Abstract

When the COVID-19 crisis hit Europe in early 2020, labour market statisticians at Eurostat were faced with a number of challenges: on the data supply side, data collection for sample surveys like the EU-Labour Force Survey was impacted by lockdowns, and the data delivered by National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) was collected using different, and in some cases, new collection modes. Response rates dropped in some countries, while they increased in others. This meant that the data delivered to Eurostat had to be processed differently and quality checks had to be adapted. Secondly, the new and unprecedented situation of employees being unable to work due to government imposed measures, in combination with a plethora of measures to subsidize employees either directly or via their employers, meant that Eurostat had to complement guidelines on how to encode employment status as a function of these measures; it also developed and introduced two new variables to measure the impact of COVID-19 measures on employment. At the same time, labour market indicators gained in importance, and requests from data users shifted from annual indicators towards quarterly indicators, and a new focus on those outside the labour force but close to it as well as transitions between labour market status. This meant that Eurostat had to develop a set of new indicators, some of them experimental, while working with the relevant Working Group for the first time online, in record time. Finally, seasonal adjustment processes had to be adapted, incorporating new guidelines to deal with the outlier and the uncertainty in developments.