European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 91

European Policy Analysis

Three major groups of the factors
that have influence on the willingness to
participate or withdraw from the labor
market were highlighted from the analysis:
work qualities (creativity, productivity;
decision making; teamwork ability; stress
handling; open to new ideas; cultural
competence); stop working because of the
lack of modern skills; places not adapted;
discrimination (at work and in education).

Willingness to work after
the age of retirement is higher when
discrimination at work and education was
not experienced. The low importance of
such work qualities as creativity, decision
making also increases the chances to
work longer, while the productivity issue
is distributed differently from important
to not important. At the same time, the
probability of stopping working career is
higher when the view of the employer is
very important, when there is a lack of
modern skills and when the work place is
not adapted.

The wish to work after official age
or retirement and being entitled for oldage pension is lower when factors such
as flexibility, creativity, openness to new
ideas, decision making, and teamwork
ability are important.

The complexities of work qualities
reflect various characteristics of work
productivity, which are important for
the labor market: the preservation of the
characteristics of work quality or work
productivity as well as the lack of modern
skills and inability to update professional
competencies due to lifelong learning
policy in the region. Hence, one can
state that lifelong learning in the entire
Central and Eastern European regions
is insufficient for the preservation of the
productivity of work. In addition to this,
the statistical data on lifelong learning and

continuing vocational education present
the poor performance of the Central and
Eastern European countries. For example,
the job quality index on skills and career
development (European Trade Union
Institute 2013) shows that all of these
countries, except for Slovenia, in 2010
performed below the EU average. The
values of Romania, Lithuania, Slovakia,
and Hungary are below 0.1, and, thus,
show very poor results on this subindex
(in comparison to Denmark whose value
is close to 0.9).

Although there is no statistical
data on employers’ investment into the job
place adjustments, we can assume that the
situation in the analyzed region is similar
to the situation of lifelong learning. As
Eurostat data show, the percentage of all
the nontraining enterprises in selected
countries is usually higher than that in
other EU countries. There are two main
reasons for this: the existing skills and
competences of the persons employed
corresponded to the current needs of the
enterprise and the training is too expensive
(the last reason being more important in
Bulgaria, Poland, and the Baltic countries,
see Table 3). Hence, the companies tried
to recruit people with the required skills
rather than investing in training or jobplace adjustment to enhance the skills and
productivity of their existing workforce.

The work places not adapted can
prevent longer work life as the data of the
Czech Republic show. As was mentioned
in the theoretical part of the paper, the
workplace adaptation is particularly
needed for manual and unskilled job
(Conen, Henkens, and Schippers 2012).
As statistical data from Eurostat show,
in the Czech Republic, as compared to
the other Central and Eastern European
countries, the number of people employed
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