The world celebrates today World Day for Safety and Health at Work

This year’s campaign from the International Labour Organization (ILO) is entitled “Workplace Stress: a collective challenge”, drawing attention to current global trends on work-related stress and its impact.

The ILO says that today many workers are facing greater pressure to meet the demands of modern working life. Psycho-social risks such as increased competition, higher expectations on performance and longerworking hours are contributing to the workplace becoming an ever more stressful environment.

With the pace of work dictated by instant communications and high levels of global competition, the lines separating work from life are becoming more and more difficult to identify. In addition the current economic recession can have serious consequences to workers’ mental health with organisational changes and restructuring, reduced work opportunities, increasing precarious work , the fear of losing their jobs, unemployment and decreased financial stability.

In recent years, there has been growing attention to the impact of psycho-social risks and work-related stress among researchers, practitioners and policymakers. Work-related stress is now generally acknowledged as global issue affecting all countries, all professions and all workers both in developed and developing countries.

In this complex context, the workplace is at the same time an important source of psycho-social risks and the ideal venue to address them in order to protect the health and well-being of workers.