Health employability in questions and in action – ESQA

Occupational health has been the subject of recent substantial reforms (2021) to invite companies to deploy public health policies aimed at maintaining employment. Motivated by major social issues (ageing of the worker in the job and increase in progressive chronic diseases), these texts introduce new health "injunctions" to detect the risk of alteration of the state of health in the job, which we propose to designate by the expression "health employability". The objective of the ESQA project is to study the strategies and programs for anticipating and preserving the health of employees that have been put in place within companies. The aim is to understand the "activation" of health employability, the representations of health that they convey, the actors involved and the tools mobilized, particularly in terms of social dialogue. From an interdisciplinary perspective, involving law, sociology and economics, the ambition of the project is to constitute the first body of reference knowledge on health employability in France (qualitative approach) as well as in Europe (statistical approach by exploiting two European databases). In a more fundamental way, the project intends to contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of health employability and to the transformations that it induces in terms of health and well-being, ageing at work, and in the hollow of working conditions. It is part of the observation of the growing societal role of companies.