Impacts of Technological Change: Work Arrangements

hello and welcome to the first installment of the 2022 expanding research partnerships webinar series today's webinar topic is promoting partnerships to explore the impacts of technological change on work and well-being from the focus on work arrangements now it is my pleasure to introduce dr sarah feldman niosh's associate director for research integration sarah thank you nicole can you hear me okay i can yes great thank you thank you and on behalf of niosh i'd like to welcome everyone to the first installment of our 2022 expanding research partnerships webinar series exploring how technological change is impacting work and well-being from different perspectives today we're pleased to bring together partners from occupational health and safety research industry and academia to consider the impacts of technological change on work and well-being with a focus on work arrangements it is my pleasure to introduce our distinguished panel i will briefly introduce all of our speakers now so we can move quickly between presentations please see the niosh expanding research partnerships webpage for their full bios our first speaker today will be rene panacrian from niosh renee is chief economist and director of the economic research and support office in the office of director at niosh she also co-manages the niosh healthy work design and worker well-being cross-sector program her interests include understanding how to improve the design of work management practices and the physical and psychosocial work environment to enable workers to thrive and contribute productively at work at home and in society she's particularly interested in understanding the economic factors that affect work arrangements and the effects of work arrangements on the well-being of workers and their families renee joined niosh in 1996 as a post-doctoral prevention effectiveness fellow our second speaker today is scott debeau from ranstat scott has 19 years of leadership experience in risk management and occupational safety as a safety professional in non-traditional employment settings he sees tremendous opportunity for systems improvements that can create and maintain safer work environments scott works to align people teams and industry resources for improved safety within the joint employer community and devotes much of his time to developing safety leadership to address critical workplace risks scott currently serves as the practice leader for risk safety at ranstad a global leader in the human resources services industry that provides workforce solutions in the areas of engineering i.t legal life sciences healthcare and manufacturing logistics branstad operates with the belief that how we operate as a company should move society forward scott is a professional member of the american society safety professionals and serves on the niosh nora work groups of contingent labor workforce and traumatic injury prevention and our third speaker today is lorraine conroy from the university of illinois at chicago lorraine is professor and division director of environmental and occupational health sciences at the university of illinois at chicago school of public health she serves as director of the uic center for healthy work which is a niosh funded center of excellence in total worker health her research interests include understanding how working conditions and work arrangements associated with precarious work impact the health of workers their families and their communities and in intervention strategies to turn unhealthy work into healthy work lorraine is co-director of the occupational safety program and director of the pilot projects research training program at the niosh funded education and research center at uic she's certified in the comprehensive practice of industrial hygiene by the american board of industrial hygiene with more than 30 years of experience in research curriculum development and teaching in occupational and environmental health and now we're ready to begin our webinar each speaker will have approximately 20 minutes followed by a q a session after all presentations have concluded please put your questions in the q a chat at any time during the webinar and indicate the speaker to whom your question is directed and now without further delay i'd like to invite renee to share her screen and slides as we welcome her to our virtual podium renee okay can you see my full screen you can yes excellent so thank you sarah and before i start um i want to acknowledge all the work done by others on this topic and um i specifically want to thank all the national economists and dr hart for his continuing trailblazing um so there are several types of work arrangements between those who perform work and those who provide jobs while standard arrangements continue to be the most prevalent some types of non-standard arrangements seem to be increasing in this presentation we provide an overview of economic factors that affect worker well-being including work arrangements definitions classification and prevalence of non-standard work arrangements and related concepts and we also provide examples from the literature on the impact on worker well-being and their role in the future of work examples of economic factors that affect worker well-being include costs and incentives related to voluntary and mandatory safety and health policies the employment and unemployment situation management practices including work organization job design existing and emerging technologies and work arrangements including those of employed co-employed and non-employee workers in a confusing sort of way typically those are referred to as standard independent contractor on call temporary help agency and contact firm workers additional dimensions of work arrangements include temporary or contingent and low wage arrangements pain benefits including access to health insurance and work schedules we consider work-related outcomes in a holistic way that extends beyond injury and illness reductions its category of outcomes may be affected by other categories of outcomes for example a worker might leave a job which is an economic outcome after experiencing job stress which is approximate outcome and even though we focus on worker well-being in this presentation it is important to remember that outcomes for family members communities and society overall should also be considered um i wanted to mention that other economic outcomes um we include um outcomes expressed in monetary terms and outcomes expressed in quality of life terms um because there are no commonly accepted definitions of work arrangement it is hard to assess their prevalence and associated research findings on work design and worker well-being we briefly discuss a two-tiered approach to classify work arrangements first is a legal approach to classify employed co-employed and non-employee workers and second an approach based on important characteristics of all work arrangements that vary by arrangement we mainly discuss workers main job on which most data sources collect information in a standard arrangement the employer