Employmentweb_low

EmploymEnt, Work, And hEAlth InEquAlItIEs - a global perspective
young shoe-shiner in la paz (Bolivia).
source: Joan benach (2010)
studies have addressed occupation-related health issues and only a
few describe the relations between informality and health inequities
using overall health effects. in the uK, results from the British
household Panel survey 1999-2001 show that small employers and
own-account workers are at an increased risk of having a limiting
illness, for both men (adjusted hazard ratio, ahr=1.47 95%ci:1.09-
1.98) and women (ahr=2.42; 95%ci:1.49-3.94), yet no statistically
significant results were reported for illness recovery (Bartley, sacker,
& clarke, 2004). for both men and women, there is a strong positive
association between a country’s increasing proportion of informal jobs
and death and daly for all diseases.
Being in informal employment relations may cause mental distress
because of job insecurity (i.e., the threat of losing their jobs). under this
framework, workers expect fair relations between efforts spent on the
job and what they get in return, particularly salaries and promotions,
recognition and job security. an imbalanced effort-reward relation may
lead to perceptions of injustice, emotional distress and poor selfesteem,
which is a plausible scenario among informal
workers. There is empirical evidence that asymmetric
effort-reward job perceptions are associated with
cardiovascular disease, poor self-perceived health,
and several mental disorders (siegrist & Marmot,
2004). These effects may be exacerbated in situations
of social vulnerability, as in the context of workers in
informal employment relations, who lack any
enforceable contract. results from several
community-based cross-sectional studies have shown
that women in informal jobs were more likely to have
minor mental disorders than those with formal job
contracts, using adjusted relative measures for the
number of symptoms of mental disorders (santana et
al., 1997) or standardised psychiatric diagnoses (ludermir & lewis,
2005). This association was not observed among men (ludermir &
lewis, 2005). for example, informal rag pickers were more likely to
have minor mental disorders than other workers in their
neighbourhoods (da silva, fassa, & Kriebel, 2006). in developed
countries such as the us and canada, positive associations have been
observed between self-employment and stress (Jamal & Badawi, 1995)
and self-perceived health (dolinski & caputo, 2003), but other studies
did not find similar evidence. for instance, Prottas and Thompson (2006)
examined self-employment and stress, family conflict and job
satisfaction. crude positive associations disappeared when adjusted by
socio-demographic and work-related factors such as hours worked, job
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