 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the Director of Research here at the Institute of International and European Affairs, the IIA in Dublin. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this IIA webinar. We're delighted to be joined today by Avilo Kalfen, Executive Director of EuroFound, who has been generous enough to take time out of his schedule to speak with us. EuroFound is of course based here in Dublin. Avilo will speak about living and working in an era of disruption drawing on insights and findings from what I think is the fifth round of this excellent survey, which actually completed as recently as May 2022. So it's based on responses, recent responses from over 200,000 people. So this up-to-date data will give valuable insights into how living and working conditions have changed and will reflect on key challenges for policymakers, as we will hear. Mr. Kalfen will speak to us for about 20 minutes or so, and then we will go to questions and answers with you, our audience. As always, you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screens. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you, and we'll come to as many of them as possible once Avilo has finished his presentation. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. Please also feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIA. I'll now very briefly introduce Avilo before handing the floor over to him. So Avilo Kalfen joined Eurofound as the Executive Director on the 1st of June 2021. So congratulations on your first anniversary plus the month of Avilo. He was previously the Director of the Economics and International Relations Institute in Sofia. And prior to this, Mr. Kalfen served on two occasions as Bulgaria's Deputy Prime Minister, 2005-2009 and 2014-2016, as well as Minister of Foreign Affairs 2005-2009 and Minister of Labor and Social Policy from 2014-2016. Avilo, it's a great pleasure and I'll hand you the floor for 20 minutes. Thank you very much, Barbie. And I would start by thanking IIA for the invitation. To be part of this excellent line of speakers in the webinar of IIA is a honor for me. And thank you very much for all those that spare some of their time to watch our webinar today, because I hope that these issues are going to be interesting at this time. I'm going to try to make as informative as possible my 20 minutes. Maybe starting with a few sentences on Eurofound and the particular survey. As you mentioned, Bari Eurofound is the only EU agency which is based in Ireland. But this is also the oldest EU agency, it has been founded back in 1975. And for all these 47 years now, we are studying, we are making research on employment, working conditions, social policies, balance between working and private life. And this research appears as relevant today as it has been 47 years ago. And I'm very happy that lots of our research is taken by our stakeholders. We have a tripartite agency, which means that we are governed by the government's employers and workers from all EU member states. So we are providing research, we have about 30 to 40 publications per year, we have all at any time 50 subjects under research in the pipeline. I'm happy that lots of our research pop up in different other academic editions or in policy documents, or in different parts where our stakeholders are taking them. This particular survey that I'm going to present is something we started at the beginning of the lockdown. So it was spring, actually April 2020. When the lockdown started, when the economy started closing down, and when we wanted to see what happens and what is the effect on working and on living and how people feel with this huge stress that we had at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. So this then started an e-based survey based on the social media, but in every member state we are very selective in terms of gender, age groups, etc. So we don't call it representative because certainly we don't reach people and groups that are not using social media. Now we have more than 200,000 answers and replies. So I would say this is very, very realistic and very good information that could be used. I think we are the only ones in the EU that have started back two years back and we have already the fifth wave of this survey going on the train and asking people about their opinions. Many of these people keep responding every six months to us, so we can see a little bit also the trends of what is happening in the working and living conditions. And this fifth survey that was just published, you can find it on our webpage, shows a very interesting trend. So I'll try to take the flavor of this trend. I mean the most interesting, the most important things to take home. But if you go into the figures, this is going to give you much more information. Trying to make it more informative, I'm going to use slides and graphs. I think visually they sometimes present better than words, what we are doing, but again, you're very welcome to go to the EU funds website and see more details on that. So if we can start the presentation with the first slide. Next one please, I mean the first graph we have. This is a graph showing how many people lost their jobs during the lockdowns in the pandemic. So you see we have three stop points, spring 2020, 2021 and 2022. In between, in the autumn of 2020 and 2021, we also had surveys, so we practically have fifth surveys, five surveys that go on that. So what we see is that in terms of job retention, the situation is extremely different in the different EU member countries. You are going to see the usual suspected countries like Greece, Spain, Cyprus, losing most of the jobs, and this was after one year of lockdown. On the other side of the graph you have countries like Netherlands, Luxembourg that lost a few of them. You can see that Ireland is kind of part of the first group of countries where despite the measures that have been taken, especially after the first year of the lockdowns, there were quite a lot of job losses. So this is to tell you that the situation in terms of job retention was very different in the different member states. Now next slide please. Here we see what is the location of work across the three E-survey rounds. Where people work from home entirely from the office or the workplace entirely or hybrid working. If we have been speaking before this survey, I would say that teleworking is here to stay and I'm still confident in that. Because you have very clear science of interest from the