controls the manner and means by which the worker provides services and is responsible for the safety and health of employees types of other arrangements include agency that involves co-employment and shared responsibility for workers among employers contract that involves a business rather than an employment relationship and gig arrangements that are intermediate by digital online platforms an example of a household survey using such an approach to classify workers is the contingent worker supplement of bls and i will be referring to this as cws again this um this data this survey defines um non-standard arrangements uh in the categories of temporary help agency workers workers provided by contract firms independent contractors and our co-workers and i will tell you about on co-workers in a minute um according to a 2020 national academy of sciences report to reduce my classic misclassification cws includes questions about self-employment and obtaining customers on one's own um the types of arrangements used by cws allow classifying a responder's name job into mutually exclusive categories and um those don't include on co-workers who really should be classified in a second tier approach that i will tell you about because on co-worker or work relates to work schedules so um in terms of the mutually uh different categories um these types of arrangements include employees not in a non-standard work arrangement in other words in a standard arrangement workers in intermediate or co-employment arrangements including temporary agency workers and contract firm workers and those who are not employees or are self-employed including including independent contractors and the self-employed who are not independent contractors in addition on-demand gigwork is a hybrid of work by contract firm workers and independent contractors so we need to distinguish between gig workers who are w2 employees and gig workers y in self-employment or non-employee arrangements the 2020 nas report provided recommendations for improved data collection existing commonly used surveys such as the general social survey and its quality of work life supplement or qwl i will be referring to this throughout this presentation and the national health interview survey and its occupational safety and health supplement they include those surveys that are commonly used include a single question on work arrangements and in some cases may group together workers in different non-standard work arrangements for example the publicly the public release for the 2015 national health interview survey data grouped together agency and contract firm workers the single question used by the surveys includes temporary help agency workers contract firm workers and contractors and all goal workers and workers in standard arrangements these services also collect data on worker well-being and work characteristics in standard and non-standard arrangements that are important determinants of worker well-being and included in the second tier classification approach that includes information on job security work schedule compensation type earnings earnings level security and benefits um so concepts related to work arrangements help better understand these arrangements and include contingent work and work precariousness cws uses three definitions of contingent workers listed below from narrowest to broadest and i will only mention the broadest or estimate three which is workers who do not expect their jobs to last there is no standardized definition of work regardlessness but its characteristics including security temporariness vulnerability to unfair treatment lack of ability to negotiate pay benefits and work schedule lack of ability to take leave and lack of a social safety net including unemployment and work conversation insurance information on multiple jobs held by worker is important to understand work arrangements and worker well-being definitions of multiple job holders vary among sources i will mention just one example the census bureau's lead which defines a multiple job holder as anyone who holds two or more jobs in a quarter and at least one of these jobs is a long lasting stable job also it is important to understand all the jobs held within a household as also recommended by the nasa board for example access to benefits by one household member might also enable access to benefits by another household member um here i present statistics from cws in a variant survey by ron princeton i will i will be um referring to this as grand survey according to cws the overall prevalence of non-standard worker interface increased from 9.9 in 1995 to 10.7 in 2005 and then decreased to 10.1 percent in

2017. even though the rant survey was based on cws the definitions of worker institutes by these two surveys were slightly different ground-based estimates showed that 15.8 percent of workers were in non-standard workers in 2015 up from the 10.7 percent uh from 2005 cws based estimate however the 2017 cws based estimates were lower than those from the 2005 cws suggesting no increase in the prevalence of non-standard arrangements subsequently captain cougar in 2019 examine uh examine the potential causes of this discrepancy they revise the overall prevalence estimate downwards to 13.7 that would be based on their own

survey and it's shown in the very last um cell of the table uh the last comma column and adjusted bls estimates upwards i didn't include those on the table to make them more comparable to their vision and concluded that there were likely had been a modest upward trend in the share of the u.s workforce in non-standard work arrangements during the 2000s uh the run survey included questions on gigwork obtained through online intermediaries and found that 0.5 percent of workers were working through such intermediaries in 2015. in 2016 uh smith used data from the same year from the pew center and estimated that eight percent of americans earned money from online gig platforms in the previous year and data from our now very familiar 2017 cws indicated that electronically mediated workers accounted for one percent of four workers however bls noted that these questions did not capture information as intended and consequently the nas report from 2020 provided bls recommendations for improved measurement so based on the estimates above the prevalence of electronically mediated work likely ranged from 0.5 percent to 8 during 2015 to 17. um cws data indicated the downward trend in the prevalence of contingent workers between 1995 and 2017 regardless of which of the three alternative definitions of contingent worker worker was used the broadest estimate three decreased from 4.9 percent in 1995 to

