Work security is about working conditions that are safe and promote workers well-being. Although embracing issues traditionally treated under the rubric of "occupational health and safety", work security means more than that. In other words, it is not just about mechanisms to protect workers against occupational hazards, disease and injury; it is also about the so-called modern scourges of stress, over-work and presenteeism. And it extends to violence at work and the important area of harassment in its various guises.

• Conventions:
  • Convention 1: Restricting hours of work
  • Convention 103: Maternity Protection
  • Convention 132: Annual Holidays with Pay
  • Convention 155: Existence of OSH law
  • Convention 159: No discrimination against disabled workers
  • Convention 161: Establishment of OH services
  • Convention 171: Restricting night work
• Laws
• Existence of a national law requiring the establishment of occupational health services: such a law is indicative of a more advanced level of worker protection. Since all of the developed countries have today a basic OSH law, we have used this variable as a means of discriminating between countries having only the "bare minimum" (i.e. a law but no further provisions to protect workers health) and those having established more sophisticated systems. The legal mandate for occupational health services is found among countries with the better systems of worker protection in place. Workers injured on the job, or ill due to workplace exposures, deserve health services dedicated to their care, with health providers specially trained in diagnosis and treatment of work-related illnesses. Workplace-based or community-based occupational health services are also a proven means of preventing adverse work-related health outcomes.
• Existence of a national law to protect disabled workers from discrimination: workers who become disabled due to work injuries, accidents or work-related disease, or who are disabled for other reasons, such as handicaps from birth or from non-work related accidents, are often subject to discrimination, overt or covert, making it more difficult or even impossible to secure employment. Without a means of generating income, disabled workers can quickly fall into a poverty trap, which often catalyses wider impacts on families and society who bear the costs in one form or another. Legal protection for such workers is a minimum and fundamental element of work security. Workers should not be penalized for any disability, whether work-induced or otherwise. They are entitled to the same human rights as any other citizen, and deserve special protection.
• Existence of a national law mandating paid maternity leave: pregnant workers require legal and financial protection to cover periods during and after pregnancy, to protect them from work environments that may be hazardous to their health or the health of the foetus, and to protect them from discriminatory actions resulting in job loss due to maternity.
• Existence of a national law guaranteeing paid leave: societies plagued by overwork and lack of paid leave for rest periods, with a minimum of income security, experience high rates of ill-health and social malaise. Without laws guaranteeing workers the right to paid leave, extreme exploitation of workers is a likely occurrence, with consequences for individuals, families, employers, governments and society. Ill-health is a direct outcome of the lack of paid leave entitlement, resulting in overwork. The mere existence of a law mandating the provision of paid leave does not necessarily mean that the law is as protective as it may need to be. ILO Convention No. 132 outlines the minimum protections prescribed and internationally agreed upon.
  

• Level of government expenditure on workers compensation, as a percentage of GDP. Prevention is the first line of defence against work-related accidents, injuries and diseases. However, where work-induced adverse health outcomes or accidents do result from work-related exposures, adequate compensation for affected workers is a key means of protecting their basic security.
• Existence of labour-management, tripartite or bipartite occupational safety and health boards or committees. To ensure that laws translate into protection of workers health, a variety of mechanisms are needed to reach employers and workers at the level of the workplace. One of the most fundamental mechanisms is a tripartite or bipartite board or a labour-management safety and health committee. Where these mechanisms exist, usually requiring a legal mandate, social dialogue and consultation are used as means of addressing and solving problems both locally and nationally.
• The existence of disability or invalidity benefits provided to workers injured in work-related accidents. This is a measure of how well workers are protected in the event they are injured at work. Where workers are not provided with disability or invalidity benefits following a work-related accident, insecurity is almost guaranteed to follow.

• the work-related fatal injury rate;
• a categorical variable with five codes corresponding to estimated levels of fatal injury under-reporting;
• the share of wage employment in total employment, used as a proxy for the proportion of the population having guaranteed compensation for occupational injury;
• the average reported working time; and
• average annual paid leave (vacation days) corrected by the relative size of wage employment.

In all, 95 countries are covered by the Work Security Index.

As expected, western European countries have the highest scores, making up entirely the cluster of Pacesetters. Top performers are Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. There are no Pacesetters in any other region. Eastern Europe and the Americas are the regions having the best performing industrializing or transitional economies: Argentina, Barbados, Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia. These countries are classified as Pragmatists. As such, by definition, they have relatively weak legislation related to work security, or on mechanisms to ensure the application of the laws, but still achieve good results in the outcome measures.
By contrast, however, over two thirds of the countries in our list have unsatisfactory levels of work security. The latter are classified as Conventionals or Much-to-be-Done, in almost equal numbers. These two clusters contain countries from all regions (except Western Europe) and all countries from Africa and Middle East (except Israel, which is a Pragmatist) as well as from Asia (except Asian OECD countries, which are also Pragmatists).
The Conventionals could be considered as "average" performers in that they have satisfactory institutional or legislative mechanisms and/or satisfactory mechanisms for implementing those norms, but nonetheless perform rather poorly on the outcome measures. Probably for historical reasons the majority of African and Latin American countries come under this label.
Finally, the most critical cases are in the category of Much-to-be-Done, which takes in the most deprived countries from the African continent, Asia and Eastern Europe. The countries of Eastern Europe have a history of strong legislation on the various aspects of work security, including nearly 100% trade union membership until the fall of Communism. Some of the other countries, particularly those in Asia, have more recently upgraded what were basic factory acts carried over from colonial periods to include other laws on work security. Yet the results show that, while laws and mechanisms may exist, alone they are insufficient to protect workers health.