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- Title
Working hours and all-cause mortality in relation to the EU Working Time Directive: a Danish cohort study.
- Authors
Hannerz, Harald; Soll-Johanning, Helle
- Abstract
Background In keeping with the need to protect the safety and health of workers, the EU Working Time Directive stipulates that a worker's average working time for each 7-day period, including overtime, does not exceed 48 h. It has, however, not been settled whether or not the threshold at 48 working hours a week is low enough to protect against excess mortality from long work weeks. The aim of the present study was to examine all-cause mortality in relation to weekly working hours among employees in the general population of Denmark. A special attention was given to mortality rates among employees with moderately long work weeks, 41–48 h. Methods Interview data from cohorts of 20–64 year-old employees were drawn from the Danish Labour Force Survey. The participants (N = 159 933) were followed through national registers from the end of the calendar year of the interview (1999–2013) until the end of 2014. Rate ratios (RRs) for all-cause mortality were estimated as a function of weekly working hours while controlling for age, sex, social class, night-time work and calendar year. Results We found 3374 deaths during an average follow-up time of 7.7 years. With 32–40 working hours a week as reference, the RRs for all-cause mortality were 0.75 (95% CI: 0.66–0.85) for 41–48 and 0.92 (0.80–1.05) for >48 h. Conclusion Mortality rates in Denmark are significantly lower among employees with moderately long work weeks than they are among full-time employees without overtime work.
- Subjects
DENMARK; AGE distribution; CONFIDENCE intervals; EMPLOYEE attitudes; INDUSTRIAL hygiene; INTERVIEWING; LONGITUDINAL method; OCCUPATIONAL diseases; SHIFT systems; SOCIAL classes; SURVEYS; TIME; EMPLOYEES' workload; ODDS ratio
- Publication
European Journal of Public Health, 2018, Vol 28, Issue 5, p810
- ISSN
1101-1262
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/eurpub/cky027