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This 30th edition of the OECD Employment Outlook examines recent labour market trends and short-term prospects in OECD countries. It finds that the recovery from the recent economic and financial crisis has been slow and uneven. Unemployment remains unacceptably high in many countries and long-term unemployment has risen, increasing the risk of higher unemployment becoming entrenched. An analysis of how labour markets weather economic shocks shows that policies to lower structural unemployment also help to dampen the adverse effects of economic downturns on unemployment, earnings losses and earnings inequality. The report documents the decline in the labour share of national income that has been occurring in many OECD countries, primarily as a result of globalisation and technological change. Enhanced investment in education and better targeted tax and transfer programmes can help to ensure that the fruits of economic growth are more broadly shared. Finally, the impact of climate-change mitigation policies on the labour market is examined. Some sectors could experience large employment changes even if the impact on the overall level of employment may only be small. As for other structural shocks, policies should be put in place to facilitate labour market mobility.

The OECD Employment Outlook 2013  looks at labour markets in the wake of the crisis. It includes chapters on  the experience of different labour market groups since 2007; employment protection legislation; benefit systems, employment and training programmes and services; and re-employment, earnings and skills after job loss. As always, it includes an extensive statistical annex.

The OECD Employment Outlook 2014 marks the 20th Anniversary of the OECD Jobs Strategy and includes chapters on recent labour market developments with a special section on earnings/wages, job quality, youth employment, unemployment and unemployment rates, and forms of employment and employment protection. As in previous editions, the 2014 OECD Employment Outlook monitors recent labour market developments in OECD countries and Key Partner economies and identifies appropriate policy action to foster more and better jobs.

The 2015 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook provides an in-depth review of recent labour market trends and short-term prospects in OECD countries. Chapter 1 looks at recent labour market developments focusing on minimum wages, while Chapter 2 draws on the OECD’s International Survey of Adult Skills and considers skills and wage inequality. Chapter 3 looks how policies to get job seekers back into work can help make labour markets more inclusive, while Chapter 4 examines job quality in terms of earnings mobility, labour market risk and long-term inequality. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses how job quality in emerging economies can be enhanced.

This 2016 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook provides an in-depth review of recent labour market trends and short-term prospects in OECD countries. Chapter 1 examines recent labour market developments, with a special focus on vulnerable youth who are neither working nor in education or training. The size of this group has grown in recent years in many OECD countries and governments will need to take vigorous policy measures if they are to meet the target, recently adopted by G20 governments, of reducing the share of youth who are vulnerable by 15% by 2025. Chapter 2 considers skills use at work: are countries doing enough to assure that workers are able to make full use of their skills on the job? Chapter 3 looks at the short-term effects of structural reforms on employment and identifies successful strategies for reducing transition costs. Chapter 4 looks at how to close the labour market gender gap in emerging economies, proposing a comprehensive policy response to the problem. The Outlook’s analysis and recommendations are complemented by a statistical annex.

The 2017 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook reviews recent labour market trends and short-term prospects in OECD countries. Chapter 1 presents a comparative scoreboard of labour market performance that encompasses the quantity and quality of employment, as well as the inclusiveness of the labour market. During the past decade, most countries managed to better integrate women and potentially disadvantaged groups into the labour market and improve the quality of the working environment, whereas earnings quality was more or less stable and labour market security worsened. Chapter 2 looks at the resilience of labour markets following the global crisis and shows how both structural reforms and expansionary fiscal policy mitigate the unemployment costs of adverse aggregate shocks. OECD countries generally have avoided an increase in structural unemployment, but not a marked deceleration of wage and productivity growth. Chapter 3 documents the impact of technological progress and globalisation on OECD labour markets over the past two decades. Technology is shown to have been strongly associated with both job polarisation and de-industrialisation. The impact of trade integration is difficult to detect and probably small, although rising imports from China has a small effect in depressing employment in manufacturing. Chapter 4 provides an exceptionally rich portrait of collective bargaining in OECD countries that makes it possible to understand better how national systems differ and the implications of those differences for economic performance.