3.8 percent in 2017. um using 2017 cws data and contingent worker estimates uh 3 um the percentage of workers in non-standard arrangements who were also classified as contingent workers range from 3.2 for independent contractors to 42 percent for agency workers in addition one to point three percent of workers in standard arrangement supported being contingent in 2017. this points to um to the fact that uh workers in standard arrangements don't always fare farewell um and to generate um the in terms of the prevalence of work regardlessness to generate a scale to measure um this uh concept but the tai and ray used qw uh l data from uh 2002 through 2014 and their scale included four precariousness components temporariness disempowerment vulnerability and wages uh they found that agency workers supported the highest percentage of high work precautions work recurrence was stratified in three levels low medium and high and independent contractors supported high work recursions least frequently and less often than did workers in standard arrangements again pointing to the fact that sometimes worker in standard arrangements um are not doing um as well as others um so it is important to assess the distribution of work arrangements by gender age race and ethnicity and education for example again according to the 2017 cws data independent contractors had the highest percentage of white workers and agency workers had the highest percentage of hispanic workers agency workers reported the lowest percentage of having a bachelor's degree or above in terms of multiple job holdings bailly and splatter in 2020 used lead data and found that the multiple job holding rate increased from 6.8 percent in the second

quarter of 96 to 7.8 percent in the first quarter of 2018. this rate rose during economic expansions and fell during recessions women held multiple jobs at higher a higher rate than men and for men the rate didn't change much over the last 20 years but for women it increased from 7.5 to 9.1 percent

and now i'm gonna um report on a few niosh uh studies um uh on on worker instruments and related concepts so the first one is on work arrangement and health related quality of life first author is tapas ray data where qwl from 2002 to 2014 and they considered they also considered worker instrument in the main job and healthy days and days with activity limitations so the qwl includes questions about physical and mental health and asks participants to respond whether or not their physical and mental health was poor in the last 30 days and the same for the days with activity limitations due to poor physical or mental health so um these this would be how healthy days and days with activity limitations are defined so activity limitations are all specifically where productivity losses about work related to work but include work include work so they examined the association of work arrangement with a variety of organizational other work characteristics and concluded that occupation industry hours of work and shift time type and part or full-time status were significantly associated with work arrangement this slide shows that independent contractors and alcohol workers were significantly less likely to be stressed than workers in standard arrangements and here for workers in standard arrangements and for independent contractors the authors observed significant association between perceived job stress and reported unhealthy days for workers in standard and agency arrangements the authors observed a similar association between job stress and reported days with activity limitations now this is a study i mentioned before um again led for for by anaswa bhattacharya it's about work reconnaissance job stress and health related quality of life uh the data are again 2002 to 2014 qwl data they constructed the work precaution scale that i mentioned before and they found statistically significant positive associations between job stress and work precariousness and also that workers reporting work recurrences were more likely to experience more unhealthy days and more days with activity limitations due to health problems this slide just shows descriptive results uh by sex so um again the precariousness um scale was divided um at three parts um low medium high and um the others found a higher percentage of workers in bakarya's work where uh the female females so this would be that um if you look at the high column the 33.65 um and this table shows that workers in the top thirty-three percent of the recaro scale were fifty-seven percent more likely to report experienced job stress than those in the bottom thirty-three percent of the precarious scale indiv um workers in highly precarious work uh reported more unhealthy days so 0.4 days more within 30 days than those in the lowest territory and workers doing highly precarious work reported experience a higher number of days with activity limitations and that was 1.2 more days within the 30 days period than those in low precarious work situations um so here uh that's the last um study i will mention it's about work flexibility and work related well-being first author by tapas ray used an additional year of qwl data from 2018 and the descriptive results showed that the prevalence of work flexibility remained relatively stable during the study period there were three indicators of work flexibility including working at home being able to take time off when needed and being able to change schedule daily um here the report is about uh healthy days and this will be um this will be this is calculated as the sum uh of unhealthy days subtracted from the three days uh the last 30 days um this is what produces the imported number of healthy days so working at home increased the likelihood of job stress by 22 and job satisfaction by 65 this points to the mixed result of these flexibility indicators in terms of um health related quality of life and well-being for workers taking our more time off decreased the likelihood of jump stress by 56 percent decreased the days with activity limitations by 24 and more than double the likelihood of job satisfaction and changing one's schedule decreased the likelihood of job stress by 20 and increased the likelihood of job satisfactor satisfaction by 62 and um we're coming to the close i'm going to talk to you about the summary of what represented the future of work and research gaps so we discussed the need for standardized definitions and classification of work arrangements describe the two-tiered approach to defining classify those or investments we concluded that the overall prevalence of non-standard work arrangements did not increase and the prevalence of contingent workers decreased over the past 20 years and then we discussed findings from selected studies that um showed that job stress was an important determinant of other well-being outcomes uh for example activity limitations um and that um stressed workers in all arrangements um fared worse than non-stress workers across arrangements and and again workers in standard arrangements do not consistently fare better than others um so efforts by nation its partners to advanced research and worker instruments include plans currently being implemented to address research gaps identified by the healthy work design and well-being cross-sector council um ongoing research aiming to address related nio strategy goals and the development of a strategic plan for the future of work initiative that includes an emphasis on work arrangements an example of specific efforts to improve surveillance on walk arrangements