Telework, gender and psychosocial risks: a triad to integrate in preventive policies 4.0

Abstract

Health at work not only entails the need to avoid harm to the worker, but also implies the achievement of a physical, mental and moral balance. To speak of occupational health is to speak of the management of «psychosocial» and «organizational» factors.

The transition from scientific knowledge of psychosocial management to the preventive practice of occupational hazards is necessary and even urgent in this time that we are living.

The triple crisis that affects us (health, economic and socio-labor) derived from COVID-19, far from being an exception, has intensified gender inequality in all spheres of relationship, also at work.

The greater predisposition of working women to take advantage of a flexible work model such as telework implies a greater exposure of the same to certain risks such as isolation or hyperconnection, establishing teleworking in a focus of segregation that determines the return of women home, as a full-time worker and, in turn, caregiver.

In short, both economic reasons (effects of the COVID-19 and the structural problems it reveals) and structural reasons (changes in the organization of work typical of a digitized era), as well as the renewal of regulatory frameworks, also collective or conventional, not only at the national level, but also in the strictest international law (ILO Convention 190), oblige us to relaunch, or promote, the preventive management of risks at work from a double perspective: a more adequate management of psychosocial and organizational risk, on the one hand; and a psychosocial labor management from a gender equality perspective, from another.