Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: (eBook).Work is often associated with a decline in health, both physical and mental.However, the starting point for this book, considering the case of France, is the statistical finding that the decline in health among the unemployed is much worse.Indeed, the mortality rate in this group is 60 per cent higher than that for the employed, the risk of suicide is three times higher, and there is a higher incidence of cancers and heart attacks.The outlook for mental health is just as bleak.The originality of this book, edited by Dominique Lhuillier, Dominique Gelpe and Anne-Marie Waser, lies in this triangulation of work, health and unemployment, based on the testimonies of people in unemployment.Indeed, drawing on the individual and collective life stories of around 100 survey participants, work appears in a different light when seen from this perspective.This approach to unemployment paradoxically brings this book under the publishers' "Clinique du travail" collection, wherein work is analysed as a form of empowerment, whose expression and development is intrinsically related to people's health. The health benefits of work through the lens of unemployment A structure for individuals' social livesFrom the perspective of unemployment, work is not just a source of constraints derived from the employee's subordination to the employer but it also creates a "binding contract" (p.57): an individual's agreement to organize their life according to a specific management of time.This organization of time is reinforced by an organization of space, in that it expands individuals' social lives beyond their immediate sphere of family and neighbours.This dimension can be particularly relevant to women, for whom work can be an "instrument of emancipation" (p.108) in terms of resources, and a way out of the family sphere under a husband's domination.This notion is reflected in the identification of a "sex of unemployment" (Chapter 3), characterized, in the case of women, by an attachment to work and the perception of withdrawal into family life as a violent form of deprivation.The pressure of male domination is often at the heart of this withdrawal from work, sometimes going so far as preventing women from seeking employment (as in the case of Nabila, pp.109-110), when work is seen as a means of emancipation.
Source: International Labour Review
DOI: 10.16995/ilr.24780
Author: Claude DIDRY
Institution: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Language: English
Subfield: General Health Professions
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,090
OpenAlex ID: W4414439972
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