**Abstract**

Over the last decades, there has been a considerable progress made to address risks at workplaces and to promote occupational safety and health of workers. Nevertheless, the recent changes of the labor market underline that new risks to the health and well-being of workers should be considered. In this context, a vast amount of studies have analyzed the relationship between work conditions, social inequalities, and health, suggesting a complex net of causation. Only recently, it has been shown that people in lower socioeconomic positions incur higher working risks. The 2008–2013 economic crisis also introduced a reduction of the number of workers in full-time permanent employment with a steady expansion of atypical and precarious workers. The latter have generally been associated with more insecure and unhealthy working conditions. Another important aspect of safety in the workplace is gender differences. Although nowadays there is more information than before about the types of health problems and accidents women incur at the workplace, the genderrelated questions are still open issues that require a careful evaluation of work-related risks of men and women. In this chapter, we focused on the current state of the art in the field of occupational health and examined the aspects that are still being debated.

**Keywords:** occupational health, occupational exposure, risk assessment, social determinants of health

## **1. Introduction**

The target of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) programs includes fostering a safe and healthy work environment. Successful safety interventions depend on the correct identification of causality mechanisms from exposure to hazards to the onset of disease or injury. The central point of OSH programs is the risk assessment process in which we must identify things, situations, and processes that may cause harm to people. The usual approach to OSH implies three phases: (i) hazard identification related to specific work tasks, (ii) risk assessment or evaluation of the risk associated with that hazard, and (iii) actions and procedures to eliminate the hazard, or control the risk when the hazard cannot be eliminated [1, 2]. It is important to underline the difference between hazards and risks, as many people use the terms interchangeably. Commonly used definitions follow: a hazard is any source of potential damage, harm or adverse health effects on something or someone. A risk is the chance or probability, high or low, that a person will be harmed or experience an adverse health effect if exposed to a hazard [1, 2]. For example, the disease tuberculosis (TB) is the adverse health effect caused by the *Mycobacterium tuberculosis* also defined as the "hazardous biological agent." The risk to get sick from TB depends on the probability to be exposed to the " hazardous biological agent," for example, by working with biological samples infected with *Mycobacterium tuberculosis* or having close contact with someone with the disease TB. In this example, the probability (risk) of being exposed to TB will be very high for people working in the hospital infectious diseases department, but very low for people working in other workplaces, such as a library. Today, there are known many different types of hazards, which can cause adverse effects or harm in the workplace. Hazards can come from a wide range of sources and can be found in every workplace. Workplace risk awareness has grown over time, thus now it is possible to identify situations and processes that are inherently dangerous, such as those associated with chemical, physical, and biological procedures or ergonomic risk factors. Unfortunately, there is no cultural preparation to address risk assessment of new and emerging categories (e.g., the work organization) that do not seem to be inherently dangerous [3–5].

Before going into specific aspects of OSH, it should be emphasized that adverse health outcomes in the medical field can be considered as based on two different approaches: the first considers bad health as an inevitable result of individual behavior patterns; the second considers that poor social and economic circumstances affect health throughout life. These different approaches can be extrapolated into the occupational field. Unfortunately, the occupational safety and health management system has so far given little attention to aspects related to the social-economic organization in which people live and work. In recent years, several studies have shown that safety interventions may be more effective at preventing the incidence of work-related diseases by giving priority to the characteristics of organization structures [6–8]. What does this specifically refer to? Generally, when referring to social-economic organization, we consider some occupational and working conditions, type of organizational structure of companies, different types of contracts (such as atypical jobs), size of the production units, and feminized and masculinized jobs.

In this chapter, assuming that most aspects of common workplace hazards should have been dealt with extensively in other chapters of this book, we will not discuss them unless these can be modified by the specific characteristics of subgroups of workers. Our goal is to provide a point of reflection on the relationship that associates socioeconomic organization and safety interventions in the workplace with social inequalities in health also named health inequalities.
