work

Unemployment insurance should serve as a financial cushion when someone unexpectedly loses their job, rather than as a system that encourages people to remain outside the labor market at others’ expense. Yet, Lithuania spends around five times more of its GDP on unemployment-related benefits than Poland, while its unemployment rate is more than twice as high. Poland’s experience shows how much labor-market rules and incentives can matter.

The new agreement of Lithuania’s governing coalition includes a commitment that “people who work must not be worse off than those who do not”. According to experts at the LFMI, this principle is particularly relevant when assessing the unemployment insurance system. Yet in Lithuania, unemployment can still be more financially rewarding than work, especially in lower-skilled and lower-paid jobs.

The Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI) warns that, after the recent tax reform, Lithuanian businesses are facing another major regulatory challenge — the implementation of the EU Pay Transparency Directive.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously described culture as a web of narratives. The way societies understand the labor market is one such narrative — and it matters, because the story we choose shapes how we regulate and manage economic life.

According to the explanatory note of the draft law, strike activity in Lithuania remains consistently low, while in countries such as France, Italy, and Belgium, strikes are a common and effective tool for defending workers’ interests. But do collective labor conflicts actually improve workers’ well-being in the long run?

Platform workers in the Czech Republic are not, by and large, a captive workforce in need of rescue. They are people who have made a rational choice to work flexibly, on their own schedule, for income that suits their circumstances. Good regulation should make that choice safer and more transparent. It should not make it impossible.

The idea of a 4-day working week has already captured minds in many places around Europe. Like UBI, it is a devilishly sweet temptation that is almost impossible to resist.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said at Davos that Slovakia could become a country that will experiment with a four-day working week. It is a flattering topic and so several media immediately picked up on it.

The Lithuanian Free Market Institute, together with its partners Free Trade Europa and law firm TGS Baltic, is holding a roundtable discussion to discuss new forms of work that have been created via digitalization and the changing nature of employment that is being sought by platforms and individuals alike. 

Social policy can be seen from a fragmented perspective with a purpose to justify growing costs of welfare and ideological battles against the free market economy. Such policies try to advocate limits of the market economy or even undermine its role, for the sake of making ‘progress’ in changing the economic system.