Work has long been considered a social determinant of health. Like housing, education, income security and other matters of economic and social policy, work can be a key factor in creating, maintaining or exacerbating unequal health outcomes across different societal groups.
But if work is already understood to be a social determinant of health by regulators and policymakers, it has been underused as a lever to address health inequities. That’s the main case we — an international group of work and health researchers — have made in a series of articles on the relationships between work and health recently published in The Lancet.
