The Healthy Work Campaign and Colleagues Publish a Letter Advocating for NIOSH and OSHA to Develop a National Regulation to Limit Work Stress

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Oct 29, 2024, 08:59 ET

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 29, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Almost 40 occupational health researchers, practitioners, and labor union activists including members of the Healthy Work Campaign team, published a letter to the editor of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, September 20, 2024. The letter supports the National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in calling for the development of a national regulation covering workplace psychosocial stress as an occupational hazard.

The letter responded to an article by more than a dozen prominent NIOSH authors including Dr. John Howard, Director of NIOSH, titled "An urgent call to address work–related psychosocial hazards and improve worker well–being." It also follows on the heels of a letter published in September 2023 by former OSHA Director Dr. David Michaels who argued that OSHA should consider developing occupational safety and health standards to protect workers from mental health hazards.

Dr. Peter Schnall, Director of the nonprofit Center for Social Epidemiology and co-Director of the Healthy Work Campaign remarked, "Work-related stress, caused by psychological and social (psychosocial) hazards in the workplace, has been and continues to be a major problem in most U.S. workplaces, causing short and long term health and safety issues for millions of U.S. workers including contributing to burnout, depression, anxiety, PTSD, high blood pressure, increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, and an estimated 70,000-120,000 deaths per year."

Work stress and its health consequences negatively impacts productivity and costs businesses billions of dollars a year.

"Work-related stress can significantly impact businesses, leading to increased absenteeism, reduced productivity, higher employee turnover, and substantial financial losses," says Dr. Pouran Faghri, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Fielding School of Public Health, University of California Los Angeles

"It is time that our federal government recognizes the five decades of scientific evidence demonstrating that work-related stress causes health problems and listens to the suffering that causes to workers. We need to bring together industry, labor and occupational health and safety researchers, practitioners and activists to prevent work stress at its source," says Dr. Marnie Dobson, Director of the Healthy Work Campaign.

"NIOSH and other government agencies should also acknowledge that work-related psychosocial hazards can and are being reduced through labor-management bargaining and joint committees," says Dr. Paul Landsbergis, a coauthor on the letter and Associate Professor of Public Health at SUNY Downstate.

As the federal agency responsible for preventing work-related illness, injury and deaths, OSHA, did develop a new webpage in 2023 "Workplace Stress" which includes guidance and resources for employers. But it is just the beginning.

Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, European Union (EU) OSHA, and many countries throughout Latin America, already have regulations or laws that require employers to address sources of stress at work, such as high workloads, long work hours, shift work, work-family conflict, threat of layoffs, low social support, low job control, and workplace bullying and harassment.

The recent letter to the editor calls for NIOSH and other government agencies, to work with the occupational health and safety community, workers and OSHA, and recommends:

Language for a consensus standard for psychosocial hazards
Building a national psychosocial hazard surveillance program
Developing a public education campaign about the impact of psychosocial hazards on physical and mental health and the chronic disease burden.

Media Contact:
Zach Schnall
310-403-4964
[email protected]

SOURCE Healthy Work Campaign