Changing Patterns of Employment and Unemployment: Impacts on Physical & Mental Health & the Meditating Role of Social Capital

Australian Health Inequities Program (funded by NHMRC)

Work is a central and essential part of the lives of most people. It occupies the hours, days and years when people are at their best. It shapes the character and develops or shrivels health and human capacities. But it can do harm as well as good to workers’ physical and mental health. There is a growing overseas, and a small Australian, body of research that shows strong links between mental and physical health and the ways in which people are employed. For example, jobs that use people’s skills, have moderate amounts of challenge, and provide reasonable degrees of discretion over how the job is done are good for health and wellbeing, while there is strong evidence that unemployment is bad for health. But long hours of work, constant fear of job loss, having high demands but low control over job tasks, working in manual blue collar jobs are all clearly linked to higher risks of injury or significant harm to mental health. Thus the ways in which people are employed, and the extent of unemployment, are major public health issues. They are made more so by the fact that forms of employment have been changing rapidly in Australia, towards more contingent work (eg, casual, labour hire, contract), more very long hours of work, and more under-employment. Offsetting this, there has been a fall in unemployment and a large reduction in deaths and injury caused directly by work. Indeed, the improvement in occupational safety has been one of the great public health gains of the last century.This project will provide, for the first time in Australia, a detailed understanding of the impact of the changing forms of employment and unemployment on overall health. It will provide original insights into what aspects of the employment relation help or harm health; and on what enables some people to escape the harm that others experience. This will provide vital information to underpin policies designed to gain the benefits of a flexible workplace, with minimum harm to workers.