The survey that asks Europe about its work

The European working conditions survey, conducted by a European Union agency, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, periodically questions representative samples of workers about organisation, autonomy, risks, hours and perceived health.

Its strength lies in standardisation: the same questionnaire translated under a controlled protocol, the same sampling rules, which makes comparisons between countries and over time possible, unlike most national surveys. It also questions both employees and the self-employed, which makes it possible to compare the two situations with the same instrument.

It supplies the longest series on work intensity, decision latitude, exposure to physical risks and atypical hours.

It also allows combinations to be measured, for instance the conjunction of high demand and low latitude, a configuration at the heart of models of strain at work. The best known, proposed by Robert Karasek in 1979, was later supplemented by a third dimension, social support.

Those combinations are more informative than isolated indicators, because the same intensity is not experienced in the same way depending on the room for manoeuvre available to cope with it.

All its measures are self-reported. Work intensity, load and autonomy are perceptions, sensitive to national response norms and to what people implicitly compare themselves with.

Since those norms differ between countries, comparisons of level are more fragile than changes over time within one country, which the agency flags in its methodological documents. A gap between two countries may thus reflect a difference in how demanding respondents are when answering as much as a difference in conditions.

The survey changed its mode of collection in a recent wave, moving partly from face-to-face interview to telephone, which affects comparability with earlier waves. The change coincided with the pandemic, which made home interviews impossible in many countries.

That difficulty is general: improving a method breaks the series, and preserving the series prevents improving the method. Institutes decide case by case and document the break.

France has its own surveys on working conditions, conducted since 1978, and on psychosocial risks, with larger samples and more detailed questions. The report of the expert panel chaired by Michel Gollac, submitted in 2011, provided the framework for measuring psychosocial risks subsequently adopted in those surveys.

Their articulation with the European survey is documented, and they make it possible to check whether a gap observed between countries comes from a real difference or an instrument effect. Neither source replaces the other: one provides comparison, the other precision.