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Temporary staffing has an increasing role in world economies, contracting workers and dispatching them to work for leasing employers within countries and across borders. Using Illinois as a case study, co-authors have undertaken investigations to understand the occupational health, safety, and well-being challenges for workers hired through temporary staffing companies; to determine knowledge and attitudes of temp workers and temp staffing employers; and to assess temporary staffing at a community level. Temporary staffing workers in Illinois tend to be people of color who are employed in the most hazardous sectors of the economy. They have a higher rate of injury, are compensated less, and often lose their jobs when injured. Laws allow for ambiguity of responsibility for training, reporting, and compensation between the staffing agency and host employers. Our findings illustrate the ways in which principles of fairness and equity are violated in temporary staffing. Shared responsibility for reporting injuries, providing workers’ compensation insurance, and training workers should be mandated in law and required in contractual language between temporary staffing and host/contracting employers. Monitoring, enforcement, and adjustment of the law based on experience are required to “promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all.

Background While frontline and essential workers were prioritized for COVID-19 vaccination in the United States, coverage rates and encouragement strategies among non-health care workers have not been well-described. The Chicago Department of Public Health surveyed non-health care businesses to fill these knowledge gaps and identify potential mechanisms for improving vaccine uptake. Methods The Workplace Encouragement for COVID-19 Vaccination in Chicago survey (WEVax Chicago) was administered using REDCap from July 11 to September 12, 2022, to businesses previously contacted for COVID-19 surveillance and vaccine-related outreach. Stratified random sampling by industry was used to select businesses for phone follow-up; zip codes with low COVID-19 vaccine coverage were oversampled. Business and workforce characteristics including employee vaccination rates were reported. Frequencies of requirement, verification, and eight other strategies to encourage employee vaccination were assessed, along with barriers to uptake. Fisher’s exact test compared business characteristics, and Kruskal–Wallis test compared numbers of encouragement strategies reported among businesses with high (> 75%) vs. lower or missing vaccination rates. Results Forty-nine businesses completed the survey, with 86% having 500 or fewer employees and 35% in frontline essential industries. More than half (59%) reported high COVID-19 vaccination rates among full-time employees; most (75%) workplaces reporting lower coverage were manufacturing businesses with fewer than 100 employees. Verifying vaccination was more common than requiring vaccination (51% vs. 28%). The most frequently reported encouragement strategies aimed to improve convenience of vaccination (e.g., offering leave to be vaccinated (67%) or to recover from side effects (71%)), while most barriers to uptake were related to vaccine confidence (concerns of safety, side effects, and other skepticism). More high-coverage workplaces reported requiring ( p  = 0.03) or verifying vaccination ( p  = 0.07), though the mean and median numbers of strategies used were slightly greater among lower-coverage versus higher-coverage businesses. Conclusions Many WEVax respondents reported high COVID-19 vaccine coverage among employees. Vaccine requirement, verification and addressing vaccine mistrust may have more potential to improve coverage among working-age Chicagoans than increasing convenience of vaccination. Vaccine promotion strategies among non-health care workers should target low-coverage businesses and assess motivators in addition to barriers among workers and businesses.

Rollover protective structures and systems (ROPS) offer an engineering solution that, along with seatbelt use, protects drivers and virtually eliminates the potential forfatal orsevere injuries.3 It has been shown that engineering controls are the most effective means of controlling workplace hazards, followed by administrative controls (policies and practices) and, finally, personal protective equipment. Engineering controls are preferred because policies and personal protective equipment require promotion of their implementation, which is dependent on the availability of sound and effective protective equipment as well as the knowledge and impetus of workers to use it appropriately. The marketing campaign targets at-risk segments of the farming community (small-scale crop and livestock farms), identifies barriers to prevention (e.g., pressure to reduce costs and save time), includes incentives (e.g., cost reductions through provision of rebates), crafts messages on dangers to families and the economic burden of disability, and makes use of dramatic visual images.

The meat industry showcases the precarity of employment arrangements as part of broader global economic liberalization. In many countries, its workforce consists mostly of precariously employed immigrant and resident foreign-born workers. Categorized as “essential workers”, they worked throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, while facing high infection risk. Using case-studies in three country contexts – Illinois/USA, the Netherlands, and North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany – we analyzed policy documents, investigative reports, publicly available data, and informal expert consultation to examine structural causes of protection gaps for workers in the meat industry as well as facilitators and barriers to improving occupational safety and health. The Framework Method was applied to systematize and compare the overall data. Our analysis yields two key findings: First, immigrant workers in the meat industry face similar structural conditions across country contexts, with intersecting immigration- and employment-related precarity, generating gaps in social and health protection and deficiencies in the realization of theoretically held rights. Second, as policy responses to SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks varied, our case-studies showcase fundamentally different approaches to state responsibility for worker wellbeing as part of food supply chain (FSC) governance. The sacrificial-worker approach, observed in Illinois/USA, prioritized industry interests over worker and public health. In the Netherlands, a passive government delegated responsibilities to industry actors who forestalled systemic change through ad hoc adjustments, leaving the core problem of workers’ precarity intact. In Germany, the government leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst for change by enforcing a ban on subcontracting workers in the meat industry, with the potential to fundamentally shift industrial relations and thus address the root causes of worker precarity. Our results highlight economic liberalization and related worker precarity as central determinants of health inequities; and they underscore the imperative for more equitable social and health protection of all workers as part of FSC governance, and as part of food systems transformation for sustainability.

