Precarious employment conditions affect work content in education and social work: results of work analyses.

Work content is adversely affected by precarious employment conditions, with consequences for workers and clients/customers. Three examples are taken from professions involving long-term relations between workers and clients. Adult education teachers hired on short-term contracts to teach primarily immigrant populations prepare their courses under less favorable conditions than regular teachers and their employment context foments hostility among teachers.

Is work in education child's play? Understanding risks to educators arising from work organization and design of work spaces.

The educational sector exposes its primarily female work force to numerous psychosocial risk factors. At the request of the education workers', ergonomists developed a participatory research project in order to understand the determinants of the difficulties experienced by special education technicians. These technicians work with students presenting behavioral and learning difficulties as well as developmental and mental health problems.

Understanding women's work: steps toward transformation--an introduction.

A session at the 2005 Delhi Congress on Women, Work and Health was entitled "Social movements and research on women, work and health: How can researchers and community members work together on current problems?" and described researcher-worker collaboration to gain recognition for the constraints and requirements of women's jobs. Suffering in the workplace may appear to come primarily from such visible aggressors as toxins and heavy weights, but its ultimate cause is the powerlessness, isolation, and denigration that sap workers' ability to fight back. Participatory research projects described here have promoted solidarity and encouraged the transformation of working conditions.

Qualitative research using numbers: an approach developed in france and used to transform work in north america.

Qualitative research is often opposed to quantitative research. But numbers can play an important role in illustrating analyses in qualitative research. Their persuasive, concrete nature can help ensure the success of a workplace intervention, especially in the North American context, where numbers are treated very seriously.

Repetitive Strain in Nonrepetitive Work: A Case Study.

In a Québec factory, a woman in a nontraditional job suffered from epicondylitis whereas her male coworkers were unaffected. A study was undertaken in order to enumerate the operations at risk for epicondylitis. Workers were interviewed in order to identify difficult operations and systematic observations were done over 4 work days.