We have legislation that recognises some benefits to those that work a “strenuous job” (IT: “lavoro usurante”). For instance, removing toxic substances, as well as working underwater as a diver, are strenuous jobs. However, the definition of strenuous right now is binary: either your job is or isn’t. We could improve the recognition of strenuous.
We should be able to recognise the strenuous periods of a normally “not strenuous job”. We should also allow ourselves to differentiate the intensity of strenuous jobs, so that everyone working in strenuous conditions should at least have their due recognition of those conditions and could see some benefits recognised.
how?
One marginalist approach could be to assign a “strenuous” score to jobs, so for instance if a job has a 0.2 score, it means that one fifth of that job is strenuous. That could be either related to intensity, or to stressful weeks worked annually.
Many medical professions are definitely strenuous, at least some of the time, and yet they are never recognised as such.
By introducing a score, an idea that I borrowed from fuzzy scores, we could introduce recognition to these and more jobs.
issues
Of course this is only one solution that I can come up right on the spot and I could already see a few political issues with it. Deciding the scores would of course be critical. From a political point of view this would be most definitely viewed as a marginal approach to the problem. More structural proposals could better deal with it.
If you can think of some alternatives, or if you have comments on this, please send them my way and I’ll happily talk about them! 😊