Lifetime job demands and later life disability

Abstract

Occupational characteristics may improve or harm health later in life. Previous research, largely based on limited exposure periods, reached mixed conclusions. We use Health and Retirement Study data linked to the Department of Labor's O*Net job classification system to examine the relationship between lifetime exposure to occupational demands and disability later in life. We consistently find an association between non-routine cognitive demands and lower rates of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) receipt and work-limiting health conditions. Routine manual demands are associated with moderately worse health and increased SSDI receipt in most lifetime specifications. These results are robust to various specifications of occupational demand measures and controlling for transitions between jobs of different levels of occupational intensity. We show that failure to account for job characteristic exposure early in a worker's tenure obscures the relationship between physical job demands and disability later in life. While characteristics of jobs worked at ages 30 and 55 are both predictive of later-life health outcomes, early-life job characteristics frequently dominate in models containing early and late exposures.

Assessing Relationships between Physically Demanding Work and Late-Life Disability in Italian Nonagenarian Women Living in a Rural Area

“…The assessment of functional abilities revealed that Group 4 (farmers) had the lower number of subjects independent in the BADL compared to all the other works categories, supporting a higher risk of disability in association with a physically demanding job, as previously documented [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ].…”

“…Despite the paucity of long follow-up studies, there is evidence of a negative association between physical exposures throughout working life and midlife (i.e., between 55 and 64 years old [ 2 ]) physical function [ 7 , 8 ]. A higher risk of disability has also been associated with physically demanding work [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ], low education, poor financial assets, low occupational status, and unfavorable health behaviors [ 10 , 13 ]. In the same way, results from an Italian study on a cohort of elderly persons aged seventy and over revealed that farmers, assumed as workers exerting a physically demanding job, were more disabled in performing instrumental activities of daily living, compared to white-collar workers, although this relationship was no more significant after the adjustment of the analysis for the cognitive status [ 14 ].…”

A research framework for the United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021–2030)

“…Diversity among work pathways has been explored through micro-transitions between employment to unemployment (Hägglund and Bächmann 2017 ), full time and part time work (Van Winkle and Fasang 2017 ) and sequential precarious employment (Raymo et al 2011 ). Analyses across life courses of work with specific characteristics such as being precarious (Ní Léime and Street 2019 ) or physically demanding (Nicholas et al 2020 ) have illustrated how work characteristics can have a cumulative effect on later life outcomes of poverty and illness/disability.…”

“…How does long term engagement in precarious work with little security or benefits and low pay, result in lives infused with uncertainty and instability (Campbell and Price 2016 )? In what ways does lifetime occupational engagement in physically and cognitively demanding jobs limit work capacity later in life (Nicholas et al 2020 )? Which workers are most advantaged by job flexibility and at what points in their employment life course (Kossek and Lautsch 2018 )?…”

A health economic theory of occupational choice, aging, and longevity

“…Controlling for selection by lagged health, they argue that at least 60 percent of the association between occupation and health is explained by selection. Nicholas et al (2020) show that lifetime exposure to occupational demands affects health and disability later in life. Abeliansky and Strulik (2021) computed the frailty index for individuals from a panel of European countries and found that blue collar workers, workers with little education, and workers in occupations with high physical or psychosocial burden display more health deficits and accumulate health deficits faster.…”