European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 77

European Policy Analysis

The problem of reconciliation
work and family responsibilities is
closely related with the flexible working
time. The limited access to flexible work
arrangements for older people prevents
them from the extension of working
life. For example, this kind of barrier is
unsolved in Lithuania: the Labour Code
of the Republic of Lithuania does not
provide opportunities for older people
to work shorter hours, neither are older
workers granted any special privileges in
the case of setting part-time work at their
workplace, neither part-time work is very
common in Estonia. The main reason
behind the low use of part-time work
there is the taxation system. Employers,
therefore, are not motivated to hire parttime workers. Flexible employment is not
common also in the case of the Hungarian
elderly population (Feifs 2013). In
Bulgaria, the limited social security and
low level of pay are the impediments to
a higher flexibility of the working time,
part-time, or temporary employment
(Dimitrova 2007).

Organizational strategies. As
was defined in the literature analysis,
the
organizational
strategies
can
vary broadly from technological and
managerial adjustments to the needs of
older employees to their skills upgrading.
However, the lack of comparable data
on organizational strategies for the
prolongation of working life of the older
employees unable us to make a detail
analysis of the situation in selected
countries. On the other hand, we can see
the general trends in the developments
of institutional characteristics of lifelong
learning where governments introduce
di fferent supportive measures to involve
employers and employees into training
activities.

The high gender segregation
and low levels of training are among
the common features of the Central and
Eastern European countries (Erhel and
Guergoat-Larivière 2011), though it
should be stressed that during the analyzed
period (2008–2010), in the majority of
countries, the percentage of people in
employment who are involved in training
experienced a small decrease (European
Foundation for the Improvement of Living
and Working Conditions 2011). As the
employers (especially those of SMEs) were
not willing to provide training (the main
reason according the survey being that “in
the long term, they do not consider this
as a good investment”), different statesupportive policies such as the shorttime work/temporary lay-off schemes
and training activities were introduced in
some of the analyzed countries (the Czech
Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia).
However, as was showed in European
Foundation for the Improvement of Living
and Working Conditions report (2011),
the proportion of companies benefiting
from them is rather limited.

Together with the specific anticrisis
lifelong policy measures the analyzed
countries implementing general policies
supporting training costs and/or wages
for enterprises: the national EDUCA
program aimed to help enterprises to
carry out training activities for their
employees or for employers themselves
in some selected National Association
of Corrosion Engineers (NACE) sectors
in the Czech Republic (since 2009), the
Estonian national program “Support for
development of knowledge and skills”
aimed to promote the participation
of enterprises in job-related training
activities, use of consultancy services for
training purposes, and participation in
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