workers, from the employers and from the governments, that teleworking or hybrid working which is combining working from the office with working from distance remotely is going to stay. Everybody wants this, everybody likes this. At the same time there are some drawbacks. One of them is the hassle it creates mostly to the management. So what we see now in the last survey is that many of the employers are asking the workers to go back to the office when the lockdown adds. Still we have a substantially higher percentage of people working from other places remotely compared to the pre-COVID situation where we had three to five percent of the workers. Now we have about 30 percent of the workers working either entirely remotely or in a hybrid way. But this is still much less than the potential and we see a trend of decreasing. So now we have this movement back of the pendulum but I'm sure again that's a subject that I could elaborate lots that teleworking is already here to stay and this is creating privileged jobs. So again you're going to see especially young people that particularly prefer to have teleworking. Next slide please and we are going to see the preferences. Here you see the preferences for teleworking daily or several times a day or a month at least by the different age groups. So you're going to see that women are much more likely to ask for teleworking and young people but above 30 I mean not the youngest and this is increasing with with DH also required to work remotely. It is very important to say that the young the starters of the work would prefer to go to the office and you have good explanations for that because they would like to be to feel the atmosphere of the company I mean to see where they are how they're getting on board of the company etc. So they would prefer to prefer to be there because of these particular reasons. But otherwise people would tend much more than the actual practice to work remotely or in a hybrid way. For women this is a particularly important issue because this is a way we have proven they have much better opportunities to combine their private life with the working class. So the message here is teleworking is still high indeed it's decreasing but the demand is higher and the pressure to the employers to keep it high percentage is going to be there because there are a number of issues with overtime right to disconnect etc etc that needs to be solved. Next slide please. Here we see different other effects of the pandemic then I would focus in particular on the health effects on the mental health effect because we have seen that during the pandemic we have that we had much increasing problems with mental health that were not met. So you see the negative feelings and a risk of depression by by age in the three consecutive service this covers again the two years. We see that basically young people suffer much more from mental health problems in security, loss of perspective, loss of feeling that they can have a useful work, more depression, more loneliness, more tense state than elderly people. This is something which I think needs to be taken on board and in particular if we see the next slide please we are going to see that many of these issues are not taken on board. Here we have before we go to the next slide just to show you here that I said young people are much more of the subject of mental health problems, but in terms of gender these are more women. Surprisingly, the unemployed people, the people with disabilities, those that have difficulties to have a permanent and more stable job have much higher levels of depression and anxiety. In this case, this is how the health care needs this needs. And we see that practically despite the fact that there is an improvement of the health care services that are provided. This is not for only for mental care, mental health for all health needs. Still, it is, there is a very high percentage, especially in some member states for unmet health needs by the by the medical see by the by the health system. And also this is a very serious issue that that needs to be addressed. Again, if you look at the case of Ireland. Again, there is an improvement for for one year. But still, there is a two high percent percentage of medical medical needs. Next slide please. So what type of medical needs we we are talking about and this is the hospital especially scare which is clearly the leading one. But I would also point in particular the preventing screening called test because the prevention if the prevention suffers, then we create a number of additional problems afterwards and it is much more expensive for the society to deal with the and I would also point to the mental health care and in what I also mentioned because we have seen a tremendously increased levels of stress during the lockdowns and during the pandemic. And the mental health needs needs are still very high and the unmet needs are still very high. Again, despite a slight improvement. Next slide please. This is the situation by age in mental health and we are going to we see that the most serious situation is we can't people 18 to 24. These are the people that are either students are entering the job market with all the insecurities and you can imagine that if they have a difficult start then it's going to take time for many of them to go to the normal to the normal way and mainstream of the working conditions. Next slide please. Here, we focus on the ability to make ends meet so what are the difficulties to pay the family budget for the families. What we see is that we have deterioration on this on this parameter as well, which means that there are much less families that are at ease with their budgets and they can guarantee their monthly payments and we have an increased uncertainty or people with great difficulties or with at least with difficulty that are paying their monthly bills bills. This is very important because this reflects also their readiness and capability to work properly, their quality of work, the quality of life, and as we are going to see also very much their trust in the society and in the institutions and eventually some additional problems that could happen. In this process, of course, this is very much strengthened and reinforced by the war in Ukraine. I mean if we ask now I mean this is the situation in the spring. I'm afraid this is going to be even worse with the raising prices and the raising inflation. And this is indeed a very serious problem that needs to be addressed by policy makers. Next