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 R) – 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?)