Job insecurity and injury under-reporting

Work & Stress has just published a new article entitled "The relationship between job insecurity and accident under-reporting: A test in two countries".

The upshot of this examination of organizations in the United States and Italy is that job insecurity (one dimension of employment precarity) increases the likelihood of experiencing a workplace injury and decreases the likelihood that such an injury will be reported. The authors’ analysis strongly suggests that job insecurity, rather than memory lapses, is responsible for the under-reporting:

...as job insecurity increased, the discrepancy between what employees experienced and what they reported also increased, suggesting that employees may have a stake in maintaining a safe image at work even as their workplace experience of accidents and injuries increases as a function of job insecurity.

An interesting empirical and inter-jurisdictional addition to the literature on employment precarity and safety.

-- Bob Barnetson