrial Relations. It consists of contributions from a range of leading European scholars and looks at the role of social dialogue and collective bargaining to creating, maintaining or reducing the risks associated with employment contracts of few hours, such as marginal part-time work, temporary agency work and zero-hour contracts.

Building on extensive work on sustainable public procurement over the past years, IER's Dr Eva Katharina Sarter presented a paper entitled "Hidden Debates: Public Procurement as a Venue for Negotiation", which examined the political dimension of debates on the strategic use of public procurement to foster (social) policy goals.

This event, which will mark the official launch of the book “Re-Thinking Europe’s Skill Needs: Reflections Following the European Year of Skills”, will bring together experts and professionals to explore how we can tackle the skill needs in today’s ever-changing world.

Our recent renewal of the Athena Swan Bronze Award shows that IER has progressed on all gender equality indicators since its last award. This progress is just one of the positive results from the renewal. Progress is especially seen in the area of staff work-life balance, which was a key issue in the previous application. Nearly all staff now respond favourably to their work-life balance situation now compared with only one in three in 2018.