Search results

In June 2016, the first cases of Zika were reported in the USA in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, Florida. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a survey of Wynwood businesses about their perceptions of their financial well-being and the government and media’s responses to the Zika outbreak.

A survey instrument was developed, and 44 owners/managers of Wynwood businesses were interviewed by telephone or in-person during the period when the outbreak was being managed.

Businesses reported downturns in revenues, profits, and customer traffic following the Zika outbreak. Believing that the downturn would be temporary, few businesses laid off workers or reduced prices. All businesses reported dissatisfaction with the government’s response to the outbreak.

This is the first study to document the impact of Zika on businesses located in outbreak areas. The findings highlight the business impact of Zika outbreaks and suggest a need for improved communication and response from state and local governments to business concerns when future outbreaks occur.

The purpose of this paper is to use a comparative qualitative case study design to better understand how the observed characteristics of an organization correspond to their score on the organizational performance metric (IWH-OPM), a leading indicator tool designed to measure an organization’s occupational health and safety (OHS) performance.

Five organizations were recruited based on their diverse IWH-OPM scores obtained in a previous study. Qualitative data were collected from these cases and analyzed with consideration of OHS leadership; OHS culture and climate; employee participation in OHS; OHS policies, procedures and practices; and OHS risk control. Similarities and differences among organizations were examined in relation to these themes.

Three distinct groups of firms emerged from the cross-case analysis in terms of their overall OHS performance: high, medium and low. Higher firm IWH-OPM scores generally corresponded to better OHS performance in the workplace as observed through qualitative methods.

The findings are a step toward OHS leaders or practitioners eventually being able, based on an organization’s IWH-OPM score, to have a quick understanding of a workplace’s OHS status and of how best to support further improvement.

“U.S. industry is under seige. Our competitiveness is at stake and AT&T is not finished with cost reductions. It's a moving target. We'll continue to be very, very aggressive but not do something in the short run that will hurt us in the long run.”

This paper reviews research examining how the use of new office technologies can contribute to the risk of stress‐related health changes. Looking to the future of office work, the potential stressors associated with expert systems are discussed and the conditional nature of stress demonstrated.

Despite a substantial body of research on physician incomes and hours, there has been surprisingly little study of part-time work in the professions or on the organizational structures that support or inhibit part-time arrangements. To assess the factors associated with the presence and prevalence of part-time work in radiology practices, we conducted structured interviews with 69 practice administrators and 13 self-employed or retired radiologists. Patterns of part-time work are heavily gendered; men use it as a transition to retirement while women seek it early in their careers to balance work and family needs. As hypothesized, larger practices, academic practices, and those affiliated with larger organizations were significantly more likely to have part-time radiologists. Controlling for level of competition between practices, those that had recently experienced increased competition were less likely to have part-time radiologists. Neither difficulty recruiting radiologists to the practice nor length of the average workweek for full-time radiologists were associated with having part-time radiologists in the practice. Practices that had a senior partner or administrator who supported the concept of part-time work were more likely to offer this option to physicians. We expected that radiology practices would have explicit policies regarding part-time work; however few of the practices had any formal policies on this career option. As a result, radiologists seeking part-time work early in their careers were at a distinct disadvantage in negotiations. Fear of the stigma and related career consequences may restrain male radiologists from seeking part-time work early in their careers. Despite acceptance in some practices and a growing presence of part-time radiologists in the specialty as a whole, there are significant and persistent barriers to part-time work arrangements other than as a transition to retirement.

This chapter proposes that efforts to improve our understanding of factors affecting migrant health and longevity in the United States must consider migrants’ labor market incorporation and the structural conditions under which they work. I use public-use death certificate data to examine whether there is a mortality penalty for foreign-born workers in the secondary sector industries of agriculture and construction. I focus on the decade of the 1990s for two contextual and empirical reasons: (1) the decade was characterized by economic restructuring, restrictive immigration policy, increased migration, and dispersion of migrants to new geographic destinations; and (2) the 1990s is an opportunistic decade because 19 states coded the industry and occupation of the decedent during this time. These numerator mortality data and Census denominator data are used to compare all-cause mortality rates between working-age (16–64 years) US-born and foreign-born agricultural and construction workers, the overall foreign-born population, and foreign-born workers in health care – an industry where the foreign-born tend to work in well-paid occupations that are well-regulated by the state. The results show a clear mortality penalty for foreign-born workers in agriculture and construction compared to the overall foreign-born population and foreign-born healthcare workers. The results also show the mortality penalty for foreign-born secondary sector workers varies by industry. These findings support the argument that bringing work into our analyses is critical to understanding the contextual and structural factors affecting migrant health and survival.

This study explores the relationship between work stress, coping resources, and mental health. Utilizing data collected from a unique sample of professional African Americans (N=167), the study distinguishes between five forms of work stress (perceived discrimination, token stress, role overload, role conflict, and scrutiny) and several indicators of mental health (depression, anxiety, somaticism). The results show that token stress and role overload are more consistent predictors of mental health than any other form of work stress among Black elites. In terms of coping effectiveness, confrontation (e.g., seeking out someone who will listen) appears to be a beneficial strategy for handling work pressures. Forbearance (e.g., hiding one's feelings) and avoidance (e.g., leaving a situation) strategies are related to poor mental health. There is additional evidence however, that confrontational styles of coping are not always conducive during times of elevated work stress, especially when Black elites are faced with token stress. Optimistic comparisons, on the other hand, are useful coping resources among those elites who are dealing with high token stress and role overload.