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July, 1988, Vol. 111, No. 7

The relation of age
to workplace injuries

Olivia S. Mitchell

Do work-related illness and injury (job risk) rates differ significantly by age? If so, are the patterns dependent on the job-related risk in question? Are age and job risk profiles invariant to controls for workers' occupations and industries?

To answer these questions, we combined 1981 illness and injury incidence data from workers' compensation reports with exposure data from the 1980 U.S. census. These data contain detail on workers' health problems and the jobs on which they experienced the problems, thus permitting us to investigate how occupational risk varies by age, industry, and occupation. According to our research, age is positively and significantly correlated with some forms of workplace risk; job-related temporary disabilities do not vary with age, but employees age 65 and over are more likely to suffer permanent disabilities and fatalities on the job; and age effects are not simply the result of job differences between older and younger workers, because the findings prove robust to the inclusion of controls for industry, occupation, and other variables.

This excerpt is from an article published in the July 1988 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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