The 2018 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook reviews labour market trends and prospects in OECD countries. Chapter 1 presents recent labour market developments. Wage growth remains sluggish due to low inflation expectations, weak productivity growth and adverse trends in low-pay jobs. Chapter 2 looks at the decline of the labour share and shows that this is partially related to the emergence of "superstar" firms, which invest massively in capital-intensive technologies. Chapter 3 investigates the role of collective bargaining institutions for labour market performance. Systems that co-ordinate wages across sectors are associated with better employment outcomes, but firm-level adjustments of sector-level agreements are sometimes required to avoid adverse effects on productivity. Chapter 4 examines the role of policy to facilitate the transition towards new jobs of workers who were dismissed for economic reasons, underlying the need of early interventions in the unemployment spell. Chapter 5 analyses jobseekers' access to unemployment benefits and shows that most jobseekers do not receive unemployment benefits and coverage has often been falling since the Great Recession. Chapter 6 investigates the reason why the gender gap in labour income increases over the working life, stressing the role of the lower professional mobility of women around childbirth.

The 2019 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook presents new evidence on changes in job stability, underemployment and the share of well-paid jobs, and discusses the policy implications of these changes with respect to how technology, globalisation, population ageing, and other megatrends are transforming the labour market in OECD countries. The report discusses how labour market regulation might be used to extend rights and protections beyond standard employees, as well as to rebalance bargaining power between employers and workers. It analyses how collective bargaining and social dialogue can be mobilised to address emerging challenges in the labour market, looking at the role of government, social partners and new forms of collective organisation. The role of adult learning is also addressed, with a particular focus on the most vulnerable groups. And finally the report also assesses challenges for social protection policies, presenting evidence on the support gaps affecting different types of worker, and discussing reform avenues for preserving and strengthening the key stabilising role of social protection systems.

The 2020 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook focuses on worker security and the COVID-19 crisis. Chapter 1 provides an initial assessment of the labour market consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting economic crisis. It also presents an overview of the emergency labour market and social policy measures implemented by OECD countries and discusses directions for further policy adaptation as countries move out of lockdown. Chapter 2 investigates the uneven access to unemployment benefits for workers in part-time and less stable jobs, which often accentuates the hardship they face in times of crisis, and discusses the difficult balance between work incentives and income security. Chapter 3 provides a comparative review of employment protection legislation (EPL) across OECD countries by developing a new version of the OECD's EPL indicators, which now include an improved assessment of regulations for collective redundancies, unfair dismissals and enforcement issues. Chapter 4 takes a fresh look at job polarisation, and in particular the hollowing out of jobs in middle-skill occupations. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the changing labour market outcomes for middle-educated vocational education and training graduates, whose labour market perspectives are challenged by the contraction of jobs in middle-skill occupations.

The 2021 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook focusses on the labour market implications of the COVID‑19 crisis. Chapters 1-3 concentrate on the main labour market and social challenges brought about by the crisis and the policies to address them. Chapters 4-5 cover long-standing structural issues but also discuss their relevance and implications for the COVID-19 crisis. More specifically, Chapter 1 monitors the impact of the crisis on the labour market, with a particular focus on vulnerable groups in the medium and long term. Chapter 2 provides a preliminary assessment of the role of job retention schemes in preserving jobs during the COVID-19 crisis. Chapter 3 analyses how active labour market policies and public employment services have responded to the challenges posed by the crisis. Chapter 4 assesses the extent and consequences of domestic outsourcing for the labour market in general, and for low-wage occupations in particular. Chapter 5 provides a detailed review of statutory and negotiated regulations governing working time – including teleworking – as well as an overview of trends in working time patterns and time use across OECD countries and socio-demographic groups.

Two years into the pandemic, economic activity has recovered faster than expected. However, the labour market recovery is still uneven across sectors and is threatened by the economic fallout from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which has generated the fastest growing humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II, sending shockwaves throughout the world economy. The 2022 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook reviews the key labour market and social challenges for a more inclusive post-COVID‑19 recovery. It also examines the policies to address these challenges and the outlook ahead. Particular attention is given to frontline workers and groups lagging behind in this recovery (young people, workers with less education, and racial/ethnic minorities). The Outlook also addresses a number of long-standing structural issues that have a key relevance for labour market inclusiveness, such as employer market power and its labour market consequences, the role of firms in wage inequality, and the effect of working time policies on well-being and economic outcomes.

