Determinants of health at work in the EU15 : Elaboration of synthetic indicators of working conditions and their impacts on the physical and mental health of workers

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.