Workplace health promotion programmes can reduce health care spending, decrease sickness, absenteeism and increase work productivity, providing benefits to employers as well as employees. Government efforts to promote health and well-being at work can be amplified by attracting environmental, social and governance (ESG) investments towards companies that prioritise employee health and well-being.
Health and work
Healthy people are more likely to be employed, have a good job and retire later, while people experiencing health issues or disabilities are more likely to lose employment and struggle in finding a new job. Countries should therefore look to boost the skills and employability of people at all ages facing health challenges and help them find and keep good jobs.
Key messages
Mental health is not just a health issue and cannot be addressed successfully by the health system alone. Living with such conditions makes it harder to stay and do well in school, transition to higher education or work, work effectively and productively, and to stay employed. Changing this requires integrated policy responses involving all policy fields jointly, particularly youth, workplace, welfare and health policy.
The single biggest problem in disability policy is that intervention is coming too late, when employment is no longer an option or after having missed the opportunities to ensure equal treatment, equal skills development and equal labour market transitions. A disability-inclusive and disability-responsible approach in all relevant mainstream services and institutions, known as ‘disability mainstreaming’, will help to encourage the shift to early intervention across all areas.
Context
Poverty rates for people with disability
Despite years of investment in disability policy, the poverty rate of people with disability remains stubbornly high and has even increased in a majority of OECD countries. In 2019, across OECD countries, 24% of people with disability lived in a household with very low income (below 60% of median income), compared to 14% of people without disability.
The large poverty gap is explained by large gaps in employment rates between people with and without disability and insufficient social protection for those not in work. Differences across countries in poverty rates are large, and many of the countries with high overall rates of poverty, such as Korea and the United States, also have a large disability poverty gap as well.
Unemployment rates of people with mental health conditions
In every OECD country, people reporting a mental health issue were more likely to be unemployed than those not reporting such a health issue. Across OECD countries, the unemployment rate was, on average, 85% (or, 7.7 percentage points) higher for people reporting a mental health issue. There are considerable differences in that gap across countries, irrespective of the overall level of unemployment. While being unemployed can be very distressing, this difference in unemployment rates suggests either that people with poorer mental health are looking for jobs without success, or are transitioning more frequently into and out of work, or both.
The effect of the working environment
Job quality is a key contributing factor for employee health and well-being. While being in good quality work generally acts to protect against ill-health, a strenuous working environment (where there are more work demands than resources can cope with) can have a negative impact on health.
Around 40% of workers reporting a poor working environment said that their work had a negative impact on their health. This is more than double the proportion (15%) among workers with a good working environment.