The 2023 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook examines the latest labour market developments in OECD countries. It focuses, in particular, on the evolution of labour demand and widespread shortages, as well as on wage developments in times of high inflation and related policies. It also takes stock of the current evidence on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the labour market. Progress in AI has been such that, in many areas, its outputs have become almost indistinguishable from that of humans, and the landscape continues to change quickly, as recent developments in large language models have shown. This, combined with the falling costs of developing and adopting AI systems, suggests that OECD countries may be on the verge of a technological revolution that could fundamentally change the workplace. While there are many potential benefits from AI, there are also significant risks that need to be urgently addressed, despite the uncertainty about the short- to medium-term evolution of AI. This edition investigates how to get the balance right in addressing the possible negative effects of AI on labour market outcomes while not stifling its benefits.

This publication presents an internationally agreed set of guidelines for producing more comparable statistics on the quality of the working environment, a concept that encompasses all the non-pecuniary aspects of one's job, and is one of the three dimensions of the OECD Job Quality framework. These Guidelines take stock of current data availability in this field, review the analytic and policy uses of these measures, proposes a conceptual framework based on 6 dimensions and 17 characteristics (ranging from physical risk factors and work intensity, through to task discretion, autonomy and opportunities for self-realisation), assesses the statistical quality of measures in this field, and provides guidance to data producers and users on methodological challenges in this field. These Guidelines also include a number of prototype surveys modules that national and international agencies could use in their surveys.

These Guidelines have been produced as part of the OECD Better Life Initiative, a pioneering project launched in 2011 with the objective of measuring society's conditions across 11 dimensions of people's well-being. They follow on from similar measurement guidelines on subjective well-being, micro statistics on household wealth, integrated analysis of the distribution on household income, consumption and wealth, as well as trust.

This annual edition of Labour Force Statistics provides detailed statistics on population, labour force, employment and unemployment, broken down by gender, as well as unemployment duration, employment status, employment by sector of activity and part-time employment. It also contains participation and unemployment rates by gender and detailed age groups as well as comparative tables for the main components of the labour force. Data are available for each OECD Member country and for OECD-Total, Euro area and European Union. The time series presented in the publication cover 10 years for most countries. It also provides information on the sources and definitions used by Member countries in the compilation of those statistics.

This annual edition of Labour Force Statistics provides detailed statistics on population, labour force, employment and unemployment, broken down by gender, as well as unemployment duration, employment status, employment by sector of activity and part-time employment. It also contains participation and unemployment rates by gender and detailed age groups as well as comparative tables for the main components of the labour force. Data are available for each OECD Member country and for OECD-Total, Euro area and European Union. The time series presented in the publication cover 10 years for most countries. It also provides information on the sources and definitions used by Member countries in the compilation of those statistics.

This annual edition of Labour Force Statistics provides detailed statistics on population, labour force, employment and unemployment, broken down by gender, as well as unemployment duration, employment status, employment by sector of activity and part-time employment. It also contains participation and unemployment rates by gender and detailed age groups as well as comparative tables for the main components of the labour force. Data are available for each OECD Member country and for OECD-Total, Euro area and European Union. The time series presented in the publication cover 10 years for most countries. It also provides information on the sources and definitions used by Member countries in the compilation of those statistics.

This annual edition of Labour Force Statistics provides detailed statistics on population, labour force, employment and unemployment, broken down by gender, as well as unemployment duration, employment status, employment by sector of activity and part-time employment. It also contains participation and unemployment rates by gender and detailed age groups as well as comparative tables for the main components of the labour force. Data are available for each OECD Member country and for OECD-Total, Euro area and European Union. The time series presented in the publication cover 10 years for most countries. It also provides information on the sources and definitions used by Member countries in the compilation of those statistics.