Employmentweb_low

eMployMent relations and health inequalities: pathways and MechanisMs
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Gaps in knowledge
for most contemporary workplaces in core industrialised countries, the
health effects of working conditions are relatively well-known. There is
a long tradition of research reporting on the effects of very specific
material working conditions in relation with somatic health outcomes.
in the last decades of the 20th century, with the consolidation of
occupational stress research, abundant evidence has accumulated
linking factors related to the organisation, content and magnitude of
work tasks to diverse psychological and physical outcomes. Moreover,
the health effects of stressors related to the organisation of
employment, such as flexible working times, job insecurity, downsizing
and other uncertainty-provoking threats, are documented relatively
well, at least among more or less standard wage-earners.
one area where knowledge about standard wage-earning
populations is still lacking concerns the impact of interactions
between different types of co-existing working conditions, as well as
with various forms of social stratification (like gender, or ethnicity) and
macro-social indicators (like welfare state types or countries’ levels of
social inequality). related to the latter point is the definition of “work”:
especially for many women, but also for men, work is something more
than just regularly paid daytime employment; it extends to household
duties, informal care, voluntary work or additional paid work in the
informal sphere. These kinds of interactions may exacerbate or
modify the health effects of specific working conditions. in addition,
research results have been biased in favor of larger organisational
settings and common occupations, leaving some groups of workers,
for example those employed in small firms, largely unaddressed.
With regard to the psychosocial work environment, there is also a
need to consider more objective assessments of working conditions,
instead of relying almost solely on self-reports. in this sense,
alternative methods for the assessment of working conditions need to
be considered, based more on a participatory approach, and focused
on collective evaluation and preventive action. Moreover, data using
diagnosed (and diversified) health outcomes, longitudinal information
and data sources integrating information from different life spheres
are also very scarce.
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