Definition: Employment status of the victim

Category: Social statistics

This variable concerns the employment status (professional status) of the victim, for example employee, self-employed, family worker, etc. For the employees (1st digit = 3), when the information is known, it will be specified, in the 2nd digit if the job is a permanent one (contract of unlimited duration) or not (temporary of limited duration) and in the 3rd digit if it is full or part-time. Missing values can be accepted ('000'), as well as partly missing value for the 2nd and/or 3rd digits (300, 301, 302, 310, 320). 

The concept of permanency of the job to be taken into account is that of the Labour Force Survey (Column 45 « Permanency of the job ») : 

« In the majority of Member States most jobs are based on written work contracts. However, in some countries such contracts exist only for specific cases (for example in the public sector, for apprentices, or for other persons undergoing some formal training within an enterprise). Taking account of these different institutional arrangements the notions « temporary job » and « work contract in limited duration » (likewise «  permanent job » and « work contract in unlimited duration ») describe situations which under different institutional frameworks, can be regarded as similar. 

A job may be regarded as temporary if it is understood by both employer and the employee that the termination of the job is determined by objective conditions such as reaching a certain date, completion of an assignment or return of another employee who has been temporarily replaced. In the case of a work contract of limited duration the condition for its termination is generally mentioned in the contract. Are also included in these groups persons with a seasonal job, persons engaged by an employment agency or business and hired out to a third party for the carrying out of a  « work mission » (interim) and persons with specific training contracts. 

If there exists no objective criterion for the termination of a job or work contract these should be regarded as permanent or of staff unlimited duration. » 

For the concept of full-time/part-time, by coherence with the indications of the Labour Force Survey (LFS - Column 44 « full-time/part-time distinction ») and the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), it could be considered the only indicative threshold of 30 hours per week (e.g., 6 hours daily on 5 days or 7.5 hours daily on 4 days) as the limit between part-time and full-time. However, this threshold still remains flexible as some specific occupations as teachers can have full-time jobs with a very lower number of lecture hours and on the opposite some craft or trade occupations can have working times very higher than the average. When the information is taken from the declaration of the accident, it is in fact the signification of « full-time » and « part-time » proper to the enterprise that will be collected.