Washington DC [US]Sep 9 (ANI): People without a stable employment contract can reduce the risk of premature death by 20 percent if they get permanent work, according to a study.
The results of the study were published in The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Reports by Karolinska Institutet.
The researchers’ results indicate that Sweden’s job security must increase. Precarious employment is a term used to characterize positions with short contracts (such as temps), poor pay, and limited power and rights, all of which result in an unstable and unsafe work environment.
In the current study, the researchers investigated how this affects the risk of death.
“This is the first study that shows that a change from insecure jobs to safe jobs can reduce the risk of death,” says the paper’s last author Theo Bodin, assistant professor at the Institute for Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet.
“It is the same as saying that the risk of early death is higher if one continues to work in a job without a secure employment contract.” The researchers used register data from over 250,000 workers in Sweden between the ages of 20 and 55 collected over a period from 2005 to 2017. The study included people who worked in unsafe working conditions and who then switched to safe working conditions.
Those who switched from insecure to secure employment had a 20 percent lower risk of dying, regardless of what happened afterwards, compared to those who remained in insecure employment. If they stayed in secure employment for 12 years, the risk of death was reduced by 30 percent.
“Using this large population database, we were able to take into account many factors that can affect mortality, such as age, other diseases that workers may suffer from, or life changes such as divorce,” explains Nuria Matilla-Santander, assistant professor at the same institute and first author of the study .
“Because of the methods we used, we can be relatively confident that the difference in mortality is due to job insecurity rather than individual factors.” She continues: “The results are important because they show that the elevated mortality observed in workers. If we reduce insecurity in the labor market, we can avoid premature deaths in Sweden.” Dr Matilla-Santander says the next step in the research is to investigate the specific causes of death in this regard.
The study was mainly funded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte). The researchers report no conflicts of interest. (ANI)
Source: sn.dk