Glossary: unemployment, job insecurity, and health

Writing a glossary on unemployment and health for an international epidemiological journal poses a number of rather daunting challenges. However, these are the sorts of challenges we need to accept in order to further the understanding of social factors in health and disease. First of all, every nation has its own ways of defining unemployment and administering benefits. Even the ideas of "unemployment" and "benefits" are less salient in many nations. The exchange of labour for money is by no means the only form of productive activity, and family and community structure form the major source of support for those not engaged in such activity in many areas of the world. In both writing and reading this glossary therefore, it is necessary to bear in mind that it deals with unemployment and health. We have confined our entries to those we felt most relevant to understanding the existing literature on this topic. We have not set out (nor could we) to write a comprehensive glossary on unemployment and benefits: there are several books that aim to do this, with varying degrees of completeness, and some of these are included in our references.