include data currently being collected by the national um health interview survey with support from niosh so these questions ask about whether employers deduct or withhold taxes from pay the magnitude of month-to-month changes in earnings usual shift ability to change word schedule frequency of changes in work schedule on the part of supervisors advanced knowledge of work schedule and the likelihood of losing one's job in the next year information from this data collection can guide data collection by other services such as uwl and can be analyzed in combination with well-being indicators and that was actually something that the nas report from 2020 also um supported um and then this is my last slide these are challenges um that include um a series of needs um so we need improved surveillance methods to include emerging determinants uh of well-being such as flexibility um we need to assess the effects of evolving advanced technologies and worker demographics give work and to a certain extent of flexibility depend on advanced technologies if you will um we need to assess the effects of work arrangement types and characteristics over the span of a work working life considering all jobs held simultaneously the sequence of jobs and periods of unemployment as well as the work arrangements of other household members we need to determine buyers and aids to implement cost-effective programs for workers in non-standard work arrangements we need to conduct intervention studies to assess the cost and comparative effectiveness of programs and trainings to improve the well-being of workers in non-standard arrangements to assess potential um work arrangement related and additional overlapping vulnerabilities experienced by workers in specific demographic groups and we need to conduct systematic research on how macro level external factors such as economic conditions or climate change may affect all types of work arrangement um and that concludes my presentation i have included a slide with references for your information um thank you very much my last slide has the disclaimer everything i said is my fault um thank you for your attention thank you very much renee for that excellent presentation on fundamental concepts related to work arrangements that are going to be so critical to our understanding of this topic moving forward and if now if you would stop sharing your screen thank you we will invite scott to our virtual podium and ask him to share his screen and his slides scott great thank you just give me one moment to share very good are you able to see my screen and hear me okay yes we are thank you very good well hey first of all a big thank you to the leaders at niosh to allow us to talk about such important topics today um and it really has to do with care for the workforce a special part of the workforce the contingent labor community we've heard terms like precarious vulnerability and i believe better care for the work forces in our future but it's required to uh put our heads together and really discuss what does a better future look like and so um topic today look the leadership updraft what what do i mean by that and i think we've learned a lot in a very compressed amount of time over the past few years in terms of what are the expectations for health and safety for our workforce in general um but as it relates to a joint employer environment which i just define as any work environment that has two or more employers in a shared workspace to accomplish work right you have two employers involved um you know there's there's staffing there could be contingent labor there's contract um but generally that is is what i mean meaning when i say joint employer and the question is what happens when leaders recognize that in order to solve a serious problem they don't just reach out like adjacent to their ceo role or operations roles they penetrate through the organization to ask for help how do we solve these serious problems um and you know i've noticed that with with our experience through kogan it creates a bit of an updraft where ideas and solutions um a common focus on the common problem and we start seeing both problem solving and acceptance um i just think about how quickly we were able to adopt a much larger work from home um status and leveraging technology to solve some of these problems where we had that technology before coveted wasn't as readily accepted though um but having gone through that experience today i feel like hey we're in a place where leaders are leaders at a place where they realize they depend on health and safety in order to understand how do we better communicate to uh to our workforce to our customers um and what really matters comes into a much more clear focus so when i think about just the uh if there is a silver lining associated with a cobit at all here's an example um our our ceo so ramstad is in 38 countries uh based in the netherlands and our ceo and group reached out and said how do we communicate health and safety not just across all of our operating countries but but across industry across our customers is there a framework that exists to create a common understanding and narrative talking points for how are we making decisions that impact the workforce and so in the early days uh our health and safety team was in a great position to respond to that we did we developed a model we'd have to actually say we borrowed a model that was existing thanks to our friends at niosh and those of you that are familiar with the hierarchy of controls that's what we presented to our leadership just to talk about look when we think about making decisions around risk and coming coming to a com a better common understanding and a shared work environment um how are we doing that together how are we creating protocols to follow together and the great thing is is look um we actually made an alliance uh between ramstad and deco and manpower which previously in the realm of health and safety we should have already been there um good lesson for me to take forward is is how are we partnering across industry and and those that compete in the same space to solve common problems that are really important so um so that was important and i have to i have to plug niosh again their work is just terrific i love this group um done so much to help contribute to the advancement of safety in the industry i work in but back in 2015 there was this little study called overlapping vulnerabilities and i think of vulnerabilities is kind of like work that's precarious in nature so you know renee gave some great examples of that but you know there really are unique risks that are specific to the contingent labor workforce and i think one of the one of the questions leaders should be asking and penetrating through our organizations is how are we solving these problems can can we solve it with the way we've been doing things um i don't think so i think we need better so look just a couple of these bullet points as it relates to risks specific to a vulnerable workforce community is you know we we do see um an increased use in temporary workforce and and companies depending