WORK-FAMILY BALANCE DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN EU MEMBER STATES
WORK-FAMILY BALANCE DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN EU MEMBER STATES

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes how much the people’s family life and work were both affected and how these two affected each other during the COVID-19 Pandemic within the European Union countries. It includes: concepts and a historical view of family-work relationships and finally a statistical analysis based on the survey named “Living, working and COVID-19”, done by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) during 2020 and 2021. For this analysis, we have selected specific indicators assumed to indicate how the pandemic affected the individual’s family life in EU countries and how this last, in turn, affected the same people’s ordinary earning life work. As in detail, aspects like keeping/changing/loosing job, raising/lowering the working time will be connected to those of specific psychological impact worrying about work/ anxiety/ lack of concentration. The obtained results demonstrate that conflicts have arisen in the family work relationship generated by (i) concerns about job security and income (6.3% of EU respondents in 2020), (ii) losing jobs permanently or temporally (28.2% of the EU employed person), (iii) significant reduction in working hours (32.4% of employees), (iv) financial worsened situation (38% of the employed population of EU), (v) started to work at home/remotely as a result of the pandemic (36.3% of interviewed employees). Conclusions of the study indicate that during the pandemic, work-family balance was significantly deteriorated, which was caused by bidirectional conflicts between work and family domains.

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