Health Status of Agricultural Workers and the Self-Employed in 2022 and Changes in Work Patterns Compared to Pre-COVID-19 Times
In the second half of 2022, Santé publique France conducted a survey of 20,000 current and former non-agricultural self-employed workers and 27,000 current and former agricultural workers recruited from the Coset cohorts, in order to assess their health and employment status. The survey specifically aimed to document changes that had occurred since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of these two occupational groups perceived their health as good or very good by the end of 2022, but the proportion of people considering their health to be in poorer condition had increased over the past two years (since the end of the first lockdown). The prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms, which is of the same order of magnitude in both groups, appears higher than in mid-2020 among those working in agriculture. Non-agricultural self-employed individuals appear to be a vulnerable group in several respects. The proportion of workers whose activity has decreased compared to before the crisis, or who perceive threats to their future employment, is significant; moreover, these threats are largely attributed, in whole or in part, to the crisis linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. Working arrangements (such as remote work, weekly working hours, etc.) in 2022 have changed compared to those at the start of 2020 for a significant proportion of the workforce—among those who were engaged in the same activity at the start of the health crisis—and certain perceived psychosocial constraints (such as working under pressure, cognitive overload, tension, etc.) are also experienced more frequently by a significant portion of the workforce. Finally, it should be noted that by the end of 2022, one in fourteen non-agricultural self-employed workers and one in twenty agricultural workers suffer from persistent COVID-19 symptoms impacting their professional and/or personal lives. These various observations lead to the recommendation that stakeholders involved in occupational risk prevention take into account the impact of the increase in certain psychosocial stressors on the health of these populations, particularly among office workers in the agricultural sector and self-employed artisans and merchants, and also address the issue of persistent COVID-19 symptoms and their professional impact…
Author(s): Marchand Jean-Luc, Geoffroy Perez Béatrice
Publishing year: 2025
Pages: 95 p.
Collection: Studies and Surveys
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