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Dear Professor Pollmann, Professor Rieger, Professor Steinhilber, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am pleased to address you today at this opening event and thank you for the opportunity, Professor Rieger and Professor Steinhilber. And I also thank you for hosting and organizing the conference here in Tübingen together with your team. In Tübingen, we welcome international guests and if you have never been here before you will see that Tübingen is worth a visit. You will all experience this in the upcoming days.

Above all, however with attending this conference, you are making a valuable contribution to strengthening the status of occupational medicine – in science and in society.

Maintaining the health of employees in the modern workplace is not only a challenge, but also a significant task. This, of course, concerns individual health and therefore the satisfaction of life of individuals. And work is not only material security, it also enables social participation. This is especially true when work-related negative strain is minimal and the working conditions are right. Work is part of human life.

Furthermore, maintaining the health of employees also has a broader societal dimension: especially in societies that are facing a shortage of skilled workers due to demographic changes and are concerned about the future financing of their welfare state. This applies to Germany. But in principle it applies to almost all countries in Europe and the Northern hemisphere.

From the experience of the last two decades, we have learned that we can successfully meet the demographic challenge facing our social systems if labor market development is positive. In addition to higher female labor force participation and increased immigration, longer periods spent in the workforce and a higher employment rate among older workers have also contributed to this. And the trend must continue. Because the baby boomers are retiring. In Germany, this means that the labor market is losing a net total of around 400,000 workers each year.

At the same time, we are dealing with a labor market that is undergoing rapid changes, particularly due to digitalization. And these changes must be managed with workforces that are already aging due to demographic changes.

Maintaining the health of employees is therefore a labor market policy task. And, together with training, it is probably the most crucial labor market policy task in the majority of industrialized countries.

In recent years, mental illnesses and their interactions with physical complaints have rightly received greater attention. But that doesn't mean that musculoskeletal disorders have lost their significance. They remain important, for business and medical practice as well as for research. Because even in the new world of work, physical work remains.

In the future, as well, we will only be able to secure our prosperity through industrial production. Production jobs will therefore remain important, especially since most tasks that can be automated have already been automated.

In addition, social professions, which are becoming increasingly important in aging societies, are associated with physical demanding tasks. Just think of nursing or elderly care.

And desk work is also physically demanding as well.

Under these conditions, the demographic shift in the workforce is highly relevant.

So, there are plenty of challenges for preventing musculoskeletal disorders. And this raises important questions for science:

• What opportunities does occupational health and safety offer? But where are the limitations?
• What additional opportunities does digitalization open up for us?
• What incentives can employers and employees provide for company-based and individual prevention?
• What incentives are conceivable to ensure that employees on sick leave also focus on reintegrating into the workplace?
• How can the increasing number of self-employed and non-formal employment relationships be included in occupational health and safety?

Ladies and gentlemen, occupational health and safety has traditionally been important in Germany. However, fragmented regulations often push the boundaries of what is still acceptable in companies. The answer should be a change of perspective: more motivation, incentives, and support for good solutions instead of control and mistrust! And this certainly applies not only to occupational safety, but to employee health prevention as a whole.

In recent years, we have observed the following in Germany: Of the employees receiving a disability pension, not even half have previously taken part in any preventive or rehabilitation measure. So we are clearly not reaching those who most urgently need support. Although the political objective is actually: prevention, before rehabilitation, before retirement!

In Germany over the last three legislative periods the federal government and the parliamentary groups supporting them have therefore begun to provide new answers: We have made prevention and aftercare mandatory benefits of statutory pension insurance. Together with the pension insurance providers, we have ensured that access to rehabilitation measures has been made easier. The statutory pension insurance has established a company service and offers nationwide prevention programs for employees. With the so called Ü45-Check, a low-threshold offer of a work-related health check is being tested by the pension insurance providers in regional pilot projects. This should become a legal entitlement for all employees aged 45 and over. And statutory accident insurance now allows for so-called individual prevention: every employee can now report for prevention individually if they suspect an occupational disease. However, mental illnesses in particular are often not recognized as occupational diseases.

At the same time, we know that in many professions, it is simply not possible to work until age 65 or even 67. Many employees anticipate this and change careers again between the ages of 45 and 50. But many do not. Therefore, in addition to health-related workplace design, individual behavioral changes, personal health care, and rehabilitation measures, support for qualification and job changes is also required.

A comprehensive framework of information, advice, and support is therefore necessary. A transparent decision-making environment must be created for those affected, and individual support must be provided for the specific path forward.

This also helps to overcome the gap between collective, structural prevention and individual behavioral prevention. Because, especially in the workplace, the two belong together.

We’ve set out on this path. But we’re still at the beginning.

Science can help policymakers and institutions find promising paths. And it can provide us with answers as to how we can open up affected individuals – both employers and employees – to this approach.

A particular challenge in Germany is that four different social insurance systems, each with its own responsibilities, goals, and definitions of prevention, must cooperate: the pension insurance system, the Federal Employment Agency, the statutory accident insurance system, and, if possible, the health insurance funds. They, too, often have to learn how to cooperate.

In addition, occupational health care and general healthcare are largely separate systems. Here, too, incentives for greater cooperation must be encouraged.

Ladies and gentlemen, our liberal democracy is currently in crisis, and not only here in Germany. This is accompanied by dissatisfaction with government and public institutions, and by disillusionment with the state. Citizens often experience the state as bureaucratic and dismissive, rather than supportive and welcoming. For the future of our democracy, it is therefore essential to further develop the welfare state so that it provides in a timely and effective manner support to employees in a complex and demanding world of work.

With your research, you are also contributing to a positive future for our democracy.

With this in mind, I wish you all a successful conference.

Dr. Martin Rosemann

Curriculum Vitae:

• 1996-2001: Studied economics in Tübingen
• PhD 2007
• 2002-2011: Research Associate and Project Manager at the Institute for Applied Economic Research in Tübingen (IAW)
• 2011-2013: Head of the Berlin Office of the Institute for Social Research and Social Policy (ISG)
• 2013-2025: Member of the German Bundestag
• Member of the Committee on Labor and Social Affairs for three legislative periods
• 2021-2025: Speaker for labor market and social policy for the SPD parliamentary group
• 2022-2025: Member of the Executive Board of the SPD parliamentary group