Towards sustainable work

The problem

Occupational health issues are often analyzed from the point of view of the risks of selection-exclusion of work, dropping out or professional wear and tear and arduousness (see health-work plans). Recognition of arduousness at work is essentially envisaged from the angle of extreme physical constraints, according to six criteria defined by the personal prevention account (C2P) for employees in the private sector or of the active categories in public functions (state, territorial or hospital). It is clearly insufficient since many trades or work situations, notoriously painful, are ignored as the trades of “ second line »(Home aid, maintenance, logistics, etc.). The recognition of the arduousness and associated risks is also supervised by policies which are mainly restorative or compensatory.

These approaches have demonstrated their interests but also their limits, with regard to the figures of accidents at work and occupational diseases today in France or (in) (in) capacity of employees to work until retirement (Béatriz, 2023 ; Castelain, 2023). To understand health/work relationships from the unique angle of arduousness is in a way to consider that work is inevitably deleterious for health. For a sustainable prevention of health and safety at work, it is necessary to build another approach to work, that of sustainable work.

Workers do not just suffer their work. When the conditions are met, they develop with the experience of the ways of making original individual or collective which allow them to preserve, even to build their health over their professional career. Ergonomics work (EG Molinié et al. 2012 ; Gaudart & Volkoff, 2022) have shown that: a mason will create visual, hearing, tactile or olfactory indications of the state of the material to work (fluidity of the concrete to flow) or the evolution of the production system (sound variations in the engine of a tool) to know what gesture favor with the trowel without penalizing its joints ; A nurse, an audio-visual sector technician, or a cork biker, will transmit what they or they have learned from experience of what is not prescribed but allows work to be done without compromising his health or security or that of others ; Home help will see the order and duration allocated to the tasks to be done according to the state of the beneficiary to co-produce quality care ; A proximity supervisor will prioritize emergencies and compromise in the face of potentially contradictory injunctions, avoiding overflowing situations of incident or accident for oneself or for others.

This fine knowledge of the activity, from the analysis of real work, invite to approach the question of health-work relations from another angle, that of sustainability.

How does it work

Supportable work presupposes a regeneration of human and social resources. Different works have made it possible to emphasize that sustainable work is a work that is not immediately deleted, which allows you to learn and build a route, which takes into account the current needs of people and collectives (in particular in terms of quality of work, health and articulation of life spheres), without compromising the needs of future generations.

Supportable work is neither a fact to apply, nor the other face of unbearable work. It is an ecosystem to build taking into account local specificities where it sets up and evolves. It is part of the long time of a production not destructive of resources until exhaustion (e.g. labor forces and raw materials), but of production capable of forms of regeneration (Caye, 2020). This notion of sustainability thus has the merit of questioning working conditions and productive practices over time. It is to be seen as a founding principle of work, which guides action in prevention to take care of things and people over time and thus contribute to the design of a work not less painful, but sustainable.

To hold the principle of work sustainability, eight avenues of action are already known and deserve to be experienced jointly on the wider scale:

– Building management tools (monitoring and diagnostic) of changes in working conditions and health health and feeding them ;

– Promote the decompartmentalized approaches of health-work relationships over the age (in terms of targets, objects, tools, actors involved), unlike categorical approaches and often retained thresholds ;

– Support the construction of a memory of the actions undertaken and the effects observed to build up a library of significant experiences, rather than being in the urgency of the case to be managed and making the case by case ;

– Rehabilitate the “ time », That is to say times devoted to work debates, to the transmission of knowledge and know-how, to the construction of business rules, to training ;

– Ensure the articulation of the spheres of life to facilitate access, maintaining or returning to the work of populations for whom this conciliation is a cardinal element (e.g. isolated parents, people with chronic disease, professional retraining, or at the end of their careers) and for the benefit of all and all ;

– Promote the construction of relatively stable work collectives to support collaboration, mutual aid and mutual learning ;

– Make the transmission of professional knowledge and know-how essential to the construction of professional gestures a model of prevention complementary to those based on compensation, substitution, etc. ;

– Support democracy in bodies of companies or administrations and professional branches to promote the co-production of relevant solutions for stakeholders.

On what research work is the proposal founded

The approach by the sustainability of work is the result of multidisciplinary work carried out from the 1990s in northern European countries under the cross -influence of aging of the active population, the intensification of work and growing ecological issues (Docrty et al, 2008). These works oppose what can be described as “ sustainable “To what is” intensive and exhausting ».

This approach has also developed by many French researchers (see bibliography below).

How to implement

Two ways are preferably conceivable here concomitantly in time.

A local implementation, carried by the actors of a company or an administration wishing to explore new prevention paths taking into account the limits and insufficiencies identified with the approaches currently in force. This proactive approach at the local level, if it is not supported at a more global level, can however face contradictory injunctions for conformation with established prevention standards, likely to slow down or limit its scope in short or longer terms.

For a scaling, this presupposes a concerted approach between the public authorities, the professional branches, social actors to provide companies and administrations with a legislative and/or regulatory framework favorable to the implementation of diagnostic and action devices which not only prevent risks and recognize to a certain extent physical arduousness, but also seek and build the conditions for sustainable work.