Social workers more likely to work while sick
Social workers are more likely to come to work while sick than the average worker in EU28, a recent Eurofound report shows. The report compares working conditions for social workers in kindergartens, schools, youth services, and social care with the EU28 as a whole.
The report presents a mixed picture for the small but steadily growing sector in the European Union. While the social work sector shows some gains in terms of preventing wage cuts during the crisis, a high level of skills and training of workers, and women in management positions, it underachieves in terms of offering less indefinite contracts, fewer full-time positions, and poor health of employees.
As 83% of workers in social work are women, the sector is clearly female-dominated. This is also reflected in leadership positions, as the sector has more female bosses than the EU 28 average. 74% of women and 51% of men report having a female boss, compared to 47% of women and only 12 % of men in EU 28.
The health of social workers has two strands: On the one hand, social workers tend to be less absent from work because of work accidents and report more often that they will be able to do the job at age 60. On the other hand, however, they report more often of poor health and that they work even when they are sick. If these insights are two sides of the same coin or entirely unrelated findings, the report leaves open.
With regard to employee representation at the workplace, the social sector follows the EU28 pattern according to which the probability to have worker representation increases with the number of employees. In comparison to EU28, however, the social sector presents a relatively high presence of worker representation also in the smallest workplaces with less than 10 employees (40%). This means that social workers in small workplaces are almost double as likely to have employee representation as the EU28 average.
The report gives an overview of working conditions, job quality, workers’ health and job sustainability in the social work sector. The sector contains all social work activities, such as child day-care, social work in schools, child and youth services, care for the elderly and the disabled, and all other social work activities that do not involve accommodation. It is based mostly on the fifth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS), which gathers data on working conditions and the quality of work across 34 European countries.
The full report can be downloaded from the Eurofound website.
