Transcript Do Working Conditions at Older Ages Shape the Health Gradient? Barbara Bovbjerg

Do Working Conditions at Older
Ages Shape the Health Gradient?
Overview and Comments
Barbara Bovbjerg
U.S. Government Accountability Office
The Paper: Key Questions
• Why do disparities in health persist across
occupations?
• To what extent do end-of-career working conditions
contribute to health disparities?
The Paper: Background
• Research literature suggests that morbidity and
mortality are distributed unequally across
occupations
• Used two approaches and several data sources to
estimate the effect of job demands on the health of
male workers between the ages of 50 and 64
The Paper: Key Findings
• Both models show the major channel between
working conditions and health at older ages is the
degree of control and influence workers have on
the job
• Little evidence that physical demands or
environmental hazards influence health
transitions at older ages
• Workers with greater job control may be more
insulated from stress and thus healthier overall.
My thoughts
• Ambitious and creative paper that links data sets together to
try to answer important but unexplored questions about older
workers
• Some of the findings are really surprising:
– Little evidence of physical demands or environmental hazards
influencing health transitions at older ages
– Firms with supportive management don’t seem to have positive health
effects
– Increased worker autonomy reduces stress, although many jobs with
considerable autonomy are high stress
– Making decisions that affect the firm doesn’t have the same effect as
autonomy
 Not surprising that higher wages improve health
Is contingent labor autonomous by this definition?
• Popular notion that many contingent workers have more autonomy
over their work via flexible scheduling. However, GAO work found
that:
– All contingent workers received on average 10.6 percent lower
wages
– Over 18 percent of independent contractors reported being laid
off in 2010 compared to 8 percent of standard full time workers
– Over 25 percent of independent contractors expected to lose
their job in 2010 compared to about 10 percent of standard full
time workers. (GAO 15-169R)
– Is this leading to less stress and better health?
Difficulty of Implementing Findings into Policy
• Giving workers more autonomy is a laudable goal but hard to
define and likely difficult to operationalize for some jobs
• Findings would seem to support creation of things like
autonomous labor/management committees (for example)
but what about supportive management policies like
telework, phased retirement, parental leave? Do these really
make so little difference?
Final thoughts
• Work raises a number of questions about how people perceive working
conditions and autonomy in different environments and different occupations
• Important as our workforce ages, in part because many are working later in
life, and policy makers consider the role of “softer” aspects of the workplace
in getting better health outcomes
• Supportive management practices’ role deserves more exploration
• Need to know more about O*NET data and work ability model– data set
has difficult task of distilling measures of complex, qualitative concepts
like job autonomy from worker survey responses.
• Also unclear what is measured by workers’ responses regarding
supportive management practices (Paid sick leave? Letting worker set
their own work schedules?)