Welcome to HealthWorks

What makes people healthy? Some people say genetics – how healthy your parents or grandparents are. Others say that it’s lifestyle – what you eat, how much you exercise etc. Our health is complex and actually determined by 12 different factors including genetics and lifestyle, and culture, income and social status, social support, education and literacy, social environments, physical environments, child development, health services, gender, and employment and working conditions.

Employment
Paid work not only gives us money, but it also gives us a sense of identity and purpose, social contacts and opportunities for personal growth. Paid work gives us more freedom and control over our lives. Loss of employment means loss of the benefits associated with work. Unemployed people have a shorter life expectancy and have more health problems than people who have a job.

Working Conditions
Working conditions affect our health in several ways. Conditions at work (physical and social) can have a major effect on people's health. The following working conditions determine whether a job is healthy or not:

Job and employment security
Physical conditions at work
Work pace, control and stress
Working time
Opportunities for self-expression and personal development
Participation and relationships at work
Work-life balance

Job and employment security
Workers with limited job security often experience higher levels of stress than people with more secure jobs. Temporary employees, part-time workers and people working in low-wage jobs trying to make ends meets while they try to find better jobs, face high levels of stress due to job insecurity and short-term unemployment.

Physical conditions at work
Unsafe or risky working conditions can lead to increased number of injuries (or even deaths) in the workplace. In recent years, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of injuries related workstation design, such as repetitive strain injuries.

Work pace, control and stress
In 2000, 35% of Canadian workers reported having stress at work from "too many demands or too many hours." People who have more control over the work they do are healthier and often live longer than people in more stressful or riskier work.

Working time
Working very long hours is linked to some disease risk factors such as high blood pressure. Long or inconsistent work hours also lead to:

A high risk of work-family in-balance
Stress due to a lack of control over hours
Disrupted sleeping patterns, digestive problems, cardiovascular disease, unhealthy lifestyles, especially for shift workers.

Opportunities for self-expression and personal development
Jobs that provide opportunities for training and skills development lead to better working conditions. Workplaces that support opportunities for advancement to more meaningful and challenging work are more likely to keep employees and to have happier employees.

Participation and relationships at work
Although social relationships are an important aspect of working life, little hard information is available on this dimension.

Work-life balance
Work-life balance is becoming an increasingly important issue as more women continue to work in paid positions. Long and unpredictable hours that conflict with home schedules combined with high job demands, take a toll on all workers, but are most likely to be an issue for families where both partners work, for single-parent families and families that care for older relatives.

Despite the concerns about poor working conditions, pressure still exists to increase productivity and to maintain employment and wages – making it difficult to promote the creation of healthier workplaces. We need to increase awareness about the positive impact healthy workplaces can have on increased productivity and employment – the two can (and need to) go hand-in-hand.