18 May How do European countries deal with the challenges for safety and health at work? A new Data Visualization tool for understanding the issues around ageing workforce

The European Commission together with the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) have designed a visualisation tool to allow easy and quick access to the results of its three-year project “Safer and healthier work at any age — occupational safety and health (OSH) in the context of an ageing workforce”.

The agreement between the European Commission and the EU-OSHA was based on a decision and request of the European Parliament, whose objective was to further investigate possible ways of improving the safety and health of older people at work, as it is expected that the ageing of the workforce will have a serious financial impact on workers, employers and taxpayers.

Thus, the project aimed to assess the prerequisites for OSH strategies and systems to take account of an ageing workforce and improve risk prevention and health protection for all throughout working life. The data visualization tool presents the key results of the project, including data on demographics, employment, working conditions, and health, as well as examples of OSH policies across the European Member States addressing the challenges of an ageing workforce.  The tool allows users to explore the data in an interactive way by comparing countries and searching for policies, strategies and programmes, among other possibilities.

The issue of the ageing workforce is represented using the ‘Age pyramid’, that is, an interactive graph showing historical data and the projections for the EU, provided by Eurostat. Moreover, some important figures show that this is closely related to OSH and working conditions.

The country insights section provides country specific information on initiatives to address the ageing of the workforce, including healthy life years expectancy, population age structure development, employment rate, workplace risk assessments data etc.

If you want to have a look at the data visualization tool click here

The tool provides the clear evidence that e.g. health is an important factor for leaving the labour market and that 1/5 of the Europeans older than 50 think that they won’t be able to do their current job at the age of 60. SmartWork project is supporting active and healthy ageing at work for older office workers, through a suite of smart services, building a Worker-Centric AI System for work ability sustainability.

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Authors: Federica Porcu and Karolina Mackiewicz