Employees With “Multiple Jobs” Have Higher Injury Rates
March 18, 2014 No CommentsI have often thought that employees who work more than one job (MJHs) have a higher frequency of on-the-job accidents then do single job holding employees (SJHs). Finally, there is a study that supports this assumption.
The American Journal of Public Health in a study published this January says –
“With reports from the NHIS we found that, during the 15 years of our study, approximately 8.4% of employed US residents worked multiple jobs in the week before the interview and were at higher risk for injury (during work and outside work) compared with SJHs. We also found that both the rates of injury per 100 workers and per 100 FTE (with control for work hours) were higher among MJHs than SJHs.
There are several hypothetical pathways from exposure in more than 1 job to increased risk of work and nonwork injury, such as fatigue because of extra hours worked, lack of sleep, or the additional and varied physical and mental stress from alternating between different types of exposure. The elevated MJH rate per 100 FTEs in each strata of weekly work hours indicates that fatigue from long work hours may not fully explain the higher risk we found for MJHs. Other potential factors specific to work injuries include inexperience in 1 or both jobs, hurried behavior from working hourly or trying to fit full-time workload into part-time hours, and decreased employer investment in workers employed only part-time.”
So now let me ask, “what should we as employers do about employees with multiple jobs (MJHs)?”
- If the job the worker is doing has relatively low hazards (e.g. office worker or retail clerk) I’d do nothing
- For safety critical jobs (or jobs with relatively high hazards) the employer should assemble a multidisciplinary team (H.R., Legal, Engineering, Operations, Safety) to look into possible solutions to this exposure
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