Charli Eriksson – författare

This text is the proceedings of the First International Conference on Health Hazards and Challenges in the New Working Life, held January 11-13, 1999, in Stockholm, Sweden. The globalization of the economies has enormous implications for work and labour market structures. Demands for rapid adjustment and flexibility can be perceived as threatening to the employees' need for security and can cause ill health, but it is also important to try to foresee the possible benefits that could result and the constructive adaptations that individuals make. These changing conditions raise new issues and research questions concerning health consequences and people's actions and constructive adaptation. The interdisciplinary research conference in Stockholm on Health Hazards and Challenges in the New Working Life covered areas such as health and social consequences of unemployment, job insecurity, labour market constraints, flexibility in working conditions, and new forms of employment relations and contracts. The proceedings give an overview of the latest research results on these issues, which will be relevant to working life in the next millennium.The book presents a selection of contributions from researchers in psychology, occupational health and sociology and covers three main sections: unemployment and downsizing, flexibilization and stress, and opportunities and constraints in the labour market. It provides a summary and overview of earlier research, together with new findings about adaptation and actions among the unemployed, the effects of new and changing employment contracts upon health, and the polarization of the labour market and its exclusion of vulnerable groups.

The background for the international research conference “Health Hazards and Challenges in the New Working Life” was the emerging questions concerning the health and social effects of the rapid changes in the labour market leading to increasing long-term unemployment, temporary employment and irregular employment contracts. We knew that other countries have had this development at the labour market for a much longer time than Sweden has and it seemed a good idea to invite interested researchers and practitioners to an international seminar to share the relevant research findings and discuss future research needs. Thus, the first international, interdisciplinary research conference on “Health Hazards and Challenges in the New Working Life” was arranged in Stockholm during the last year of the 2nd millennium but was directed towards the foreseen development during the next millennium. We were very pleased that more than 200 participants came to a cold and dark country just after New Year’s Eve, and that it was a truly multidisciplinary setting. It became very obvious that it is necessary for the occupational health and safety research community to reach out to the public health research community as well as to the social and political sciences in order to understand the determinants and to perform comprehensive analyses at several levels in this new labour market situation.