on supplementing their workforce to accomplish work uh we see that this is this is obvious i think to all of this on the call that temporary workers are new in different environments more often than a traditionally employed worker but it's important we think about this just a little bit more because what happens when an employee is in a new environment right disconnected from exactly how things are done not sure and completely confident in expectations but a temporary worker on a new assignment is not just a new employee they're not just balancing being new they're also balancing simultaneously what i call kind of the short term unknown it's precarious they can be they can be brand new and also having to balance how long is this assignment going to last um and this is important to understand because this is connected to why some workers are willing to assume more risk than they should to say yes to things that they shouldn't in order to maintain employment so we see you know communication barriers and and great studies that i think we don't have time to go into details here but i've outlined them here terrific reads in terms just to validate these vulnerabilities the precarious work um more in depth but important for us to understand and so at ronstadt one of the things that we have done first of all just the the pandemic has really forced us to do a number of things in terms of looking at technology we've we've always considered ourselves to be human forward and we have a tech and touch program how are we leveraging technology to earlier identify risk make decisions that still has been catalyzed but the one problem that we're trying to bring a lot of awareness to and how are we solving this problem is how are we reducing uh serious injury and fatality uh to the contingent labor community and for us in our experience we've we boiled these down to what we call precursors and precursors are just known conditions that precede a serious event so if we we have a fatality or a serious workplace event um these are some of the most common things we'll see the gaps that shouldn't be there but are there and so we see compliance we see non-standard work and you know renee touched on some things around the the topics of of definition job description and things of that nature but when we talk about non-standard work we have a vague work environment where assignment changes occur very very quickly we see variance between the type of risk experienced by the worker between first shift and second shift and even third shift is very very different now the employers that get together and decide to do work together evaluate the risks together at the beginning of the relationship and most likely around what's happening on first shift but the point is how are the employers that agree to do work together staying connected to the level of risk that's presented at the employee level throughout the continuum of risk right risk happens on a continuum throughout the work cycle and that's been a big part of our focus and of course you know machinery and forklift or pit is obvious but the box on the bottom right is a very very big thing for us um in terms of how are we how are we enabling the voice of the worker to one be more informed about the types of things that can hurt them and when they recognize that give them a solution to bring it to our attention all right this is a big thing i actually call it a it's a a force multiplier if you will if we could have a magic wand and improve any any one of these areas that would be great but i think the bottom right employee engagement enabling that and technology has a big piece to do with that but awareness of safety management systems does as well so it's important that we we bust a few ms myths from time to time and regarding the type of things that occur before a serious injury occurs there's been a lot of great work in this area however industry is still operating under the myth that if we reduce our minor injuries there's a correlation to also reducing our serious injuries we know that's a busted myth that we know that no longer is is true that's the way i was taught as a safety professional and that the slogan was drive down your frequency and you'll drive down your severity but the work by these two gentlemen is is the the work environments that employees are you know hands-on tools and boots on the floor they're complex right they're organizational operational cultural and risk fluctuates very quickly right and so we need to understand it's not just how employers are coming together initially to agree everybody wants good safety that's the moral imperative we all want that same thing but where we uh differ is in our lack perhaps lack of capabilities lack of technology lack of understanding of what's required uh to for two companies to evaluate and stay connected on how are we continually monitoring and assessing risk throughout the life cycle throughout the engagement um so that we can make decisions we can adjust and we can keep moving so here here's um uh just a quick visual this is based on again nash's prevention through design i don't have any good ideas on my own i get everything from niosh so um when we think about two employers right and we have a host employer that that needs uh and depends on good staffing companies or or good contract labor to come in and supplement the work um along with them right there's a procurement process there's a vendor selection process and and that's pretty regimented compliance insurance um you know those things are in place for a reason are very important there's there's underwriting there's evaluation of each other's risk and then it moves to kind of all right well how do we start this up what's orient who's responsible for training personal pre and and this all occurs at the beginning of the relationship but that's often the most important that often that's the most emphasis on safety that we hear about until after an incident occurs but what we want to understand is that look what what two companies agree to in terms of let's let's uh enter into a business arrangement let's um [Music] staffing company to client let's let's uh help you provide you know a better labor strategy um you know developing good business practices around you know how to keep the labor force steady and reliable but what we agree to up here our operations teams really do inherit and often without any leadership involvement without leaderships penetrating not just um you know those around them how are we really getting to the point where work is occurring and understanding the level of risk the nature of risk is it acceptable or not and um so that's one one of the things that we have been working so hard to advance not just ronstadt a number of people in industry and i'll get to that in a little bit here's what we want uh to think about is is our friends up here in the scissor lift the good news no one was hurt during during the shooting this picture um actually pulled this from a website so not you know um the idea is look when we look at what's happening here are these just bad workers in a system we're assuming to