Work and health: two social rights

Abstract

Work and health are two concepts whose formulation varies from one society to another depending on unique and temporal appreciation. Updating them to our time involves the challenge to understand their construction as part of consuming organized societies. Political and social processes during the last decades must be analyzed, and so must be the worker subject as a psychophysics unit. Health, as well, ought to be considered a universal right, from where to focus and understand pathological social behaviors impacting the workplace. The subject’s social dimension and the health-work relationship are dynamic. And keeping this dynamic involves to continuously review principles, norms and regulations which need to fit reality, and specific communication and language modes, as well as working conditions and environmental aspects. These processes must be considered as taking part in Argentina’s social imaginary worth highlighting: a shift in how the State’s role is considered, the public policy’s sense, the importance of working in a complementary and interdisciplinary way, redesigning the concept of health through the broadening of those under the State’s care and considering and building the workplace as a healthy space.