No abstract

The coincidence between trends in the decline of workers’ health and the increasing practice of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) seems a paradox. Using data from the French Employment Survey 2005, in this article the authors develop an index of responsible prevention by combining a score of severity of working conditions with a score of risk prevention at the workplace. The authors then explore the influence of this variable on the propensity to stop working for medical reasons. The results show that prevention increases workers’ health status and suggest the existence of an optimal level of social CSR expenditure.

Purpose Workers’ health is a main concern in industrialized countries. The structural evolution of the labor market should have encouraged better working conditions, as should have increasing interest in corporate social responsibility. But work arduousness takes new forms as work organizations evolve. All workers are potentially affected by onerous working conditions. The purpose of this paper is to explore all types of working conditions that may affect workers. Design/methodology/approach The author creates four indicators of working conditions using the multiple correspondence analysis and also analyzes how they relate to the workers’ physical and mental health using a logit model. Findings Performing the analysis on data from the third and fifth waves of the European Working Conditions Survey, the author presents the results showing the growing importance of interpersonal relationships at work and observes a rise in inequalities in terms of health over the period 2000-2010 for people belonging to the vulnerable categories: women and lower-income groups. Originality/value The author offers to describe the evolution of the working conditions of the European workers over an interesting period during which many changes took place. Moreover, this paper investigates the respective impacts of different types of working conditions to come up with policy recommendations.

Building on the Job Demands–Resources (JD–R) model, this article sets out to analyze the mechanisms through which organizational change can affect workers’ health. The author carries out a moderated mediation analysis drawing on data from the European Working Conditions Survey conducted in 2015 with more than 44,000 European workers in 35 countries. Emotional labor, work intensity and physical strain are included as mediators of the relationship between organizational change and health, assessed by the self-declaration of psychosomatic symptoms. The study tests for the moderating role of social support, assessed as supervisor support and colleague support. It is shown that emotional labor mediates the relationship between organizational change and health alongside other work demands, with slight variations in the mechanisms depending on whether the reorganization involves staff cuts. There is evidence that social support from the hierarchy moderates the health effects of job demands.