This research looked at cyclical fluctuations in workplace accidents, whether reporting accidents affects worker firing rate, and how the economy affects these relationships.
It drew on a large Austrian accident reporting insurance dataset between 2000-2006 from male blue-collar workers.
Results
Importantly, it was found that “Workers who report a workplace accident in the previous year are more likely to be laid off” (p21) at a later period.
While the probability of reporting a moderate severity accident was governed by statistically significant links to a firms’ firing rate, this link wasn’t found for severe accidents. While severe accidents are harder to hide and thus reporting is less discretional, moderate severity accidents are far more a factor of discretional worker reporting practices (and thus, the organisational climate that either inhibits or encourages the reporting of these events).
Quoting the paper, “the higher the firms’ firing rate, the more reluctant their workers are to report a moderate workplace accident” (p21). Specifically, increasing the firing rate by one standard deviation led to a 2.1% decrease in the probability for a worker to report a moderate severity accident.
It’s said that these findings suggests that employers, to some degree, consider the accident reporting history of workers when deciding on terminating employment.
Unemployment rate was found to have a significant impact on the individual probability to be fired in line with business/economic cycles. Not unexpectedly, when the economy is in recession people are more likely to lose their job. As per the findings, a one percentage point increase “in the contemporaneous unemployment rate leads to a 21 percent higher probability to be fired” (p18).
Higher sickness rates among employees within the last two years was also statistically correlated with a higher probability of being fired, such that “a similar mechanism as for accident rates may be at work for sickness rates” (p18).
Finally, the authors note a specific caveat with interpreting their data: their data doesn’t allow the determination of whether moderate workplace accidents are overreported in booms or underreported in recissions, but simply that moderate severity accidents are “relatively less reported in recessions” (p22).
This study plus a bunch more about the numerous factors which influence incident reporting, interpretation and classification, and follow-up highlight that accident reporting and statistics are anything but objective representations of what’s really happening out there.
Link in comments.
Study authors: Boone, Jan; van Ours, Jan C.; Wuellrich, Jean-Philippe; Zweimüller, Josef, 2011, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Study link: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/52102
My site with more reviews: https://safety177496371.wordpress.com
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6836414557871853568?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28*%2Curn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A6836414557871853568%29
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