Caught between Scylla and Charybdis: How Economic Stressors and Occupational Risk Factors Influence Workers' Occupational Health Reactions to COVID-19

Workers and their families bear much of the economic burden of COVID-19. Even though they have declined somewhat, unemployment rates are considerably higher than before the start of the pandemic. Many workers also face uncertainty about their future employment prospects and increasing financial strain. At the same time, the workplace is a common source of transmission of COVID-19 and many jobs previously seen as relatively safe are now viewed as potentially hazardous. Thus, many workers face dual threats of economic stress and COVID-19 exposure. This paper develops a model of workers' responses to these dual threats, including risk perception and resource depletion as mediating factors that influence the relationship of economic stress and occupational risk factors with COVID-19 compliance-related attitudes, safe behavior at work, and physical and mental health outcomes. The paper also describes contextual moderators of these relationships at the individual, unit, and regional level. Directions for future research are discussed.

Multilevel Job Demands and Resources: Cross-level Effects of Competing Organizational Facet-Specific Climates on Risky Safety Behaviors

Both individual demands (i.e., workload) and organizational demands and resources (i.e., production pressure and safety climates) may affect the likelihood that employees undertake risky safety behaviors in different ways. Adopting an organizational multilevel perspective, the aim of the present research was fourfold: (1) to examine the impact of individual-level job demands (i.e., workload) on the enactment of risky safety behaviors; (2) to evaluate the effects of coexisting and competing organizational facet-specific climates (i.e., for safety and for production pressure) on the above outcome; (3) to assess their cross-level interactions with individual job demands, and (4) to test the interaction among such organizational demands and resources in shaping risky behaviors. A series of multilevel regression models tested on surveydata from 1375 employees nested within 33 organizations indicated that high workload increases the likelihood of employees enacting risky safety behaviors, while organizational safety and production pressure climates showed significant and opposite direct effects on this safety outcome. Moreover, organizational safety climate significantly mitigated the effect of individual job demands on risky safety behaviors, while organizational production pressure climate exacerbated this individual-level relationship. Finally, organizational safety climate mitigates the cross-level direct effect of organizational production pressure climate on the enactment of risky safety behaviors.

Pressure to produce=pressure to reduce accident reporting?

Each year, more than 4 million U.S. workers are injured on the job - several thousand die (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008). Despite these staggering numbers, research suggests that they are gross underestimates of the true volume of workplace related illnesses and injuries due to accident under-reporting. Although accident under-reporting has been well-documented, less is known regarding why this occurs. The current study suggests that under-reporting may in part be due to high levels of perceived production pressure. Specifically, this study tested the hypotheses that production pressure would be related to more experienced accidents overall and more negative attitudes toward reporting accidents. Further, we expected that production pressure would exacerbate the under-reporting of accidents. Survey data were collected from a sample of 212 copper mining workers located in the southwestern United States. The survey measured employee perceptions regarding production pressure, attitudes toward reporting accidents, perceived consequences of reporting accidents, and actual reporting behaviors (e.g., types and numbers of accidents experienced vs. reported). As predicted, the average number of experienced accidents per employee was significantly higher (M=2.84) than the number of reported accidents (M=.49). In addition, production pressure was related to more negative reporting attitudes. Individuals who had positive reporting attitudes were injured less frequently; however, when an incident occurred, they were more likely to report it. Finally, higher levels of production pressure were related to greater accident under-reporting. Additionally, employees who perceived high levels of production pressure not only experienced more accidents overall, they also reported fewer of them to the organization. Implications for occupational safety initiatives--particularly in the current economic climate--are discussed, as are methodological challenges of conducting research in this area.