be good are these just good workers in a bad system right and how we how we answer how we think about this question indicates our approach to the problem and i i present this to you because um look we do need to think that risk is a continuum along the full engagement of the work cycle and we have to be very very aware of that and it's the place for us to i think focus a lot of our improvement efforts on i've heard comments where when a temporary worker is injured i've heard comments such as well if you'd send us better people this never would have happened or if uh you know staff you know staff employees temporary workers perhaps you know they're just um you know even insulting intelligence which is completely uh ridiculous but the assumption is that the fault is of the worker right when the creation of risk is actually occurring the system within the system that the worker is within people make decisions based on what makes sense to them at the time and so so a lot of our focus a lot of our emphasis is on the this box in the blue to the right um fred manuel is the is the work i referenced him earlier he's the one that kind of pioneered tears this is when when serious injuries happen let's pay attention and not assume that we can we can prevent a slip and fall and we're going to prevent all of our fatalities now but his pioneering work we kind of tagged on and said what does this mean when we have temporary labor involved and how do we engineer our technology and our communication systems um our understanding from from our sales and operations folks so that we are all very in tune with when a worker's is reassigned that's a big risk how do we continually inform and educate our customers our customers frontline supervisors that are often in a position to try to solve a problem and make a decision and pull one person from one area and put them on equipment that they're not trained on in order to solve a problem but we've defined these things internally and it's been very helpful for us um i would i would love to say that over the past three and a half years we've had zero serious injuries um we have significant we've had we've made significant improvements significant improvements in the reduction of serious injuries by adopting an approach that has a newer view of safety that includes look where we're focusing on human and organizational performance we're very specifically focusing on the risk that is most likely to hurt people the worse and we're driving systems enablement which means every system has limited resources has defined boundaries and when we have more than one employer sharing resources to some extent right host employers have have uh the resources within their site um but the the staffing the contractors also bring resources those can fluctuate it's almost like it's fickle things can change quickly how are the resources reliably connected within this group and then the boundaries again this comes up again staffing levels change if there's vague job class or job descriptions um you know we're lacking boundaries about the type of work that should be and can be done and why this matters is when we when we don't operate with the resources we need that's connected to the level of risk experienced by the workers or we exceed the boundaries that are in place um the defined job descriptions the job assignment the staffing levels required to manage safe work when we when we have you know we have the threatened uh threatening to our resources or we expand our boundaries failure occurs very quickly it occurs very quickly so um traditionally the response has been look everybody's aggressively talking about safety after a serious injury but what are we really doing to to define and manage our resources boundaries in an ongoing basis and so we like to see that you know there's an interest you know just outside of my profession or ronstadt this is an interesting study 2020 that talked about what's happening in the industry what what are employers expecting employers that depend on labor providers to help them complete work what are they expecting in terms of health and safety and what this report shows is that look the expectations for health and safety from the primary employers i'm sorry that the the client or the host employer's viewpoint is outpacing performance uh that's traditionally um that that's been traditionally supplied so so there's rising expectations there's a bigger need for a greater understanding of safety and i i think we talk about collaboration meaningful um view of when an employer looks at a staffing company or a contractor is like if the view is reluctant or we just need them to come in and do some something that's kind of a low-level view and that's going to hurt business performance whether we're talking about safety or accounting or anything but when there's a higher level relationship value on the relationship that is the that's the lever i think we have the opportunity to start pulling so this this was a very interesting um study that i think confirms what we've been noticing internally for quite some time and again the idea is look this is our own kind of our own design that we share internally with our safety team i apologize that it's a little wordy but the point is that look we have on the left side this is where it all starts on the right side this is the work is where the work is actually happening what are the specific things we're doing connected to the management system defining expectations how will we stay connected as we anticipate risk will change turnover will happen how are we staying connected along the continuum of risk and we've we've actually made an effort to simplify this a little bit um if any of you uh are our readers or like podcasts check out sydney decker he has a very simple concept just called um [Music] you know work is imagined versus work is completed uh or blunt and sharpened you may you may recognize that but the idea is look the left side of the screen is how we think work is gonna happen on the left side this is our corporate entities these are our employers that are in position to sign contracts and agree how work should go and enter into the relationship enter into what the operations teams are going to inherit and then at the other end this is where workers are this is where work actually happens but what we need to do is make sure we're putting in better systems better expectations for performance that include leaders from both companies initiating how are we staying in touch with the actual levels of risk is work happening like we think it is and setting ourselves up for rather than finding out something big just happened and now we have to respond under the guise of safety but it's really it's really claims and incident reporting we start finding out about performance gaps that we can address ahead of the injury that's what we want and the biggest thing is that we're engaging the workforce and allowing remember that box on the right i said if we can pull one lever to promote the voice of the worker to find out what's really going on right and to enable uh in an environment that's difficult