Key points
Economic research can show how work design, organization, and practices affect worker safety, health and well-being. Understanding these relationships can point to prevention strategies that can help workers thrive and contribute productively at work, at home, and in society.
Overview
Economic research can guide strategies to improve worker safety, health, and well-being by:
- Identifying economic factors or determinants that affect worker safety, health, and well-being.
- Assessing the economic burden of worker injury and illness and overall work-related well-being.
- Assessing the economic value of prevention by comparing the economic costs and benefits of prevention strategies, which reduce the burden of worker injury and illness and improve worker well-being. This helps to identify the most cost-effective prevention strategies.
Economic factors
Examples of focus areas within economic factors include longest-held occupation, work arrangements, precarious work, and access to paid sick leave and work-life fit programs and policies, including adequate schedule flexibility and predictability. The type of longest-held occupation is associated with early mortality. The type of work arrangement, the level of work precariousness, and types of work flexibility are associated with different job stress and health-related quality of life outcomes. Worker access to paid sick leave is associated with the incidence of nonfatal occupational injuries and children's access to and use of healthcare services.
Economic burden
Assessments of burden often focus on the numbers and rates of acute worker injuries and illnesses, for which most of the available data are collected. Based on the type of available data, economists use different metrics to express economic burden. These include monetary, quality-of-life, and other well-being metrics such as life satisfaction. Commonly used monetary metrics include those based on workers' compensation cost for injuries in a specific industry such as construction or a specific condition such as occupational hearing loss. However, this cost is only part of the overall economic burden of worker injury and illness. Economists also assess economic burden components, such as suicide and opioid-related mortality after occupational injury, and spill-over effects of parent workplace injury on family members.
In addition, economic research can identify opportunities for improvements in both well-being and efficiency. An example is identifying and reducing cost-shifting. One way to do this is to link the economic burden of injured workers, who are compensated by workers' compensation, with the related economic burden of the family members, who care for injured workers and are not compensated. This helps to both more fully assess the economic burden of worker injuries and point to opportunities to reduce cost-shifting.
Value of prevention
Economists assess the economic value of prevention by comparing the costs and health and economic outcomes of interventions. Six case studies, conducted with the RAND Corporation, assessed the economic benefits of NIOSH research and services. These case studies show how investments in safety and health yield economic benefits. RAND used two types of monetary metrics. For the first three case studies, NIOSH provided RAND with preliminary, unpublished estimates of NIOSH costs, not including partner costs, to produce the research and services described.
The first set of three case studies focused on:
- Engineering controls to limit exposure to crystalline silica dust among road construction workers.
- The impact of NIOSH studies on the implementation of prevention strategies to protect firefighters. These studies strengthened the evidence of the linkage between firefighting activities and increased risk of certain cancers among firefighters.
- The impact of a NIOSH evaluation of the effectiveness of Ohio's Safety Intervention Grant Program and implementation of safety-oriented engineering controls by employers.
The next set of three case studies focused on:
- The impact of NIOSH activities that were substantially responsible for the adoption of continuous personal dust monitors that better protect coal miners.
- Improvements to the design of rear compartments in ambulances that better protect workers and patients.
- A NIOSH-supported Michigan-based program on amputation surveillance that resulted in the discovery of more related safety violations and higher monetary penalties.
Economics and NORA
The Healthy Work Design and Well-Being (HWD) Program and HWD National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) Council seek to improve the design of work, management practices, and the physical and psychosocial work environment. Economic research relates to all focus areas of the HWD Program and NORA Council goals that include working hours and fatigue, non-standard work arrangements, and occupational stress. Economics also relates to many priorities of other NIOSH Programs and NORA Councils through common focal areas with HWD and beyond.
Resources
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