slide please. We go to another issue which is related to the trust in institutions we started asking this question when we were asking to do trust governments or doctors or science when the idea was to speak about vaccination and the opposition eventually of the vaccination. And this is what we see we have a general trend of decreasing confidence, especially after in the last one year I mean in the first year, you see there was a little bit of improvement of the confidence in the European Union, which is due very much to the positive position of the outset of the of the current crisis of the institutions with the short program with the support for the for the jobs and the retention of jobs with the common actions providing vaccines etc etc. But then in the last year, like for the other institutions. This trust starts decreasing. And we see in general the highest trust in the health is in the health care system. But also trust in the health care system goes down. I mean this whole situation with people having more difficulties to with their budgets, having more stress at work and and the possibility to resume the normal pace of work. And this is very much reflected in the in the confidence levels. So, the question here is, who would be the trusted source of information and communication with the public. Next slide please. A graph which is not going to surprise you. This is the trust in national governments by ability of the people to make the ends meet. Not surprisingly again, the most difficulties you have in your family, the less you trust anybody, authorities, doctors, media, anybody who is part of the establishment. The trust levels increase with increasing incomes. But what we see is that there is also a general trend that we have seen also in the previous graph of decreasing whatever the initial level at the beginning of the pandemic. The trend of decreasing the trust in the institutions, and that can bring us some additional problems that we need to force in. Next slide please. Yes, again, this is the breakdown by in trust towards different the different sources of information. As we see doctors healthcare science are among the highest ones. Then we have police we have the news and media. But what is very surprising here, look what is the very low trust in the institutions of the people that have the main source of information from the social media, and I'm going to touch on this in a while, because there are more and more people that are collecting information from social media, so here you see the more you tap information from social media, the less you trust anybody, any partner I mean not only the institutions but also police healthcare doctors etc etc. Very much this is explained with fake news with echo chambers that are created online etc etc. Next slide please. This is a particular zoom on Ireland and the situation in Ireland. What we can say is that you have more or less the similar trends like in the other countries and in Europe as a average. This characteristic for Ireland is that you have highest higher levels of trust to government institutions and the EU compared to other countries so Ireland stays even to one point it states the first among all to EU 27 member states in terms of trust in government and EU institutions. This was again in the first year of the pandemic when all these measures for job retention and for vaccination and prevention from from contacts or or deployed. But again you have the same trial trying to decrease interest. Still you have a higher trust compared to the EU 27 that that you see on this. Next slide please. This is something that I would like just to point your attention on this because I think this is a precursor for huge, I would say tectonic societal changes. So, this is the political participation by vaccination status. You're going to say this is very strange I mean who asks whether you are vaccinated or non vaccinated and what is your political participation. This is a very interesting phenomenon. And this is when we ask the questions about trust. Those that have low trust in the institutions become more and more motivated and politically active. And on the on the ground of the general resignation of the voters and the civil society that has a decreasing trust that fighting quick problems, meeting now the facts of the war in Ukraine etc etc. You have the people that were against the vaccination many of them by the way are very much supportive of the Putin's war in Ukraine. Before you put that these are people that are against the establishment. And these people are very active. And by the way, if you look across Europe at the elections you're going to see a rise of nationalistic, some extreme, or some mainstream but not establishment parties. And this is a very clear and very obvious trend there so you have a motivation and activation of people that don't trust anybody. And these people base their information and their motivation on the social media. And if I were to take decisions about political processes, I would watch very carefully this group of people. Some of them are absolutely misled by false information. And by this information, some of them find a way to fight against the establishment and the first step is to go very actively to elections, and, and have sometimes very, very strange, unexpected results. Not to mention buoyancy referendum, the Trump elections in the in the in the US, or I could give many other examples across across Europe. This is this was the last one. So this is a very quick, I mean, trying to squeeze into the time overview of the findings again, how people feel and how people react to the crisis two years after the beginning of the lockdowns and by the way, we see that there is an increased wave so we are going to see how, how we, we would react towards the end of this year. These are processes. What we show this is not a picture, but this is a process. And this process is developing. And I think that this issues have to be taken very seriously into consideration. And I would mention once again, the need to assure more conditions and better provisions for teleworking for remote working, special attention to women and to very young people, special attention to mental health, which is, which is a problem but health as a whole, and watching these developments that happen, that happen in the society with the decreasing trusting institutions and active motivation to vote anti establishment, very, very much filled by the by the social media. Thank you very much, Barry.