for people to manage um being a being new and being a short timer leaders have to engage and create this to happen there's a role for technology but there's really a role for i think safety management system frameworks and so what i'd like to just kind of uh where i kind of rest on here is is look we've drawn a lot of knowledge from from niosh and as a safety professional benefited so much from what nash's work has done this is a new frontier for us to really i think make some uh good headway and and what should the what should those that use um uh staffing providers or contractors what should they be thinking what should staffing companies and contractors be thinking what should we be embracing and i boiled it down to these three things so if you look at safety management systems whether it's from iso 45001 [Music] whether it is from ansi z10 model there's others to mention osha has done some terrific work in the realm of defining uh recommended management systems between multi-side employers or joint employers in a way these are consensus driven expectations for safety performance and industry has picked up on that that's like a new expectation and that's an important thing for us to consider and i think it's you know there's changing expectations and an expectation for better collaboration and performance perhaps a new view for how employers work together and expect better performance right and number two is where do we make our best headway look we just don't enable it at the beginning we have to enable at the beginning we have to stay connected across the continuum of risk as employers um when i think of two employers it's easy to come apart one employer has turnover with a safety sensitive role how is the other employer notified of that because that changes risk and then we need to make sure look how are we continually assessing these risks how is an organization set up to uh to really manage and inform and communicate risks on an ongoing basis each employer has a role to meaningfully contribute there are certainly differences in terms of what a staffing company can really uh or should assume in terms of you know complete levels of training um you know management of the actual risk they're not always in the work environment but it is a shared it is a shared work environment it's a shared workforce both employers earn a role to meaningfully contribute so so i think about it look again i'll ask the same question i asked at the beginning what happens when leaders recognize that in order to solve a serious problem we have to reach down into the organization and ask for help what does better look like what's a better framework look like how do we create this leadership updraft to create a better model to follow right and so here we are we're the leaders and what i'm grateful for i think of i think the leaders of the american staffing association that are very intentional about how do we do better moving forward i think about the leaders uh i've worked with at osha certainly at niosh um the american society of safety professionals the national safety council groups and insurance consensus standards we're all really recognizing the same thing this is an environment this is a community where we have we have unique risks and vulnerabilities to a precarious workforce how are we as leaders creating a leadership updraft to start solving these problems so thank you very much and i look forward to questions i think we do these at the end of the session but that's our presentation thank you very much scott for that interesting view of global from a global hr services perspective on work arrangements and well-being and we will hold questions to the end and now scott if you will stop sharing your screen we will invite lorraine to join us at the virtual podium and share her screen and slides lorraine there we go thank you sarah and thank you to the participants here i'm um i'm going to be talking about precarious employment and as one type of alternative work arrangement or contingent work and similar to several other groups in our center for healthy work we characterize precarious employment as having one or more of these characteristics and our center is also using a participatory action approach to our research and this is one where we include community members and workers community organizations worker centers and other partners throughout all phases of our research so in developing our questions in the data collection data analysis interpretation and then actions that should result from what we've learned and we really have embraced this as a cyclical research process which should lead to new questions and then new actions and i'll talk a little bit more about that at the very end um so why focus on precarious employment so i think um it's important to focus on this because workers engaged in precarious employment are more likely to be minority and foreign-born workers they experience high levels of stress and work in dangerous conditions that puts them at greater risk of injury and illness they're also more likely to rely on social safety net programs and are more likely to experience discrimination and the other reason i think to focus on this is that our traditional approaches to occupational safety and health may not work with this workforce many of our current systems or enforcement of enforcement are complaint driven so and this is across the board if we think about osha standards or wage and hour standards fair labor standards or discrimination or equal opportunity standards they all depend on workers complaining and then prompting an investigation and people that are precariously employed really don't have the ability to complain about conditions at their workplace um traditional place approaches for for health and safety have also historically or mostly been workplace or employer-based and again precariously employed workers may not have a regular employer or a regular workplace and then scott just talked about a lot in detail about this but many of our current laws are written for unambiguous employer employee relationships and as we move to more alternative work arrangements those relationships become more ambiguous and in some cases can reduce workers rights and access to health and safety protections or benefits unemployment insurance workers compensation and things like that um so i'm going to switch and talk sorry about um some of the research in our center and so um we are one of our projects is a community-based project so we're really trying to understand uh precarious employment and its impact on health at the community level and we're looking at two neighborhoods in chicago that we've lumped together and called greater lawndale and as shown here greater lawndale is about 59 hispanic and 37 non-hispanic blacks um this is a higher percentage of non-white residents than the city of chicago where it's about 29 hispanic and 30 non-hispanic blacks the two neighborhoods i'm talking about are on the southwest side of from downtown and there's a high level of poverty in these two communities about 35 percent of all residents live in poverty and actually