The 16th Joint Summer Academy on Central-Eastern Europe

The Summer Academy was held in Tutzing, Germany, between July 1st and 3rd. The conference was organised by the Academy for Political Education (APB) and the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS).

The conference in Tutzing focused on labour market dynamics in turbulent times in Central-Eastern Europe. Researchers from international institutions in France, Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and North Macedonia shared their insights on their recent findings.

Wojciech Szymczak presented the article “Technology adoption, trade unions and involuntary atypical employment,” co-authored by Piotr Lewandowski (IBS). The survey results showed that the increase in the use of technology could lead to a broader coverage of workers in non-standard forms of employment – part-time and temporary work. Further exploration of the problem showed that the groups so far most often subjected to non-standard employment – particularly women and people with middle and lower education – are most at risk of reducing the quality of work. However, the negative impact of technology can be reduced with solid worker representation in labour unions.

The summer academy included two keynote speeches by Jorg Lingens (Munster University) and Achim Ahrens (ETH, Zurich). The first presentation described the theoretical underpinnings of labour market adjustment in the event of climate change policies, with a particular focus on the Ruhr coal mining sector in Germany. The second presentation explored the higher adoption of machine learning algorithms from the causal inference perspective in statistics and econometrics.