The working life of the future

A team of 30 researchers from all of the Nordic countries will be involved in this large-scale project, analysing the consequences for the Nordic model and making recommendations about how to maintain its importance in the face of trends that will lead to insecurity about employees’ rights in the next 10–20 years.

The work will take the form of sub-projects on themes such as the digitalisation of traditional jobs, the spread of self-employment and other new forms of flexible employment contracts, the growth of new services and platforms and the consequences for both the working environment and employment law.

The first interim report – The Nordic Future of Work – Drivers, Institutions, Politics – was published in November 2018. It identifies the four main drivers and trends that will change working life: globalisation, new technology, demographics and the climate.

It also identifies certain provisional prerequisites for tackling the transition to the working life of the future: e.g. vocational, further and higher education; welfare changes that take into account those not covered by the conventional Nordic employment model; and safeguarding the rights of trade unions and employers to organise and to negotiate together and with representatives of the state despite the respective roles of the union and employers being less clear in the period ahead. Work on these points, and more, will be followed up in future sub-projects.

The project on the future of working life is also part of the Nordic contribution to the 100th anniversary of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 2019. The Nordic countries also marked the centenary with a Nordic Future of Work conference in Reykjavik in April 2019, at which the findings of the interim report were a key element.