Do Temporary Workers More Often Decide to Work While Sick? Evidence for the Link between Employment Contract and Presenteeism in Europe

Marvin Reuter, Morten Wahrendorf, Cristina Di Tecco, Tahira M. Probst, Sascha Ruhle, Valerio Ghezzi, Claudio Barbaranelli, Sergio Iavicoli and Nico Dragano
Additional contact information
Marvin Reuter: Institute of Medical Sociology, Centre for Health and Society, Medical Faculty, University of Duesseldorf, 40225 Duesseldorf, Germany
Morten Wahrendorf: Institute of Medical Sociology, Centre for Health and Society, Medical Faculty, University of Duesseldorf, 40225 Duesseldorf, Germany
Cristina Di Tecco: Italian Workers’ Compensation Authority (INAIL), Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Epidemiology and Hygiene, 00078 Monte Porzio Catone Rome, Italy
Tahira M. Probst: Department of Psychology, Washington State University, Vancouver, WA 98686, USA
Sascha Ruhle: Chair of Business Administration, in particular Work, Human Resource Management and Organization Studies, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, University of Duesseldorf, 40225 Duesseldorf, Germany
Valerio Ghezzi: Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy
Claudio Barbaranelli: Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy
Sergio Iavicoli: Italian Workers’ Compensation Authority (INAIL), Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Epidemiology and Hygiene, 00078 Monte Porzio Catone Rome, Italy
Nico Dragano: Institute of Medical Sociology, Centre for Health and Society, Medical Faculty, University of Duesseldorf, 40225 Duesseldorf, Germany

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 10, 1-17

Abstract: European employees are increasingly likely to work in cases of illness (sickness presenteeism, SP). Past studies found inconsistent evidence for the assumption that temporary workers decide to avoid taking sick leave due to job insecurity. A new measure to identify decision-based determinants of SP is presenteeism propensity (PP), which is the number of days worked while ill in relation to the sum of days worked while ill and days taken sickness absence. We investigated the link between employment contract and PP using cross-sectional data from 20,240 employees participating in the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey. Workers were grouped by type and duration of employment contract. The link between contract and PP was estimated using a multilevel Poisson model adjusted for socio-demographical, occupational and health-related covariates. We found that European employees worked 39% of the days they were ill. In contrast to previous studies, temporary workers were significantly more likely to decide for presenteeism than permanent workers were, especially when the contract was limited to less than 1 year. Controlling for perceived job insecurity did just marginally attenuate this association. Presenteeism was also more common among young and middle-aged workers; however, we did not find a significant interaction between contract and age affecting presenteeism. In conclusion, the employment contract is an important determinant of presenteeism. Our results give reason to believe that temporary workers show increased attendance behavior independent of job insecurity, because they are less likely to have access to social protection in case of illness.

Keywords: employment contract; temporary work; sickness presenteeism; presenteeism propensity; sickness presence; job insecurity; young workers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/10/1868/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/10/1868/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:10:p:1868-:d:234648

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().