about 18 percent of employed residents work in poverty um even those that are working full-time year-round the poverty rate in greater lawndale for those workers is still about 10 uh and this is more than three times higher than the rest of chicago sorry um here i've plotted industry sectors by the u.s average indus injury rates with the lowest injury rate industries on the left-hand side and the highest injury rate industries on the right um the dotted line is the sort of average industry rate across all injuries at that in the u.s and this slide is pretty busy but we see here that greater lawndale residents are overrepresented in higher hazard industries so these are the darker bars on this so when we look at the right hand side of this we see that greater residents from these two communities are more likely to be in high hazard work in high hazard industries accommodation and food service retail trade manufacturing transportation and warehousing and so in order to get a better understanding of what this means and how it affects health and both health of workers and health of the community we used a mixed method approach to better understand this impact and it included concept mapping focus groups key informant interviews and then was followed by a resonant survey and with concept mapping there are three steps to that where we identified issues that influence the health of the community or the health of them where we ask people really to brainstorm um an answer to a question that was when i think about my work situation or people in my who live in my community in similar work situations one way work impacts our health good or bad is and then they brainstormed a lot of ideas we asked them then to sort those ideas into um we condensed that down to 55 items and then asked people to sort that into um categories that made sense to them and then rate them on in terms of how prevalent it was in the community and how much of an impact it had on health we used concept mapping software that uses statistical and graphing methods so each of these items each of the small numbers are individual items and they grouped together into four general themes um in that there was one sort of healthy description of healthy work and then three that really would lead to unhealthy work the um so residents even residents that have experienced precarious work can identify healthy aspects of work that include that might improve their mental and physical health and this includes um flexible work hours where they control the flexibility decent wages and supported co-workers but we also identified systemic and structural inequities that were really [Music] focused that influenced employment and health and these included racism and immigration policies and then lack of control and exploitation really arose in this and then it'll come up in some other methods that we use too looking at the power dynamics between workers and employers being discriminated or harassed at work violations of health and safety or other worker rights and then even violations of sort of what we consider basic human rights being able to access the washroom or the bathroom and having access to water while they're at work and people told us stories about not being able to use the bathroom and then cutting across all of this was this concept of stress and this was both physiological psychological and physical stress and it was widespread throughout all our clusters and it really was described in multiple ways as either an outcome or an and um it included things like working too many hours not getting enough sleep physical pain from strenuous work but also struggling to find and keep work as well as working too many hours in order to just meet basic needs we also conducted 12 focus groups where we engaged with community our academic and community partners to do the data analysis and data interpretation and we met with 77 community residents and again three main themes emerged and they're very similar to what we saw with the concept mapping that people felt that they were systematically marginalized from the pathways that would lead to decent work situations um there was a structural hostility to sustaining healthy work and that was baked into the economy particularly in disadvantaged communities and that there were widespread violations in the rights agency autonomy of workers and then a cross-cutting theme here that arose from our was really around investment and social resources that exist in these communities [Music] that would support healthier work or more decent work and our key informant interviews resulted in similar findings we did key informant interviews with community leaders and community based organizations in these two communities across all of these three methods we found that residents reported that many jobs cause stress they have unpredictable schedules don't pay enough to live on and don't offer benefits and are physically dangerous and in many cases emotionally unsafe they also reported that employers aren't held accountable when wages are stolen or workers aren't valued that workers can't really speak up against unfair treatment and are often pitted against each other for jobs and that and um residents and key informants stress the importance of community resources that were needed to sustain good jobs and these were not specifically to the workplace they were things like better education job training child care fair housing and transportation we then followed this with a quantitative survey where we enrolled almost 500 community residents and one of the criteria was that they were adults but they also had to be engaged in precarious work sometime in the past two years about half of our sample was women and the other half were men um about half were latinx and about 40 percent were black um and some preliminary findings from this um are shown here and we found that 28 percent reported being on call or engaged in day labor or temporary work about 37 percent reported that it was likely that they would lose their job in the next year more than 70 percent reported that they didn't receive benefits and 78 reported that they did not they would not get paid if they missed work and nearly a quarter of people we surveyed had experienced wage theft and these were data that were collected pre-pandemic we don't have quantitative data post pandemic we have some additional qualitative information about post pandemic we did ask similar to the what rene presented at a national level we asked questions about mental and physical health and we did see that poor mental health was associated with wages that buried a lot less flexibility in schedules and regular changes to their work schedule and a likelihood of job loss or having experienced wage theft and that poor physical health shared some of these same associations but was also associated with on-call day labor or temporary work and that really was the increased risk of exposures on the job we also modeled the association between employment precarity and occupational exposures so we used

2022-05-15 13:53

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