DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-9511-1
title: European Working Conditions Survey, 2024
title: European Working Conditions Surveys, 1991-
title: EWCS

description: &lt;p&gt;The &lt;i&gt;European Working Conditions Survey&lt;/i&gt; (EWCS) is conducted by Eurofound (the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions). Since its launch in 1990, the EWCS has provided an overview of working conditions in Europe. The main objectives of the survey are to:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;assess and quantify working conditions of both employees and the self-employed across Europe on a harmonised basis;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;analyse relationships between different aspects of working conditions;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;identify groups at risk and issues of concern as well as of progress;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;monitor trends by providing homogeneous indicators on these issues; and&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;contribute to European policy development in particular on quality of work and employment issues.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;Themes covered include employment status, working time duration and organisation, work organisation, learning and training, physical and psychosocial risk factors, health and safety, work-life balance, worker participation, earnings and financial security, as well as work and health.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;The EWCS paints a wide-ranging picture of Europe at work across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups. Its findings highlight actions for policy actors to help them address the challenges facing Europe today. The EWCS is generally conducted once every five years, although an extra wave was conducted in 2001 to cover the new acceding and candidate EU countries. The survey is based on a questionnaire which is administered face-to-face to a random sample of 'persons in employment' (i.e. employees and the self-employed), representative of the working population in each EU country. An integrated dataset is also available (see SN 7363) which combines data from the first five waves of the survey in one file.&lt;br&gt;
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Before working with the EWCS data, users are recommended to read the latest supplementary supporting documentation on the Eurofound &lt;a href="http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/surveys/european-working-conditions-surveys" title="European Working Conditions Survey" target="_blank"&gt;European Working Conditions Survey&lt;/a&gt; webpages. Further information about the series can be found there, including methodological information, technical reports and reports on translation, sampling implementation, sampling evaluation and weighting, coding, quality control, quality assurance and other publications.&lt;br&gt;
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&lt;p&gt;Eurofound carried out the fieldwork for the latest edition of its European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) during 2024. The EWCS 2024 provides a comprehensive picture of the everyday reality of men and women at work. In order to future-proof this unique tool for European comparative analysis on working conditions and to look at how trend analysis could be maintained. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The 2024 edition of the survey provides data to be able to continue to:&lt;/p&gt;
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&lt;li&gt;assess and quantify working conditions of both employees and self-employed workers across the EU Member States and beyond on a harmonised basis&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;analyse relationships between different aspects of working conditions&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;identify work situations that are of concern and/or groups at risk, as well as monitoring areas of improvement&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;monitor trends by providing homogeneous indicators on these issues&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;contribute to European policy development, particularly on quality of work and employment&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As the newest edition in Eurofound's longest-running survey, the EWCS 2024 aims to ensure continuity of the survey analysis, accurate and timely findings and high-quality outputs, as well as adaptability of data collection methods for the future.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Continuity of survey analysis: Comparative analysis, rich set of indicators, job quality at the heart, different working situations, quality of working lives&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Quality of findings and outputs: Relevance to users, quality of the questionnaire and finalisation process, quality of the translation, quality of the survey production process&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Adaptability of data collection: Comparability over time but also new questions dealing with 'the future of work that we want', findings solutions to collect high-quality comparative data on job quality in a changing data collection environment.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In parallel to the face-to-face interviews for this survey edition, Eurofound also implemented an experiment for an online questionnaire for the first time. The data for the online survey will be available in late 2026.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For further information on the EWCS 2024 see&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/en/surveys-and-data/surveys/european-working-conditions-survey/ewcs-2024&lt;/p&gt;