Healthy Work Now Newsletter No. 2 

A note from Marnie Dobson, HWC Co-Executive Director & Peter Schnall, HWC Executive Director

In the three months since launching the Healthy Work Campaign, we have been inspired by all of the support and interest in collaborating with the campaign. We are encouraged by the growth of local and national organizing efforts, as well as legislative efforts to protect various principles of healthy work.

One noteworthy healthy work achievement was the City of Philadelphia passing the “strongest fair scheduling law in the Nation.” For a city where 62% of food & retail sector workers receive their schedules less than two weeks ahead of time and two-thirds work irregular or variable schedules, this is a major achievement. One estimate claims more than 130,000 workers could be impacted. (To learn more about the impact of irregular work schedules, job insecurity and other work stressors, please check out our Stats to Know.)

That being said, there is a great deal of work to be done. 5,000 workers died on the job in the U.S. in 2018. As Workers’ Memorial Day (April 28th) is fast approaching, we want to remind readers that in addition to the U.S. workers that died last year from officially-recognized occupational injuries and illnesses, there are over 120,000 preventable deaths per year that are associated with how U.S. companies manage workers. This is a conservative estimate based on research on the number of workers exposed to psychosocial work stressors associated with deaths due to chronic illnesses such as depression, hypertension and heart disease – which are not included by U.S. Dept of Labor statistics.

Share Your Story

Have you ever experienced toxic working conditions

which caused you undue stress or made you sick?

Or took part in achieving healthier working conditions?

Click here to share your experience with us.

Project Updates

We are excited to be partnering with organizations like WorkSafe on a number of new activities including administering “healthy work” surveys to worker groups, developing educational workshops on work stress prevention, and collaborating on developing educational materials for working people.

We are continuing our partnership with university researchers to develop our own Healthy Work Survey. Under the leadership of Dr. BongKyoo Choi, this online tool, targeted to organizations and individuals working in the U.S., will be free to the public, assess exposures to work stressors and the impact of these stressors on health, as well as compare results to a national average.

We are also making progress on developing our intervention toolkit, led by Dr. Paul Landsbergis, which will expand upon the resources currently available in our Healthy Work Tools pages, by providing a database to search by occupation/industry, work stressor and other factors, to provide evidence-based solutions such as organizational intervention case studies targeted at specific working groups.

Additionally, we are expanding our team, most recently with the addition of Dr. Pouran Faghri, an expert in intervention research who will focus on outreach & disseminating our intervention tools.

Ask the Experts

As the Healthy Work Campaign expands, we want to remain accessible, sharing what we’ve learned with our community, as well as welcoming discussion about the important challenges before us. In addition to fielding questions through social media and our contact page, we also encourage you to reply to this email and “Ask the Experts” about any work stress-related questions that come to mind. From the questions we receive in this way, we will try to answer one question directly in the next newsletter. It gives you a reason to come back and gives voice to the concerns about which you care most.

To promote healthy work in the U.S., we need your help.
Learn about the Healthy Work Campaign and ways you can get involved.