Objectives. Although eye injuries are common among citrus harvesters, the proportion of workers using protective eyewear has been negligible. We focused on adoption of worker-tested safety glasses with and without the presence and activities of trained peer-worker role models on harvesting crews. Methods. Observation of 13 citrus harvesting crews established baseline use of safety eyewear. Nine crews subsequently were assigned a peer worker to model use of safety glasses, conduct eye safety education, and treat minor eye injuries. Safety eyewear use by crews was monitored up to 15 weeks into the intervention. Results. Intervention crews with peer workers had significantly higher rates of eyewear use than control crews. Intervention exposure time and level of worker use were strongly correlated. Among intervention crews, workers with 1 to 2 years of experience (odds ratio [OR] = 2.89; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.11, 7.55) and who received help from their peer worker (OR = 3.73; 95% CI = 1.21, 11.57) were significantly more likely to use glasses than were other intervention crew members. Conclusions. Adaptation of the community health worker model for this setting improved injury prevention practices and may have relevance for similar agricultural settings.

Objective: The overall goal of this research project was to assess ethnic disparities in monetary compensation among construction workers injured on the job through the linkage of medical records and workers' compensation data. Methods: Probabilistic linkage of medical records with workers' compensation claim data. Results: In the final multivariable robust regression model, compensation was $5824 higher (P = 0.030; 95% confidence interval: 551 to 11,097) for white non-Hispanic workers than for other ethnic groups when controlling for injury severity, affected body region, type of injury, average weekly wage, weeks of temporary total disability, percent permanent partial disability, death, or attorney use. Conclusions: The analysis indicates that white non-Hispanic construction workers are awarded higher monetary settlements despite the observation that for specific injuries the mean temporary total disability and permanent partial disability were equivalent to or lower than those in Hispanic and black construction workers.

ObjectivesIn 2014, US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) updated a rule requiring employers to directly report all hospitalisations, amputations and eye enucleations to OSHA within 24 hours and within 8 hours for fatalities and multiple injury events. Past studies have shown that employers under-report injuries and illnesses for numerous reasons.MethodsThis study evaluated the completeness of required immediate reporting of severe injuries and illnesses by employers to OSHA by linking cases reported to OSHA with hospital data from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2023. We evaluated factors associated with failure to report severe injuries or illnesses to OSHA using multivariable logistic regression.ResultsWe identified 7578 non-fatal occupational injuries and illnesses and an additional 160 fatalities treated in Illinois hospitals that were not reported to OSHA. The cumulative reporting rate for non-fatal injuries was 39.7%, while non-fatal illnesses (excluding COVID-19 cases) was 25.1%. There was no significant change in reporting rates over the 7-year period for non-fatal injuries and illnesses. Failure to report serious injuries and illnesses was associated with hospitalisations involving acute illnesses (adjusted OR (aOR)=2.60), female workers (aOR=1.29) and incidents occurring on weekends (aOR=2.21) and holidays (aOR=1.98). We also identified factors associated with improperly reporting cases that did not meet the OSHA reporting criteria.ConclusionsWe estimate that failure to report these hospitalisations obscured up to 2122 violations in Illinois workplaces that could have led to remediation to protect other workers from injury. This analysis informs compliance assistance programmes that address reporting practices and record-keeping policy.

Background: Workers compensation data are an important source for evaluating costs associated with construction injuries. Methods: We describe the characteristics of injured construction workers filing claims in Illinois between 2000 and 2005 and the factors associated with compensation costs using a robust regression model Results: In the final multivariable model, the cumulative percent temporary and permanent disability—measures of seventy of injury—explained 38.7% of the variance of cost. Attorney costs explained only 0.3% of the variance of the dependent variable. Discussion: The model used in this study clearly indicated that percent disability was the most important determinant of cost, although the method and uniformity of percent impairment allocation could be better elucidated. There is a need to integrate analytical methods that are suitable for skewed data when analyzing claim costs.

The community-based prevention marketing program planning framework was used to adapt an evidence-based intervention to address eye injuries among Florida’s migrant citrus harvesters. Participant-observer techniques, other direct observations, and individual and focus group interviews provided data that guided refinement of a safety eyewear intervention. Workers were attracted to the eyewear’s ability to minimize irritation, offer protection from trauma, and enable work without declines in productivity or comfort. Access to safety glasses equipped with worker-designed features reduced the perceived barriers of using them; deployment of trained peer-leaders helped promote adoption. Workers’ use of safety glasses increased from less than 2% to between 28% and 37% in less than two full harvesting seasons. The combination of formative research and program implementation data provided insights for tailoring an existing evidence-based program for this occupational community and increase potential for future dissemination and worker protection.

OBJECTIVE:To explore concept mapping (CM) as a participatory methodology that can be used by public health officials to strategize approaches to reducing health inequities among low wage workers and workers with unstable employment. METHODS:In a workshop of 68 occupational health officers, mainly from government agencies, CM was demonstrated through gathering and prioritizing ideas for reaching underserved, at-risk working populations. RESULTS:Prior to the workshop, occupational health officers generated 99 brainstormed ideas on how to reach underserved workers. These were reduced to 39 unique items, which workshop participants then sorted into themes and prioritized based on perceived effectiveness and feasibility. Twelve specific approaches covering enhanced surveillance methods, occupational safety and health (OSH) training, and partnering with employers, other agencies, and community groups were considered most actionable by occupational/public health officers to address the health of low-wage, and precarious workers. In a follow-up session 1 year later, a subset of participants discussed the findings. CONCLUSION:Concept mapping can be used to elucidate actionable approaches by government agencies to better address occupational health inequities experienced by low wage and precarious workers.