The health of the U.S. workforce is an issue of importance to both workers and their employers. There is a wealth of evidence on occupational safety and health hazards that may potentially affect workers’ health. In addition to these hazards, personal characteristics and conditions, such as age, gender, genetics, or weight, can impact a person’s work and interact with workplace hazards. Individual characteristics and conditions may change the way workers respond to hazards which they may be exposed to on the job. In addition, employers face burgeoning costs of workforce healthcare which affect their companies’ productivity and profitability, and can constrain growth (ACOEM 2009; Hymel 2011). Maintaining a well-functioning workforce is increasingly critical as the workforce ages and is burdened on a personal level and financially by chronic disease. These issues affect U.S. well-being and competitiveness in the global environment. However, such work and personal factors are generally not considered together. Rather, they have been addressed separately. One impact of this traditional approach to occupational and personal risk factors is that the workforce suffers and subsequently the well-being of the nation is diminished.
Selected Category: At-risk populations
A Comprehensive Approach to Workforce Health
Categories: At-risk populations, Total Worker Health
December 22nd, 2011 10:39 am ET - Paul Schulte, PhD, and Sudha P. Pandalai, MD, PhD
Safety and Health for Younger Workers
Categories: At-risk populations, Young Workers
May 4th, 2010 1:28 pm ET - Dawn Castillo, MPH
This is the time of year that many young people begin thinking about summer jobs. For some teenagers, these jobs might be viewed as elective—that is, opportunities to gain work experience, spend time productively, or earn some spending money. For others, however, especially those in their late teens and early adulthood, these jobs pay the rent and buy groceries. New research from NIOSH illustrates that more needs to be done to ensure that as young people join the workforce they are better protected from hazards. On average each year from 1998 to 2007, about 800,000 workers 15 to 24 years of age were treated in emergency departments and nearly 600 died from work-related injuries. Younger workers were twice as likely as their older counterparts to be treated in hospital emergency departments for work-related injuries.
Immigrant Worker Safety and Health
Categories: At-risk populations
October 27th, 2008 8:37 am ET - Administrator
In the United States, immigrant workers constitute a significant proportion of the workforce. In 2006, 15% of U.S. workers were foreign-born and at least 6.3 million were undocumented. Immigrant workers face a disproportionate risk for workplace injury and illness. This is due to a confluence of factors including an overrepresentation in the most hazardous industries including construction and agriculture. Additionally, workplace safety interventions often do not reach immigrant worker populations due to barriers created by social, cultural, and economic issues including language, literacy, and marginal economic status. Furthermore, immigrant workers often lack knowledge of their rights to workplace safety and are reluctant to pursue these rights.
Contingent Workers
Categories: At-risk populations
February 19th, 2008 10:00 am ET - Kristin J. Cummings, MD, MPH, and Kathleen Kreiss, MD
In the past 40 years, there have been enormous changes to employment arrangements in the United States. The use of part-time, temporary, and contract workers has risen dramatically. These and other workers who do not have a traditional relationship with a single work-site employer can be grouped together as “contingent workers.” Using a broad definition, contingent workers make up nearly one-third of the workforce, or 43 million workers in 2005, ranging from well-compensated independent financial consultants to low-skilled construction workers.
We explored many of the issues facing contingent workers in the January 30, 2008, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association in the article “Contingent Workers and Contingent Health: Risks of a Modern Economy” (JAMA. 2008; 299(4)).
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