Sickness Absence and Part Time Work in Public Organizations – The Case of Norwegian Municipalities (68644)
Session: On Demand
Room: Virtual Video Presentation
Presentation Type:Virtual Presentation
Sickness absence is a very costly challenge facing all organizations. In most European countries, sickness absence is higher in the public sector than the private, something often explained by the differences in tasks and functions between the sectors. The public sector is characterized by tasks such as health-services, social services, and care. Many of these services are characterized by a high degree of personal interaction between employees and users, as well as services that are based on availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This also entails an extensive use of part time employment, in many cases necessary to make complex shift-arrangements to function. Still, the linkage between part-time work and sickness absence is not very well studied, and existing studies show inconclusive and sometimes conflicting results. Most of these studies are conducted at the individual level, focusing on individual characteristics and job characteristics as explanations for individual absence from work. In this study, we shift focus to the organizational level, more specifically the municipal level, and asks whether sickness absence in the municipality organization as whole can be explained by the relative number of part-time workers to the total number of employees in the municipality organization. Using panel data from 2015 to 2019 (five years), we estimate – using a panel regression model with fixed effects – if any effect of part time work on absence can be detected when we control for municipal characteristics (general economy, size, demography, level of central services like kindergartens, and more).
Authors:
Dag Ingvar Jacobsen, Agder University, Norway
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