More than their parents, a large percentage of baby boomers continue to work into their late 60’s and beyond. This can mean delaying retirement from a longtime career, or maybe part-time or self-employment. In fact, trends suggest that older Americans who fully retire (completely withdrawing from the paid labor force)  are a  minority.

​Nicole Maestas is an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. Her work on the economics of aging has demonstrated significant shifts in labor supply patterns at older ages. She showed that one-half of all retirees pursue a retirement transition path that involves partial retirement or labor force re-entry (“unretirement”) and that re-entry was largely predictable ex ante, and not a consequence of economic shocks. She has also argued that labor supply at older ages is likely to increase still further, even absent policy changes to promote employment at older ages, due to increased labor demand for older workers. Indeed, her work shows that the rise in employment at older ages was driven in substantial part by an increase in labor demand by firms in the professional services industries. In current work, she is examining how these labor force trends, and population aging more generally, affect economic growth.

Researchers who study the link between health and working into our later years explain the relation as follows: Work offers a routine and purpose, a reason for getting up in the morning. Moreover, the workplace is a social environment, a community. Depending on your profession, work typically involves interacting with co-workers, bosses, subordinates, union members, suppliers, vendors and customers. The incentive for workers to invest in their health while employed is strong.

“In the beginning when you retire, it might feel more like a holiday,” said Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren, the director of research at the Center for the Study of Market Reform of Education and a Ph.D. student at the London School of Economics. “But after that, we see more of a ‘use it or lose it’ effect.”

If the interactions and social relations from work — as well as the income — can enhance the health of older populations, the implication is that policymakers should make it easier for those older workers to remain in paid work. “This does not mean politicians should force people to ‘work until they die,’” Mr. Heller-Sahlgren said. “They should remove disincentives to working.”

Mr. Heller-Sahlgren examined the short- and long-term impacts of retirement on mental health. His database — drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe over various years — indicates that there was no short-term impact of retirement on mental health and depressive tendencies (like appetite, concentration, fatigue and so on).

The survey results, Mr. Heller-Sahlgren said, suggest that negative effects of retirement begin to emerge after the first few years of leaving work. Most interestingly the results do not vary by sex or between people with different educational and occupational backgrounds.

“Relationships rule,” said William Wells Jr. (age 72) who owns a consulting business in Minnesota that specializes in ethnic and racial diversity. Mr. Wells cut back his hours several years ago when his granddaughter was born. The 15 to 20 hours he estimates he now spends working don’t include networking and having working lunches or dinners with potential clients. “I’m still doing 10 hours or so just networking and relationship building,” he said.

Sharon Wills, who is 65, still works for the company with which she spent her career. “I don’t do well at home,” said Ms. Wills, who started working for the staffing company Kelly Services in 1986, eventually specializing in recruitment.

She lives in Texas and retired back in 2011, taking a year off — and not really enjoying it. When the company contacted her to ask if she wanted to work as a “ninja” — someone who helps out branches or locations around the country — she jumped at the opportunity.
“There is a lot to learn about our business,” Ms. Wills said, noting that she has continued to develop new skills. “The way we recruit now is not the way we recruited 25 years ago.”

Although many of the benefits seem rather obvious, scholars can’t make absolute statements about the health effects of working longer. The research is tricky by nature: Just as retirement can impact health, so can health impact retirement. “I would say, in my experience, the research is mixed,” said Dr. Maestas of Harvard Medical School. “The studies I have seen tend to show that there are health benefits to working longer.”

As the economists Axel Börsch-Supan and Morten Schuth of the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging of the Institute for Social Law and Social Policy explained in an article for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Even disliked colleagues and a bad boss, we argue, are better than social isolation because they provide cognitive challenges that keep the mind active and healthy.”

Other forms of research have looked at the impact of work and employment on social networks. Looking at people between the age of 57 to 85 with a focus on their social networks, researchers have shown that people who keep working experience increase their networks of family and friends by about 25%. The social networks of retired people, on the other hand, diminish over a five-year period of leaving the workplace. In the study, the gains were primarily limited to women and older people with advanced education.

Not everyone can keep working into their later years – nor does everyone want to. The prospect of working longer in low-wage jobs or in monotonous tasks like an assembly line can be demoralizing. As H. L. Mencken, the journalist and satirist, wrote in 1922: “If he got no reward whatever, the artist would go on working just the same; his actual reward, in fact, is often so little that he almost starves. But suppose a garment worker got nothing for his labor: Would he go on working just the same?”

The estimated total annual cost of vehicle crashes resulting from using cell phone use is $43 billion, according to a National Safety Council study. Commercial truck and bus drivers can be fined up to $2,750 for each related offense, and the employer is exposed to penalties of up to $11,000.
Developing a strong distracted driving policy may help protect your company and your employees. A recent survey conducted by Traveler showed that 74% of businesses contacted had a distracted driving policy in place.

Erin Bellott, Senior Vice President and Product Manager for Liberty Mutual Insurance, provides the following three steps for risk managers who want to create a safety culture that prohibits distracted driving:

1.  DESIGN THE POLICY

• Before using a mobile device, safely pull over to the side of the road or, preferably, into a parking lot or rest area.
• Let all incoming calls go to voicemail and refrain from reading emails or texts until you’ve arrived.
• Don’t text, call or email any employee known to be driving.
• Enforce that the ban on mobile devices while driving applies to all mobile devices, not just company devices.

