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Work despite poor health? A 14-year follow-up of how individual work accommodations are extending the time to retirement for workers with poor health conditions.

ABSTRACT: Given many OECD countries' efforts to extend their citizens' working years, research underscores the importance of work accommodations to maintain older workers and enable them to work despite poor health or declines in physical functions. Nevertheless, few studies have investigated the associations between poor health conditions and opportunities to accommodate work in accordance with individual needs and preferences. In this study, we differentiate between three types of poor health conditions (disease, illness, or sickness). We examine the separate effects of these health conditions as well as of possibilities for work accommodations (working hours, pace, planning), on time to retirement. Additionally, we examine the potentially joint effect of poor health and low opportunities for work accommodations. The analyses are based on a representative sample of 1143 Swedish workers from Panel Survey of Ageing and the Elderly (PSAE) with a baseline (2002/2003) age of 55-64 years. Using complementary register data on income, we followed the labor market activity of these individuals until the end of 2015. We employed Cox proportional hazard regression to estimate the time to retirement and adjusted for demographical, socio-economic, and work-related covariates. In comparison to those with good health, having disease, illness, and sickness is associated with a higher risk of earlier exit from the labor market, and the joint effect of poor health and low opportunities for work accommodations increases this risk. High influence to accommodate work while having a disease or sickness supports work participation, while these patterns of associations were not equally consistent for individuals with illness. This study highlights the importance of increasing older individuals' opportunities to make their own work accommodations, particularly in the presence of disease and sickness, and thereby combat the negative effects of poor health on time to retirement.

SUBMITTER: Jonsson R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6978491 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Work despite poor health? A 14-year follow-up of how individual work accommodations are extending the time to retirement for workers with poor health conditions.

Jonsson Robin R Dellve Lotta L Halleröd Björn B

SSM - population health 20191106

Given many OECD countries' efforts to extend their citizens' working years, research underscores the importance of work accommodations to maintain older workers and enable them to work despite poor health or declines in physical functions. Nevertheless, few studies have investigated the associations between poor health conditions and opportunities to accommodate work in accordance with individual needs and preferences. In this study, we differentiate between three types of poor health conditions ...[more]

PMID: 31998831

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Policy makers in aging societies aim for the extension of work lives by increasing the official retirement age. Despite these efforts, many people stop working before reaching this retirement age. The main reason for early retirement is poor health. Health in turn is influenced by exposure to the work environment. Furthermore, health and work stress are influenced by education, which may lead to different effects for the lowly and the highly educated. OBJECTIVE:This study examines the relationship between work stress and retirement age. It investigates whether this relationship is mediated by health and moderated by education. Three dimensions of health are taken into account: self-rated health (SRH), depressive symptoms, and high cardiovascular risk diseases (HCVR). METHODS:A German subsample of the longitudinal Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) was linked with register data of the German Public Pension Scheme (SHARE-RV). The sample followed 302 individuals aged 50 to 65 years at baseline from 2004 to 2014. The data contains information on work stress, measured by job control and effort-reward-imbalance (ERI), health, and age of retirement. Multi-group structural equation modeling was applied to analyze the direct and indirect effects of work stress on retirement age via health. Work stress was lagged so that it temporally preceded health and retirement age. RESULTS:Lower job control and poorer SRH lead to a lower retirement age. Health does not operate as a mediator in the relationship between work stress and retirement age. Education moderates the relationship between work stress and health: high ERI leads to better SRH and better physical health of higher educated persons. Low job control increases the risk of depressive symptoms for persons with less education. CONCLUSIONS:Improving stressful working conditions, particularly improving job control, can prolong the working lives of employees and postpone retirement.

Dataset Information

Work despite poor health? A 14-year follow-up of how individual work accommodations are extending the time to retirement for workers with poor health conditions.

Publications

Work despite poor health? A 14-year follow-up of how individual work accommodations are extending the time to retirement for workers with poor health conditions.

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