What are the economic costs of a poor work environment?

At the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, it is our fundamental conviction that workers’ health is a value in itself. To put it simply, work must not be health-hazardous, and work must not make the worker neither physically nor mentally sick. In our minds, there is no need for any further rationale for healthy and safe work.

That said, it would be naïve to think that, in a bottom-line world, the bottom-line would not count with regard to work and health. It does count at individual, company, and societal level. At individual level, a worker may worry about reduced payment during sickness absence. At company level, the phrase “is there a business case?” is often heard. At societal level, all economic consequences, rather than a partial interest, are considered. Therefore, there is a broad need to know the magnitude of the economic loss that comes with a health-hazardous work environment and, vice-versa, the magnitude of the economic benefit that comes with improving the work environment. For example, when the World Health Organization (WHO) published in 2022 its landmark guidelines on mental health at work using a societal perspective (1), a lot of attention was paid to the WHO`s estimation that the global economic costs of the most prevalent mental health conditions totalled USD1 trillion per year (2, 3).