Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 11 
In several occupations, classical safety risks often add to the above-mentioned exposures, that is, 
slips, trips and falls, risks related to moving parts of machinery, moving vehicles, exposure to hot, cold, 
or hazardous materials, loud noise, chemical or biological substances, and in general physically 
exhaustive work. 
A certain ergonomic risk of many administrative and supervisory jobs is physical inactivity (61%), in 
practice meaning sitting most of the working time in front of digital equipment, sitting to make phone 
calls or sitting in meetings. Not only adminis trative tasks but also many occupations in transport and 
industry require prolonged sitting (transport, cashiers, parts assembly, etc.).  
In the 10-year period before 2005, EU-wide surveys found a significant increase in work intensity. Major 
differences in work intensity and working time patterns can be seen between occupations, forms of work, 
sectors and enterprise size, for example. The length of the daily or weekly working time and its allocation 
with the 24 hours of a day or at night are important fact ors for health and wellbeing. The Eurostat data 
show a slight decrease in the average weekly working time for full-time employees (15-64 years) 
from 40.2 to 39.9 hours between 2006 and 2019.  
Eurostat reports for all types of ‘employment at atypical workin g time’ a minor decrease between 
2011 and 2019, from 38.8% to 37.2% (EU27 average), for all employed workforce and all types of such 
atypical time. The data also document slight increases or decreases of the different types of work during 
atypical times > on Saturdays the percentage decreased from 28% to 25%, working in the evenings 
decreased from 19% to 15%, working on Sundays remained stable at around 13.5%, work at night fell 
from 7% to 5%, and shift work increased slightly from 17% to 18%. Some groups of self-employed 
show a higher rate of atypical working times: for high-managerial self-employed, this rate is 43.2% 
and for low-managerial self-employed 64.5%. 
Significant differences also exist between eastern/southern and central/northern/western 
European countries. More physical and ergonomic risks (except inactivity) are reported from eastern 
and southern EU Member States but more emotional demands (e.g. difficult clients, poor communication 
and long working hours) in northern and central European count ries. One of the major reasons might 
be the reallocation of industrial production to eastern countries after the EU extension to 24 and later to 
27 Member States. 
Conditions of employment and workforce development  
During the past decades and at faster pace after 1990, a greater variety of non-standard contractual 
relations has emerged. Typical characteristics of non-standard work are part-time work, temporary (or 
fixed-term) work, seasonal work, casual work, home-based work, telework, self -employment or family 
work. Currently, high public awareness is directed to those types of non- standard work that are 
connected either to new forms of contracts (voucher, platform, zero-hours, portfolio, etc.) or increasing 
types of work not bound to the premises of the employer (mobile, at home, at client’s place), mostly 
made possible by the increased use of modern information and communication technologies (ICT). 
These forms of work often have as a —  additional — major characteris tic a less clear employer –
worker relationship.  
However, in 2019 the conventional employment contract still accounted for around 86% of the workforce 
(EU27), 9% are ‘own- account’ workers, that is, self -employed without employees. The remaining 4% 
were self-employed with employees (employers) and less than 1% were contributing family workers. Of 
all employed workers, 17.2% worked part-time and 13.3% had temporary contracts.