Workplace disease prevention

Faster, further, more! What do the increasing performance requirements mean for our everyday working life? What ideas of the individual and the collective are associated with this development? What opportunities and risks are linked to it? Marie Jelenko discusses these and other issues in light of the increasing urgency of problems caused by stress, burnout and the like. While occupational accidents as classic hazards of gainful employment have decreased significantly in recent decades, work-related health risks due to psychosocial stress and lack of exercise have increased. At the same time, restrictions on access to government benefits have placed greater pressure on workers to maintain their long-term health and ability to work. Here, prevention of work-related hazards could make an important contribution. Its welfare state roots go back to the time of industrialization. The associated orientations toward accident prevention, male industrial work, technology and state supervision are still pronounced in Austria. This contrasts with a digitalized world of work with low physical but greatly increased mental work demands, which require individual commitment, flexibility and willingness to adapt from employees. Successfully coping with these demands increasingly rests on the shoulders of the individual. Traditional preventive approaches to work-related health risks therefore run the risk of excluding growing parts of the working population from preventive social services. This publication takes up this problem. It combines sociological debates on individualization and work with developments in work-related prevention and scientific findings on disease risks in gainful employment. The author underpins the socio-political embedding of work- related prevention on the basis of welfare state traditions of thought and the development of its legal foundations. With a focus on the Labor Inspectorate and the Austrian Workers` Compensation Board as central governmental mediating bodies between law and operational implementation, current prevention discourses are empirically investigated. Qualitative interviews with experts and a large number of documents form the basis of the analysis. The results show concrete starting points for a better integration of psychosocial risks into prevention work. However, traditional ideas of prevention still hinder the broad implementation of this development. In addition, individualized and more flexible working conditions and an increased market orientation contribute to the fact that psychosocial risks of work remain a social challenge.