How to Survey Health and Safety at Work in the Changing World of Work? Theory, Challenges and Practice 1 |
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| Session Organisers |
Mrs Marine Cavet (Prevention and Research Unit - European Agency for Health and Safety at Work) Mr Maurizio Curtarelli (Prevention and Research Unit - European Agency for Health and Safety at Work) Mr Xabier Irastorza (Prevention and Research Unit - European Agency for Health and Safety at Work) |
| Time | Thursday 18th July, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Room | D23 |
The aim of the session is gathering international researchers in the field of health and safety at work (OSH) and OSH-related fields of working conditions or public health to present and discuss methodological issues, examples of surveys and innovative survey and research methodologies, including combining data from different sources. Traditionally employers’ surveys are conducted to investigate OSH regulation compliance, risks prevention, types of initiatives adopted to retain workers with ill-health or chronic diseases or to promote return to work of workers after an accident or sickness, and workers’ surveys are conducted to investigate the impact of work and working conditions or the exposure to risks on workers’ health. Nevertheless, fully reliable data on occupational and work-related health issues are still an issue, statistics on occupational diseases are not fully satisfactory and far from being comparable across countries, and there is still a lack of consensus about agreed definitions on what is ‘occupational’ and what is ‘work-related’ in order to measure it in a sound, reliable and comparable way. In addition, the new forms of work, the increasing digitalisation of work tasks, the growing polarisation of the labour market with an increase of highly-skilled (desk-based) jobs and low or non-skilled (manual) jobs, the 'bad' jobs in which growing inflows of migrant workers are segregated, are all factors which impact on health, have implications in terms of prevention and pose new challenges of measurement, sampling, getting access to respondents and ensure cross-country comparability. Examples of questions to be responded in this session are: how to get access to employers with a poor OSH protection performance who are reluctant to respond a survey? How to sample and get access to workers who are exposed to specific types of risks or have particularly poor working conditions which impact on their health? How to get access to and survey migrant workers, especially those not legal or those in particularly exploitative working contexts? How to ensure comparability across countries? How to combine survey data and administrative data e.g. in the area of return-to-work? Are employers-employees surveys a good tool to have a broader perspective on OSH? What are the best survey modes to survey OSH, considering that health is a sensitive topic? How to measure the impact of new forms of work and digital technologies on health, also in terms of psychosocial risk?
Keywords: occupational health and safety, new forms of work, employers' surveys, workers' surveys
Mr Xabier Irastorza (European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA)) - Presenting Author
Ms Marine Cavet (European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA))
The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) completed its second European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks (ESENER-2) in 2014, interviewing 49,320 establishments across 36 countries.
There are available data on work-related accidents and ill-health through reporting systems and surveys directed at workers. However, little is known about the management of occupational safety and health (OSH) risk, in practice, particularly those that are ‘new and emerging’, such as work-related stress, violence and harassment. ESENER is aiming to fill this information gap by exploring four OSH areas:
1. OSH Management in the establishment.
2. How psychosocial risks are addressed.
3. Main drivers and barriers to OSH management.
4. How worker participation in OSH management is implemented in practice.
ESENER-2 built on the experience and findings of ESENER-1 (2009), leading to the following changes:
• Target population: (1) smallest establishment size class employing five workers rather than ten and (2) coverage of agriculture, forestry and fishing –all sectors included except for private households (T) and extraterritorial organisations (U).
• Respondent: a single respondent in each establishment: “the person who knows best about health and safety in this establishment” followed by a question on their function in order to enable an analysis by type of respondent.
By country, the samples ranged from 450 in Malta to 4,250 in the United Kingdom. Data were collected through computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), by native interviewers in each country. There were 47 national versions of the questionnaire.
Datasets for both waves of ESENER are available at the UKDA and GESIS.
Fieldwork for ESENER-3 is scheduled for 2019 -same questionnaire and methodological approach of ESENER-2- and first results should be available by the end of 2019. The presentation aims to share the lessons learnt -and challenges- of tree waves surveying OSH among enterprises.
Ms Valentina Gualtieri (Inapp (Italian National Institute for Public Policy Analysis)) - Presenting Author
Labour studies are traditionally mainly focusing on issues related to the ”quantity” of work, in particular on aspects such as maintenance of employment and the reintegration of workers into employment. Analyses that link labour market indicators with information on the “quality” of work are indeed not particularly common. For this reason, in order to investigate more in depth the quality of work, Inapp (the Italian National Institute for Public Policy Analysis) has conducted a periodical survey on workers (QDL survey) in Italy since 2000. The main objective of the survey is to collect a large set of items which operationalise the 5 dimensions of the quality of work (ergonomic, economic, complexity, autonomy and control) identified by the conceptual framework of scholars Gallino and La Rosa. The initial three rounds of the survey were targeting workers only and were meant to gather information about their working conditions. Nevertheless, for the most recent round of the survey (carried out in 2015), it was considered that a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that determine quality of work require exploring also the characteristics of the environment in which individuals work, that is the workplace, in particular their characteristics, their organisational aspects and company strategies. Therefore, this led to complement the survey on workers (with a sample of 15000 workers) by a survey on employers (with a sample of 5000 workplace), including a sub-sample of employees linked to their respective employers (600 workers) to analyse more in detail the quality of work of workers in relation to its determinants at workplace level. The aim of our contribution is to present the innovative methodological approach of the IV QDL survey in Italy, focusing in particular on the ergonomic dimension of the survey, which cover most of the OSH aspects and health outcomes determinants.
Dr Stefania Capecchi (Department of Political Sciences, University of Naples Federico II)
Professor Francesca Di Iorio (Department of Political Sciences, University of Naples Federico II)
Professor Nunzia Nappo (Department of Political Sciences, University of Naples Federico II) - Presenting Author
The study investigates the relationships between work-related stress perception, self-assessed health and several individual and economic covariates in a large sample survey.
Working conditions measures are a prominent issue in social sciences and work-related stress represents a key research topic because of its connections with health and other psychosocial risks, such as very high work intensity and pace. Moreover, work-related stress is considered likely to exert several impacts on enterprises’ and national economies. In order to build intrinsic job quality indices and provide measures of working life sustainability, the subject has been variously investigated (among many others, see: Eurofound, 2013). As an instance, the experience of work-related stress is likely to increase sick leaves and to cause at least half of the total absenteeism at work (EU-OSHA, 2014). Thus, to address effective policies at a national and supranational level, the need arises to understand which work situations and/or which characteristics of workers and occupations may lead to specific difficulties. Given its very nature as a latent construct, the experienced stress is typically measured through subjective assessments often collected by means of ordinal scales. Therefore, a ordered probit model is implemented.
Our paper presents results on perceived stress in a cross-country perspective, by means of data collected in the 6th European Working Conditions Survey, carried out by Eurofound in 2015. Workers are asked to say whether they face stress in their work. We are dealing with a sensible item since it may of course interact with other working conditions, and impacts on individual satisfaction, commitment/engagement, absence at work, desire to change and/or quit the job, etc.