Special Eurobarometer 'European social reality'

Special EUROBAROMETER 273 “European Social Reality” Report
1.5.3 Work stress
For a significant minority of European Union workers, their job has a bad side: 41% of
the respondents find their job too demanding and stressful, 21% work in dangerous or
unhealthy conditions and 14% do not find that their job allows them to balance their
professional, family and private life 24 .
How much do agree or disagree with the following statements
describing positive and negative aspects of your job? EU25 (%)
My work is too demanding and stressful
I work in dangerous and unhealthy
conditions
My job allows me to balance my
professional, family and private life
% negative* % positive* Neither/DK
*% positive answers = people who disagree that their work is too demanding and stressful and that they work in dangerous
and unhealthy conditions.
Work stress is a problem that managers (45%) and self-employed people (44%) tend
to face slightly more often than other workers, whereas manual workers are
considerably more likely to work in dangerous and unhealthy conditions (29%). The
ability to balance one’s professional, family and private life is most often positively
rated by the self-employed and by workers aged 55 or older (both 74%). Women tend
to be slightly happier in this regard than men are (71% vs. 67%). People who left fulltime
education at the age of 15 or younger more often negatively rate their work
environment than people who stayed in school longer.
At the country level, the feeling that one’s work is too demanding and stressful is most
widely expressed in Lithuania (71%), Greece and Romania (both 70%). It is least
widely perceived in the Netherlands (24%) and Finland (25%). In Sweden,
remarkably, the workforce quite widely expresses job stress (54%), much more widely
so than workers in the other Scandinavian countries do (35% in Denmark).
24 The concept of work stress is measured by 3 items that are part of QA9 “How much do you agree or
disagree with the following statements describing positive and negative aspects of your job?” The item “my
job allows me to balance my professional, family and private” is asked in the opposite direction from the
other two items meaning that people who disagree tend to feel more work-stress and vice-versa.
- 25 -
41
21
14
34
66
69
25
13
17