A study on the health effects of overwork and diversification of workers status

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Recently in Japan, number of claims for workers' compensation due to overwork to death and suicide of workers related to mental problems in the workplace are increasing. In addition to the huge workload, the increase of part-time and temporally workers in the workplace may affect the health of the workers. Unstable contractual status and lower wage of these workers threaten the basic rights of these workers but they may also affect full-time workers, as well. The purpose of the present research project is to investigate the impact of overwork and mixture of various workers' status in the workplace from the view point of health of workers. The indices we used to detect the health effect were questionnaire for physical and mental complaints, work and life style, physiological examination, and laboratory tests mandatory performed for periodical health examination. We also used DSM-IV for depression and JCQ and ERI to investigate the stress and work environment. We looked at the relationship of the examinations to overwork and workers' various contractual status. Currently in Japan, regular health examination is the main tool and strategy to protect and promote health of workers but we found that health examination has little power to detect the problem of workers. Also, mere working hours does not precisely represent the work load. Thus, it seems that we need new measures for the health problems of overwork and temporally work, and we tried and reported the results of some of the new measures such as autonomic nerve function and questionnaires. Despite the seriousness and urgency of the problem, there has been little study on this subject and many occupational health professionals have not realized its importance. Further study is warranted and it should be started by looking at the workplace as a whole, including both full-time and temporary workers.