The way in which our globalised society organises work does not contribute to the creation of a healthy society. Instead of the objective of health that secure, stimulating and gratifying working conditions and life ought to generate, we are in a world of work and non-mercantile jobs that considerably increase the degree of risk, uncertainty, job insecurity, accidents and exploitation. To reformulate the Ottawa Charter, we state that “the conditions and prerequisites for health are: peace, education, housing, food, income, a stable ecosystem, social justice and equality”, as well as a decent job.
Denouncing Job Insecurity
A precarious job is defined in relation to other jobs in terms of a greater degree of insecurity and the disappearance of the manager-worker relationship, as is the case in externalized or submerged labour, which places the responsibility of the exposure to its risks or the basic measures for its correction on the shoulders of the workers, who also have to assume its effects on their health almost on their own. Job insecurity and health are, in our society, contradictory elements.
In recent years, from the business world and also in the European Union’s Green Book, job flexibility has been promoted as a necessary element for improving the performance of the working population and making the adaptation to technological changes and a ever more globalized world easier, without taking into account this flexibility’s negative impact on society, health and the welfare of the working population. It is a case of considering what the essential element is that has to guide our society: the people and their welfare or the financial enrichment that every day is shared out more unequally.
Job insecurity is not a side-effect, a collateral price that has to be paid for economic growth, but a defining and conditioning aspect of the same type of growth. It is structural, chronic in nature, and is a determining cause of deregulation and job deterioration and social disintegration. Generalised job insecurity establishes the general culture of fear, generating new forms of exclusion and social violence. Thus, job insecurity spreads from the ambit of work to all the other areas of our lives and has turned into social insecurity as a new form of oppression by the capitalist system, moreover constituting a little noticed form of exclusion at an individual level. Job insecurity is experienced as job instability, uncertainty about the future, the lack of autonomy and the ability to plan one’s own life, a cause of accidents at work, emotional morbidity, dependence on the family, loss of rights and the lack of stable resources.
For young people, there is also the frustration about the probable unsuitability of the subjects they have studied and delayed entry to the labour market, a clear awareness of the risk of unemployment and the difficulties of getting a job that restrict their emancipation. Young people see their own life projects threatened in a first world of welfare that is supposedly opulent, but which tolerates temporary employment agencies, deregulated jobs and the illegal labour market.
Unemployed adults over forty-five years old see how their experience and knowledge is devalued and find themselves in the same unstable conditions as young people, in compulsory but totally unequal competition… The rotation of contracts, having more than one job, the illegal labour market, very long hours, the rise in accidents, and low job satisfaction are other aspects of job insecurity. This situation is particularly bad for women over forty, who do not have suitable possibilities for training in order to be able to continue working in quality jobs earning decent salaries.
Job insecurity is particularly acute for certain groups such as handicapped people and immigrants. We ought to make special mention of the job insecurity that is already de facto the regular system of life and work of the immigrants who are an inseparable part of the working class of every country and of Europe as a whole. The immigration laws are insufficient and too weak to guarantee rights and duties, and on the other hand the permissiveness in the face of outbreaks of xenophobia, the use of immigration for electoral purposes, the miserliness with which immigrants’ access to citizenship rights is contemplated and the difficulty of implementing fairly the laws for family regrouping for men and women are at the heart of job insecurity.
The people who receive a retirement pension as their main income are explicitly exposed to conditions of insecurity if the attempts to privatise public pension funds and replace them with private funds, which are subject to instability, speculation and the interests of the major financial capitals, continue.
In this respect, the current directives and the legislative development of the European Commission and Council (Bolkestein reformulated, work time, Green Book on “flexicurity”, etcetera) are very serious supranational threats for the positive regulation of work, and they are on their way to making the already unsustainable current job insecurity even worse.
Providing the Means

