DGB Study Unemployment makes you sick

DGB Study: Unemployment makes you sick

(16.08.2010) The German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) has published the results of a new study on the living conditions of the unemployed and concludes that unemployment not only results in income problems but also in more frequent illnesses.

As the Frankfurter Rundschau (FR) reports, citing the DGB study, job seekers are about twice as ill as those in employment. "The longer the unemployment lasts and the lower the prospects for re-entry, the more stressful the situation for those affected and their families," DGB board member Annelie Buntenbach told the FR ... So is the sick leave rate in the group of 15- 24-year-olds among employees at three percent, compared with job seekers, it is at 4.4 percent. With increasing age, this difference continues to grow. According to the study, unemployed persons in the group of 55- to 59-year-olds are more than twice as ill as employees of the same age group with a sick-leave rate of 15.2 percent.

For the DGB, the result of the study is clear: "In Germany, the health promotion of the unemployed is still totally inadequate". There are hardly any approaches to sustainable health promotion, and the unemployed rarely benefit from health insurance measures taken by the health insurance companies. Therefore, the policy should oblige the health insurance companies more to comply with their statutory prevention order also, so the demand of the DGB.

Because the poor health of the unemployed prevent in many cases the re-entry into professional life and ultimately cost the state more than a reasonable health care for those affected, stressed the DGB. Thus, according to the official unemployment statistics in June 2010, almost 540,000 unemployed had medically relevant health-related restrictions and among the Hartz IV recipients, a total of 45 percent declared that they were injured. In another study by the Federal Ministry of Labor, almost two-thirds of the respondents indicated to ALG II recipients that they could not work one hundred percent.

Mental illness also plays an increasingly important role among the unemployed, and is almost twice as common as among working people. So z. For example, in a separate study for the years 2000 to 2009, the Techniker Krankenkasse found a doubling of absenteeism due to diagnosed mental disorders. Accordingly, mental illness is also the second most frequent cause of illness amongst jobseekers and accounts for around a quarter of all unemployed persons unable to work. According to the experts, the causes are primarily the enormous psychological pressure in the search for a new job and the associated emotional setbacks, lack of social recognition and other problems and constraints caused by unemployment.

The fact that the federal government does not really know how to deal with the problem arises from its answer to a request from the Greens parliamentary group on the subject. The concept of the Federal Government is therefore as follows: „Since participation in work and employment is an essential factor for people's mental health and social well-being, all Federal Government employment promotion measures also indirectly aim at strengthening the mental health of the unemployed.“ (Fp)

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DGB study: Unemployment makes you sick
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