YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Employment and entrepreneurship  121 RUDI KLANJŠEK, TOMAŽ DEŽELAN AND NINA VOMBERGAR 3. EMPLOYMENT AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP 3.1  LABOUR MARKET AND YOUNG PEOPLE Europe in general and Slovenia in particular, in a time of global competi- tion, automation, unfavourable demographic processes, and the global epidemic of the Covid-19 virus, are confronted with forces that are sig- nificantly reshaping the labour market and the nature of work itself. Tra- ditional forms of permanent employment are increasingly being replaced by less secure, flexible forms (Grimshaw et al., 2016; Kalleberg, 2011; Klanjšek, 2018; Mortimer and Moen, 2016; Standing, 2014), new technol- ogies are obviating old jobs and changing the nature of work (Ford, 2016; Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2016), and new jobs require on average new skills and more knowledge than previously held. That last point partly explains why the age of people’s first employment is rising and why the transition itself is taking longer and ismore precarious (Dwyer andWyn, 2001; Furlong and Kelly, 2005; Vertot, 2009). The Covid-19 epidemic adds to this uncertainty, firstly because restric- tive measures are putting many jobs at risk, and secondly because of the adjustments that are upending the traditional concept of work or work- place. The aspect of social isolation due to work from home is particular- ly noteworthy here because it further reinforces the process of labour market fragmentation, which is, alongside deinstitutionalisation (i.e., deregulation), one of the important factors behind the declining bar- gaining power of labour (Bental and Demougin, 2010; Guschanski and Ozlem, 2020). Furthermore, studies show that working from home in- creases workload and makes it more difficult to ‘disconnect’ from work (Felstead and Henseke, 2017), while reinforcing feelings of loneliness and poor mental health (Killgore et al., 2020).