[L’épuisement au travail lié au vieillissement démographique n’est pas une fatalité. C’est ce que démontre Catherine Delgoulet, professeure du Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam, Paris), titulaire de la chaire Ergonomie, et rattachée au Centre de recherche sur le travail et le développement (CRTD, CNAM). La chercheuse dirige depuis 2019 un groupement d’intérêt scientifique, le Centre de recherche sur l’expérience, l’âge et les populations au travail (GIS-Creapt) et contribue au programme de recherche transverse du Centre d’étude de l’emploi et du travail (CEET). Dans un contexte de vieillissement démographique et de transformations majeures du travail, ses travaux éclairent les conditions de la construction de la santé à tout âge pour la conception de systèmes de travail et de formation soutenables.]
Questions relating to arduousness and work regularly come up in the social debate, and pension or work reforms are bringing them back to the forefront. These questions relate to essential issues linked to health at work throughout professional life, that is to say the way in which work and its conditions of performance allow each and every person to carry out their professional activity at all ages. Health here is not only the absence of illness, but also the (re)construction of human capacities, experience, knowledge and know-how offering possibilities for individual and collective control of the work situations experienced (Canguilhem, 1966).
This text aims to recall some key moments of developments in the consideration of arduousness at work in recent decades, then to identify the many facets of arduousness, those taken into account in current policies and others. It also highlights the power of action of people in a work situation. On these bases, it proposes a new approach to the relationship between health and work, from the angle of sustainability, which must be built, rather than arduousness, which would be inevitable.
Questions that date, but very partially resolved
Questions relating to arduousness at work, its qualification, its identification, its recognition and its prevention are not new. Going back in time, from the 1970s, we note the recurring links between questions of hardship and pensions (Landing, 2021).
1. Brief history
In the mid-1970s, the age of eligibility for retirement rights was lowered to 60 years (instead of 65 years) for categories of people whose profession the legislator considered difficult: certain manual workers, in particular. Retirement for incapacity is also implemented during this period, allowing recognition of the irreversible effects of work on people’s abilities and giving the right, through compensation, to early access to retirement.
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