NIOSH WorkLife Initiative

Introducing the NIOSH WorkLife Initiative

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The ultimate goal of the WorkLife initiative is to sustain and improve worker health through better work-based programs, policies, and practices.

The WorkLife Initiative envisions workplaces that are free of recognized hazards, with health-promoting and sustaining policies, programs, and practices; and employees with ready access to effective programs and services that protect their health, safety, and well being.

The protection, preservation, and improvement of the health and well-being of people who work are goals shared by workers, their families, and their employers. Ill health and injury, whether caused by work or resulting from off-work activities, reduces income, quality of life, and opportunity for both the affected workers and those dependent on them.

NIOSH has a unique interest in the health and well-being of U.S. workers. NIOSH provides national and world leadership to better understand and prevent work-related disease and injury. Traditionally, NIOSH has focused efforts almost exclusively on prevention of exposure to toxic substances and hazardous conditions found at work. This approach has had substantial success in contributing to reductions in occupational disease and injury. On average, workers are healthier and less likely to be injured than when NIOSH was established by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.

Nevertheless, as the nature of work in the United States changes, the limitations of this narrow focus have become more apparent. Clearly, the overall health of workers is influenced by factors both inside and outside the workplace: stress at work and home, physical and chemical exposures, energy imbalance from diet and limited exercise, smoking, medications, hypertension, and alcohol use, to name a few. Research has also confirmed the profound importance of social, cultural, economic, and genetic influences as well as access to health care on health and health-preserving behaviors. The effects of these many factors cannot be artificially divided between “at work” and “non-work.” Just as workplace conditions can affect health and well-being at home and in the community, exposures, activities, and conditions outside of working hours can substantially determine health, productivity, and responses to exposures during work.

Despite the obvious on- and off-work interactions and affects, there has been a longstanding separation in the public health and employment communities between those interested in control of health risks and hazards from work and those focused on individual and community health risk reduction outside the workplace. The occupational health community has seen efforts at generic health promotion and disease prevention in the workplace at best as drawing needed resources from occupational health protection strategies, and at worst involving victim blaming and distracting attention from the occupational health needs of workers. There has been concern that a narrow focus on health promotion will deflect employers from their legal responsibilities to provide workplaces free of recognizable hazards. On the other hand, others concerned with promoting health and controlling health care costs have seen the workplace as a convenient and valuable venue to provide important services to a worthy priority population, resulting in overall health improvement.

A new approach, reflecting the growing appreciation of the complexity of influences on worker health and the interactions between work-based and non-work factors is needed. Some scientists have explored the benefits of workplace-based interventions that take coordinated or integrated approaches to diminishing health threats to workers in and out of work. A growing body of evidence indicates that these approaches are more effective in protecting and improving worker health and well-being than traditional isolated programs.

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