Firing Fears

Injured workers who suffer from anxiety over fears of being fired exhibit poorer return-to-work outcomes than those that trust their employers not to fire them. Trust in the workplace is one of the more important predictors of workers’ comp outcomes, according to the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI), which conducted eight state-specific studies on the issue.

To describe the level of trust or mistrust in the work relationship, the studies’ interviewers asked workers if they were concerned about being fired as a result of injury. Workers who were strongly concerned about being fired after the injury experienced poorer return-to-work outcomes than workers without those concerns.

One in five workers who were concerned about being fired reported that they were not working at the time of the interview. This was double the rate that was observed for workers without such concerns. Among workers who were not concerned about being fired, one in 10 workers was not working at the time of the interview.

Concerns about being fired were associated with a four-week increase in the average disability duration.

The studies also identified workers with co-morbid medical conditions (existing simultaneously with and usually independently of another medical condition) by asking whether the worker had received treatment for hypertension, diabetes and heart problems. The condition may have been present at the time of the injury or may have manifested during the recovery period. Among those findings:

• Workers with hypertension (when compared with workers without hypertension) had a 3 percentage point higher rate of not working at the time of the interview, predominantly due to injury.
• Workers with heart problems reported an 8 percentage point higher rate of not working at the time of interview, predominantly due to injury, and had disability duration that was four weeks longer.
• Workers with diabetes had a 4 percentage point higher rate of not working at the time of the interview, predominantly due to injury than workers without diabetes.

The studies were based on telephone interviews with 3,200 injured workers across Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. The studies interviewed workers who suffered a workplace injury in 2010 and received workers’ compensation income benefits. The surveys were conducted February through June 2013 – about three years after the workers sustained their injuries.

WCRI is a not-for-profit research organization based in Cambridge, Mass.

Topics Workers' Compensation