Traditionally job health has analyzed work as a possible source of exposure to labour risks of various kinds (safety, hygiene, ergonomic, psychosocial) and has focused prevention on the sphere of the company. From the point of view of health, however, it is important to consider work in a structural perspective as a determining factor of social inequalities in health, where job insecurity plays a central role. Much of health prevention and promotion is focused on health fairness, but also on work organization, and of the development of all the jobs that place the security of the people and the safeguarding of their physical, emotional and psychological state at the core of their actions.
Mediate
Health prevention and promotion at work demands very broad coordinated action amongst governments, health sectors, unions, businesses, local authorities, civil society organizations and the media. Health promotion strategies and programmes have to be adapted to local needs and the specific possibilities of every country and region, and they also have to make sure that the business world is not a factor that de-structures and upsets the balance of the conditions of the environment and people’s health.
Active Participation in Health Programmes Implies:

• Job stability, adequate minimum salaries and decent working conditions.
• The fostering of job health, the assessment of job risks and their prevention.
• Having available public, free and “friendly” psychological help in moments of job or personal crisis.
• Prohibiting all kinds of subcontracting that mean neglecting risks.
• Guaranteeing that employers undertake to be responsible for ensuring health at work.

We agree with the Ottawa Charter in that “Health has to be on the order of the day of the people responsible for drafting political programmes, in all sectors and at all levels.” Health prevention and promotion at work has to combine several approaches, all of them complementary, among which are legislation and compliance with it, a correct tax system and organizational changes. We would add, especially, labour policy for a decent job and special dedication by work inspectors and trade unions.
Moving into the Future

We are in agreement with the statement that “health is created and experienced in the context of everyday life; in teaching, work and leisure centres”. For this reason those responsible for putting into practice and assessing health promotion activities have to bear in mind the principle of the equality of the sexes and people at every stage of its planning. However, we understand that despite the fact that there are still few studies done on the negative interaction between job insecurity and health, the trends observed are not at all optimistic, especially from the point of view of gender. We are progressing towards a future of job insecurity, the enemy of people’s health and good social health, and therefore it is necessary to react and commit ourselves to change and improvement. We have to think continually and once again about measures at all levels of government so that the achievement of good levels of health for all people may be a priority objective of action of all governing bodies—local, national, state and supranational. In this respect, we demand the positive action that the European Parliament can develop and guide.
Committment in Favour of Health and against Job Insecurity
The participants in this conference pledge:
1) To intervene in the sphere of public and job health policy and to advocate trade union and political action.
2) To oppose the pressure applied to further deregulate the labour market and working conditions, risks at work, using unreliable or harmful products, working (paid or not) in unhealthy environments and conditions; to combat, inspect and denounce, whenever and wherever malnutrition, mistreatment, child labour, company mobbing, harassment and gender violence is observed.
3) To monitor pollution and housing conditions, and to combat the differences “between the different societies and within them and to take steps against inequalities, in terms of health, that arise from the rules and practices of these societies.”
For all these reasons it will be necessary:
1) To demand the ADOPTION OF MEASURES THAT HAVE AN IMPACT ON HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT before undertaking projects and policies.
2) To encourage research into job insecurity and the creation of JOB INSECURITY AND HEALTH INDICATORS, based on the experience and the knowledge of professionals, social agents and the workers themselves to control and monitor the progress made with the aim of gradually eradicating job insecurity and its harmful effects and boosting health understood as something more than the absence of illness.
3) To POOL THE EXPERIENCES OF EACH OF THE COUNTRIES IN THE EU to learn of the specific nature of job insecurity in each country and mobilize using the common experience to eradicate job insecurity in Europe.
From this forum we CALL FOR the coordination and action of the forces of the left, the trade unions and social organizations to give support to the ideas and projects that we are expressing through this Barcelona Charter and we ask them to organise the debates and take the necessary steps with the aim of DECENT JOBS prevailing, and HEALTH prevailing over JOB INSECURITY. We also ask the European Parliament and international bodies like the WHO and the ILO to adopt the proposals in this Charter.
Finally, we ask society as a whole to be aware that it has to stand up and defend and promote the values of health, coexistence, equality and respect between all human beings.
NOTE: The First International Conference on Health Promotion, held in Ottawa on 21st November 1986, drafted the CHARTER aimed at achieving the objective of “health for all by the year 2000”. This conference was in response to the growing demand for a new conception of public health in the world.

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