Working Conditions and Health Inequalities

Over the last decades, there has been a considerable progress made to address risks at workplaces and to promote occupational safety and health of workers. Nevertheless, the recent changes of the labor market underline that new risks to the health and well-being of workers should be considered. In this context, a vast amount of studies have analyzed the relationship between work conditions, social inequalities, and health, suggesting a complex net of causation. Only recently, it has been shown that people in lower socioeconomic positions incur higher working risks. The 2008-2013 economic crisis also introduced a reduction of the number of workers in full-time permanent employment with a steady expansion of atypical and precarious workers. The latter have generally been associated with more insecure and unhealthy working conditions. Another important aspect of safety in the workplace is gender differences. Although nowadays there is more information than before about the types of health problems and accidents women incur at the workplace, the gender-related questions are still open issues that require a careful evaluation of work-related risks of men and women. In this chapter, we focused on the current state of the art in the field of occupational health and examined the aspects that are still being debated.