WORKING ON EMPTY / HEALTHY WORK CAMPAIGN

    WOE NEWSLETTER No. 4

A note from Peter Schnall, WOE Executive Producer & Healthy Work Campaign (HWC) Executive Director

I want to share with you a bittersweet moment – the passing of my mom, Sherry Schnall,  on November 7th, 2017. As I think of it, it’s pretty incredible that she lived to 94. But it certainly wasn’t without struggle.
 

Mom was a remarkable person and a remarkable woman. Born in 1923, she was raised during and survived the Great Depression but was able to complete only one semester of college (Brooklyn College in 1940) due to limited finances. As she came of age during the 1940’s, she became a political activist and labor supporter. She shared with her husband, my father Larry, the joys of successfully organizing NYC hotel workers, as well as the agonies of being blacklisted in 1953 and being driven out of the labor movement. However disheartening that experience was, she never left the labor movement in spirit.   
 

In 1948, she suffered almost total deafness due to the side effects of a medicine, motivating her to become a lip reader. Despite her hearing loss,  mom nonetheless successfully self-taught and became an interior designer and horticulturist. With my father, the two became successful business people, collaborating on the construction of Springvale Apartments in Westchester Co. and Leisureville Apartments in Watervliet, NY where my mom also participated in the interior and exterior designs of the properties.
 

Mom’s greatest skill was her ability to communicate with others. And she built extensive social networks wherever she (and we) lived. We all learned a lot from her. She continually modeled respect for others and generosity of spirit in all that she did and accomplished. To say the least, she will be sorely missed.
 

My parents’ help was critical in establishing in 1988 the Center for Social Epidemiology (CSE). They provided CSE with the financial and advisory support needed to help carry out the CSE’s commitment to education of the public as to the role of noxious working conditions in affecting the health of working people.
 

My mother’s respect for all people and passion for workers’ rights lives on in the Center for Social Epidemiology. One result is that the CSE has contributed to a significant body of research which demands being shared with the public, as well as assembled a team to do just that. Without the example set by my parents, it’s hard to say if I would be here now doing what I am doing. Now, in her absence, I feel even more committed to continue and expand the CSE efforts to bring about decent conditions at work for working people with the same heart, optimism and work ethic that made my mother so unforgettable and so cherished.

I celebrate her memory, legacy and dedication to the well-being of all working people! #healthywork.

- Peter 

The Healthy Work Campaign (HWC)

Working on Empty has had an incredible year of building from the ground up a viable direction for #healthywork in America including film, tools, books, and resources. We took a pause in December  to evaluate new goals, partners, stakeholders and implementation. Some of the work we've done over the past year has had such an incredible reception that we are spending some time to expand our approach by developing THE HEALTHY WORK CAMPAIGN as an umbrella for our other projects including the Working on Empty film.

The Healthy Work Campaign  is related to our already published Healthy Work Agenda. The Healthy Work Agenda will undergo further  revisions  in response to this year's feedback  from conferences, supporters and our  partners.

The goal of the HWC is to make working people and organizations aware of the potential noxious consequences of certain work practices, their impact on health and to improve working conditions.There are three tasks  that need to be accomplished for working conditions to improve:

First, Educating the public -  working people and managers need to be more aware of the role of working conditions in impacting health. To accomplish this, we envision producing educational materials, such as our film project Working on Empty (WOE), and a proposed book directed at the public with materials about work and health, as well as new tools to enable all stakeholders to address working conditions.

Second, Providing stakeholders with a way of identifying unhealthy workplaces -  we need a new survey instrument - a workplace survey - that can determine the presence of healthy and unhealthy working conditions. The CSE is developing just such a survey which we call  the Healthy Workplace Survey or HWS for short.  When the survey is available (end of 2018) workplaces will be invited to administer it to their workforce using an online computerized version of the HWS which will generate reports for both individual workers as well as  a summary of all workers for an individual company.

Third, we need tools that address the problems identified by our HWS.  We are developing a toolkit made up of intervention strategies (some of this has  already been accomplished by the NIOSH-supported Centers for Excellence) so workplaces can select appropriate interventions from the toolkit that will address the workplace stressors and issues identified in the HWS.

To accomplish the 2nd and 3rd of these  goals, the CSE  awarded a grant to Dr's Marnie Dobson, Bongkyoo Choi and Paul Landsbergis to develop the HWS survey and the accompanying toolkit.

If you would like to stand with our #healthywork movement,
fill out our form and be a part of the future of working people.

As you can see, the story about all of us requires support from all of you. United we’re stronger, healthier & more productive.

- Marnie Dobson Zimmerman, PhD