The Observatory of Working Conditions in Paris

At the end of 2022, the Paris City Council adopted a resolution concerning safety at work, aimed at achieving zero work-related deaths. It included an article specifying the creation of an Observatory of Working Conditions in Paris. The mission of defining a methodology for implementing this Observatory was entrusted to the Paris Urbanism Agency, (Apur), in conjunction with the City of Paris Department of Attractiveness and Employment (DAE). The Observatory was launched at a partnership meeting on 12th June 2024.

The work carried out within this framework has many aspects :

• One of the first tasks was to identify press articles, studies and research published on the subject, by setting up documentary monitoring, bibliographic research and producing a state of the arts report.

• Secondly, a statistical observation dimension was integrated, through defining and monitoring indicators and producing associated analyses.

• A third stage, aimed to produce in-depth thematic studies on priority and specific issues.

The state of the arts report has enabled the main aspects of academic research on work conditions, relevant to the Observatory's objectives, to be summarised. This literary review bears witness to the amplitude and diversity of issues affecting the physical and psychological health of people working in France, and more particularly in Grand Paris. A lot of work has been carried out by researchers from a broad range of disciplines (sociologists, economists, ergonomists, statisticians, doctors, etc.), on many different themes : occupational illnesses, work-related accidents, psychosocial risks, work organisation, labour law, prevention, etc. The state of the arts report also presents the main contributions of research in a concise and non-exhaustive form and enables little-documented subjects to be identified. Despite the abundance of studies available, certain topics have, as yet, not been explored in depth. Among these, death in the work place is particularly prominent, also few studies have been carried out at a local level.

Among the lessons to be learnt from this analysis there emerges that the invisibility of work-related accidents is due to several mechanisms : a tendency to consider accidents in the workplace as isolated and individual events, and the lack of exhaustive, detailed accounts recorded. The organisation of work, plays a structuring role in work conditions and suffering at work. The gap between women and men, in terms of working conditions, is particularly marked : a significant rise in the number of accidents at work and occupational illnesses among women, the under-estimation of the impact of work on their health and the absence of their specific needs being taken into consideration in the form of preventive measures put in place.

Based on this documentary work, a second phase of the study is made possible which analyses working conditions in Paris and the Grand Paris Metropolis. This includes an analysis of background data on employment and the workforce, available data on work-related accidents, occupational illnesses and work-related deaths, as well as a summary of interviews conducted in 2024 with various key players involved in occupational health.

Paris is home to an enormous number of jobs which is continually growing. These jobs are characterised as being predominantly in the services sector with large employing companies coexisting alongside small businesses, as well as a strong presence of the civil service. The working population is on average younger in Paris than in France as a whole, despite the trend towards the ageing of the workforce. The majority of jobs are waged, however, self-employment and auto-entrepreneurship have greatly increased in recent years. People working in Paris generally have a longer working day than the national average, working more frequently in the evening and being more likely to use remote working. However, they are less often subject to non-standard working hours, such as at night or weekends.

In Paris, there were 15,919 accidents at work, 6,355 commuting accidents and 1,707 newly recognised occupational illnesses reported for workers under the General Scheme in 2022. Accidents in the workplace and occupational illnesses were on the whole less frequent in Paris than on the national average (10 accidents at work per 1,000 employees in Paris compared with 27 in Mainland France), while commuting accidents were equally as frequent (4 commuting accidents per 1,000 employees). Work stoppages were on average longer in Paris than on the national scale, and were increasing faster. Transport and warehousing, healthcare, social work and construction were sectors particularly effected by accidents in the workplace in the Paris Region, Ile-de-France, as they were on a national scale.

Records of work-related deaths remain extremely limited, due to the dispersion and fragmentation of data. In 2021, the Health Insurance organisation - Assurance Maladie - registered 40 deaths of workers under the General Regime in Paris out of a total of 260 in Ile-de-France. These results cover only a fraction of the employees concerned, underlining the need to establish fuller and more detailed information.