Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 136 
The development of society, be it economically, legally or culturally, influences OSH. These studies also 
cover the impact of OSH on society, for example, costs of work -related diseases for society ,477 or the 
relations between work (or occupation) and socioeconomic status. 
This influence of such context developments on OSH is described in specific studies, for example, 
on types and levels of implementation of legislation,478 on social insurance developments, the influence 
of globalisation on supply chains and services, the ageing workforce, the ageing of t he society causing 
the approach to care for elderly people as long as possible at their homes,  and development in related 
policy fields like public health. It is mainly a field for humanities such as economy, sociology or law.479 
Meanwhile, a stronger connection between OSH and other policy and research fields has emerged. 
OSH research extended its frame and objectives to ethical considerations, for example, regarding 
research on corporate social responsibility or on working conditions in the supply chain. 480 Moreover, 
environmental policies influence safety and health at workplaces,  for example, regarding the use of 
safe but environmentally harmful chemicals, emissions from enterprises to air, soil and water, and 
energy consumption. Public health institutions provide research results about the connection between 
work and personal lifestyles, be it smoking or physical inactivity, adaptation of workplaces , and return 
to work programmes in collaboration with social security or  professional and non-profit 
organisations. 
 
7.4 Data and research – major evidence difficulties at EU level  
A precise and — in some cases even an approximate — assessment of the stat e of OSH is by far 
not an easy task. 481 Often, different explanations and reasons for similar developments are given, 
diverging or opposite developments in some countries are not well explained, and finally we can observe 
— for the same topic or situation — also a highly positive and highly negative assessment of the stat e 
of OSH in general or of several aspects, simply because there are no data that all stakeholders accept 
as reliable. One example might be the level of compliance:  estimates of the number of breaches of 
OSH legislation and the responsibility for these breaches will often differ betw een employers and 
workers.  
As mentioned already, several groups are hard -to-reach in surveys or other types of research, for 
example, migrants, seasonal and posted workers due to language issues and ‘cultural’ and 
contract insecurity, and workers in irregular circumstances, but also  workers with a legal 
exemption from several OSH regulations , for example, self -employed, often military and police and 
some parts of the public sector. Literature and analysis adds to these ‘old- hard-to-reach’ groups of 
workers the ‘new-hard-to-reach’, which are mainly characterised by new types of contracts, a less clear 
employer / employee role, and/or mobile and remote work. 482  
There surely is also a bias of responses regarding socially not -at-all or not-well-accepted topics like 
undeclared work or personal behaviour, for example, taking cognitive  or performance-enhancing drugs 
at work. 
Some structural factors make an unambiguous and accurate assessment of the state of OSH in the EU 
particularly difficult: 
1) the variety of OSH systems and infrastructures in EU Member States and its impact on 
(harmonised) EU-wide data collection and research approaches; 
2) the issues related to the use (or even new development) of reliable and measurable 
indicators, the methodological differences between different survey and research 
approaches; 
3) the assessment of the effectiveness of preventive actions and the evaluation of the