2.  COMMUNICATE & IMPLEMENT THE POLICY.

• Require each employee to attend training programs on distracted driving and its causes & consequences.
• Devise a place, such as an intranet site or even a corkboard, and encourage employees to share their ideas for preventing distracted driving.
• Reinforce the message periodically. It is not a suggestion; it is a mandate.

3.  ENFORCE THE POLICY.

• Restate the consequences and penalties for breaching the policy.
• Conduct internal audits of distracted driving prevention and safety culture.
• Track circumstances, such as managers calling employees who are driving, which may lead employees to disregard or ignore the policy.
• Refresh the policy as new practices are discovered.

Supervisors and managers must watch for signs that employees may be overlooking distracted driving policies. Maybe, an increased number of low-severity collisions or incidents while backing up could expose the need for refresher training. Regardless, conducting annual communication campaigns to reinforce the importance of a safety-driven culture is mandatory.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports more than 3,000,000 workers suffer a workplace injury or illness each year. Currently, little or no information about worker injuries and illnesses at individual employers is made public or available to OSHA. Under the new rule, employers in high-hazard industries will send OSHA injury and illness data that the employers are already required to collect, for posting on the agency’s website.

Just as public disclosure of their kitchens’ sanitary conditions encourages restaurant owners to improve food safety, OSHA expects that public disclosure of work injury data will encourage employers to increase their efforts to prevent work-related injuries and illnesses.

“Since high injury rates are a sign of poor management, no employer wants to be seen publicly as operating a dangerous workplace,” said Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Dr. David Michaels. “Our new reporting requirements will ‘nudge’ employers to prevent worker injuries and illnesses to demonstrate to investors, job seekers, customers and the public that they operate safe and well-managed facilities. Access to injury data will also help OSHA better target our compliance assistance and enforcement resources at establishments where workers are at greatest risk, and enable ‘big data’ researchers to apply their skills to making workplaces safer.”

The availability of this data will enable prospective employees to identify workplaces where their risk of injury is lowest; and as result, employers competing to hire the best workers will make injury prevention a higher priority. Access to these data will also enable employers to benchmark their safety and health performance against industry leaders, to improve their own safety programs.

To ensure that the injury data on OSHA logs are accurate and complete, the final rule also promotes an employee’s right to report injuries and illnesses without fear of retaliation, and clarifies that an employer must have a reasonable procedure for reporting work-related injuries that does not discourage employees from reporting. This aspect of the rule targets employer programs and policies that, while nominally promoting safety, have the effect of discouraging workers from reporting injuries and, in turn leading to incomplete or inaccurate records of workplace hazards.

Using data collected under the new rule, OSHA will create the largest publicly available data set on work injuries and illnesses, enabling researchers to better study injury causation, identify new workplace safety hazards before they become widespread and evaluate the effectiveness of injury and illness prevention activities. OSHA will remove all personally identifiable information associated with the data before it is publicly accessible.

Under the new rule, all establishments with 250 or more employees in specific industries covered by the record-keeping regulation must electronically submit to OSHA injury and illness information from OSHA Forms 300, 300A, and 301. Establishments with 20-249 employees in certain industries must electronically submit information from OSHA Form 300A only.

Omar had reason to believe Uber might pay. Many American taxi drivers are independent contractors yet still get workers’ compensation. Taxi drivers have always faced violent work environments (federal stats show they’re 21 to 33 times as likely to be killed as other workers). Though ride-sharing apps eliminate handling cash, others remain: working at night, working alone and with drunk people.

Some companies understand that providing workers’ compensation insurance to independent contractors could make them look like employees, giving fuel to lawsuits. But many attorneys say that it would not be a major factor. Courts still look largely to how a company controls a worker, not to whether it provides insurance.

Workers’ compensation could even protect companies when a worker gets injured. Structured correctly; the company agrees to cover on-the-job injuries, while the worker gives up the right to sue the company, so the damages they can collect are capped. If, for example, Omar or an attorney were able to show that Uber had been negligent by assigning him a known violent passenger, he could sue for an unlimited amount.

But in other ways, workers’ compensation doesn’t make sense for independent contractor workforces. It traditionally covers lost wages, which would be difficult to determine for contractors who set their own hours. What about workers who have income from several platforms but are injured on one and unable to work at all, or people whose on-the-job hours aren’t clear, like Airbnb hosts?  Peers, a sharing-economy marketplace, recently started offering Airbnb insurance that includes lost-wages protection, but it’s clear that standard workers’ comp doesn’t quite fit into a quickly-shifting sharing economy business model. ​ More and more workers will need to get their benefits outside of traditional jobs, said Peers executive director Shelby Clark. He thinks work and benefits will eventually decouple, just like pensions did a generation ago.

Fortunately, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) mandates employers to notify workers of risks and provide hearing tests to workers exposed to 85 db for eight hours/day. Additionally, OSHA requires employers to provide extensive training programs that help reduce the risk of hearing loss. OSHA regulations stipulate that workers in the construction industry receive the same benefits if they are exposed to 90 decibels for eight hours per day. By comparison, an electric power saw generates 96 decibels of noise.

Can the Department of Labor Help Prevent Workplace Hearing Loss?

The Department of Labor has launched its ‘Hear and Now’ campaign to prevent hearing loss among workers by utilizing training and new technologies. Hear and Now will help utilize real-time detection systems that can alert workers when hearing protection cannot block noise effectively enough to prevent hearing loss. The program will work to design hearing devices that allow workers to hear important messages while drowning out harmful noise. It will also improve training programs for employers and workers.

Ohio workers comp attorney Thomas Marchese will work to help you secure benefits for workplace injuries or disabilities.