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How to Survey Health and Safety at Work in the Changing World of Work? Theory, Challenges and Practice 1

Coordinator 1Mrs Marine Cavet (Prevention and Research Unit - European Agency for Health and Safety at Work)
Coordinator 2Mr Maurizio Curtarelli (Prevention and Research Unit - European Agency for Health and Safety at Work)
Coordinator 3Mr Xabier Irastorza (Prevention and Research Unit - European Agency for Health and Safety at Work)

Session Details

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?