Does it make economic sense for employers to offer or expand paid sick leave benefits to their employees? A new NIOSH study published in the American Journal of Public Health reported that workers with access to paid sick leave were 28% less likely overall to suffer nonfatal occupational injuries than workers without access to paid sick leave. Workers in high-risk occupations and industry sectors, such as construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and health care and social assistance, appeared to benefit most from paid sick leave. From these results we concluded that introducing or expanding employee access to paid sick leave might help businesses reduce the incidence of occupational injuries. This could, in turn, reduce costs to employers. To our knowledge, this is the first U.S. study to examine this issue empirically.
Selected Category: Economics
Making the Case for Paid Sick Leave
Categories: Economics, Total Worker Health
July 30th, 2012 10:02 am ET - Abay Asfaw, PhD; Regina Pana-Cryan, PhD; Roger R. Rosa, PhD
Getting Closer to Understanding the Economic Burden of Occupational Injury and Illness
Categories: Economics
March 30th, 2012 10:00 am ET - Paul Schulte, PhD; Elyce Biddle, PhD; Frank J. Hearl, PE
A recently published landmark paper by J. Paul Leigh (Milbank Quarterly 2011 89 (6):728-772 ) makes a significant contribution to understanding the economic burden of occupational illness and injury. The paper entitled “Economic Burden of Occupational Injury and Illness in the United States” shows that the annual direct and indirect costs are at least $250 billion. This amount exceeds the individual cost of cancer, coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
As Leigh notes, the cost of injury, illness, and death from these other diseases are generally easier to assess because they require a small number of primary data sources, typically 1 to 4. In contrast, estimates of the burden of occupational injury and illness are more difficult to accomplish because they rely on far more primary and secondary sources of data on more than 18 diseases and a substantial number of injury types. In fact, Leigh used more than 40 data sets in conducting this rigorous analysis.
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