Health and work in the contingent generation (2006)

2006

More than a million young workers are injured in work accidents in the European Union each year. Tens of thousands end up crippled for life. And they are widely exposed to other health risks that will leave them damaged long after the exposure has ended. It is a situation that is creating big social inequalities in health. There are different ways of coming at the health and safety of young workers. Most common is the paternalist approach, which tries to persuade young people to get into a “preventive culture”. It focuses on individual cases – risk-taking, poor training, recklessness, etc. – to disregard any analysis of the employment relationship. Trade unions believe that the health and safety of young workers depend on tackling casualisation. If there is one common thread in the widely differing situations between countries, branches of industry and occupations, it is casualisation. A prevention policy cannot focus just on specific things like training, information, and reducing individual risks. It must marry better preventive practises to a process that will help turn around the current spread of contingent employment. Behind the many accidents and countless incidents of health damage and other forms of suffering at work lie exploitative relationships. Young workers are often hired on short-term contracts in order to push down wages, fragment collective solidarity, and downgrade their jobs. Because of this, they often find a gulf between the paper rules and how things are actually done. Even where they know the risks and how to avoid or reduce them, they are denied the means of collective action and representation which would enable them to effectively protect their health and safety. Job insecurity has enabled employers to enforce creeping deregulation in practise. The rules are still generally there, but increasingly less applied.

Journal of public health (Oxford, England), 2018

The aim of this study is to estimate the prevalence of informal workers and their working conditions and employment precariousness in the EU-27; and to explore the association of different contract arrangements with health outcomes and how they are influenced by working and employment conditions. A sample of 27 245 working-age employees from the fifth European Working Condition Survey of 2010 was analysed. Logistic regression models were fitted to estimate the contribution of different contract arrangement (permanent, temporary and informal) and working and employment precariousness variables on health outcomes (psychosocial well-being and self-rated health). Prevalence of informal employees in the EU-27 is 4.1% among men and 5.1% among women. Although informal employees have the poorest working conditions and employment precariousness, they did not seem to reflect poorer health. Precariousness employment variables have a greater impact than working conditions variables in reducing ...

New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations, 2021

New Zealand has experienced significant increases in youth employment rates in the last 20 years with 40 per cent of people employed part-time. This age group has been associated with the second-highest rate of injury claims. At the current time, there is limited information on why young workers in New Zealand are more vulnerable to work-related harm. This project aimed to explore this with a convenience sample of young workers using an online survey. Participants represented a diverse ethnic population but the sample was predominately female. In total, 32.7 per cent of respondents had received no occupational health and safety (OHS) training when starting work. Fifty-seven per cent of the sample thought that OHS was valued by their employer. Interestingly, 63 per cent of the sample said they would be confident about speaking up about an OHS issue with most being willing to speak to their manager. In relation to stress, the analysis identified that there was an association bet...

2013

The objective of this report is to provide important new insight into understanding and preventing young (aged 15–24) workers’ occupational safety and health (OSH) risks in the Nordic countries. The report provides a short overview of the context of youth employment, young worker legislation, the sectors young workers are employed in, the OSH hazards they are exposed to and the nature of their injuries and health outcomes. Some of the negative effects of exposure to OSH risks are immediate, whereas other effects may first be detectable when a person is in their 30’s or 40’s. Although the risk of non-fatal injury is 40–50% greater for young workers, the injuries are often less severe than for older workers. Youth work legislation (under 18 years of age) is quite similar in all the Nordic countries, with restrictions regarding types of work, working hours, work at specific times of day, demands for work breaks and periods of rest between shifts. Young workers account for 10–17% of the...

2009

… in Health and …, 2011

Work, Employment and Society, 2016

This article presents the results of a qualitative study of 72 workers in regional Victoria, Australia. Against the background of the growing casualization of the workforce it demonstrates the impact on the health and well-being of these workers, focusing on the intersection between psychosocial working conditions and health. In particular it focuses on the detrimental impact on workers’ sense of self-efficacy and self-esteem. It emphasizes how the job insecurity characteristic of non-standard work extends beyond the fear of job loss to involve uncertainty over the scheduling of work, with debilitating consequences for workers’ autonomy, self-efficacy and control over their lives. Additionally, it is argued that the exclusion of these workers from paid leave and other entitlements in the workplace confers a lower social status on these workers that is corrosive of their self-esteem. It is these key socio-psychological mechanisms that provide the link between insecure work and worker...