Do Temporary Workers More Often Decide to Work While Sick? Evidence for the Link between Employment Contract and Presenteeism in Europe

Abstract

European employees are increasingly likely to work in cases of illness (sickness presenteeism, SP). Past studies found inconsistent evidence for the assumption that temporary workers decide to avoid taking sick leave due to job insecurity. A new measure to identify decision-based determinants of SP is presenteeism propensity (PP), which is the number of days worked while ill in relation to the sum of days worked while ill and days taken sickness absence. We investigated the link between employment contract and PP using cross-sectional data from 20,240 employees participating in the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey. Workers were grouped by type and duration of employment contract. The link between contract and PP was estimated using a multilevel Poisson model adjusted for socio-demographical, occupational and health-related covariates. We found that European employees worked 39% of the days they were ill. In contrast to previous studies, temporary workers were significantly more likely to decide for presenteeism than permanent workers were, especially when the contract was limited to less than 1 year. Controlling for perceived job insecurity did just marginally attenuate this association. Presenteeism was also more common among young and middle-aged workers; however, we did not find a significant interaction between contract and age affecting presenteeism. In conclusion, the employment contract is an important determinant of presenteeism. Our results give reason to believe that temporary workers show increased attendance behavior independent of job insecurity, because they are less likely to have access to social protection in case of illness.

Adaptation and validation of the Stanford Presenteeism Scale‐6 in healthcare professionals

“…Our results support previous studies that determined that over half of nurses have attended work despite being ill (Graf et al ; Warren et al ), which points to presenteeism as a phenomenon that must be analysed in depth due to its high prevalence (Chiu et al ; Mach et al ) and its proven association with labour discontent, work‐load, labour stress and insecurity (Reuter et al ; Skela‐Savic et al ). Its consequences have proven to be significant for the healthcare system and employees, showing that strategic training to control and reduce it is essential (Schneider et al ).…”

Working while sick in context of regional unemployment: a Europe-wide cross-sectional study

“…Support for this explanation is found in studies observing increased presenteeism in context of occupational downsizing 1 and temporary employment. 29 One implication of the overall finding is that strategies aiming to reduce presenteeism must consider the role of labour market contexts. Notably, this may receive additional relevance in the near future, where economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic will result in raising unemployment rates worldwide, especially among those countries with less economic resources.…”

Occupational Health Inequalities by Issues on Gender and Social Class in Labor Market: Absenteeism and Presenteeism Across 26 OECD Countries

“…Previous studies have reported that there are significant differences in the incidences of absenteeism and presenteeism among OECD countries, and that the patterns of changes also vary among the countries (10,(16)(17)(18). To date, however, contextual explanations of the differences in the prevalence of absenteeism and presenteeism have been focused on unemployment and sickness benefits (7,9,16,19).…”