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Article Excerpt
Based upon unique Canadian administrative data from the years 1996 to 1999, this study examines the duration of absences from work due to injuries arising from workplace violence with a hazard model. We find that policing and nursing occupations, larger health care expenditures and more severe acts of violence are associated with longer absences from work. On the other hand, workers from larger firms have shorter absences from work. Our estimates are also quite sensitive to the inclusion of unobserved heterogeneity distribution, i.e., an individual specific random effect. This suggests that unobservable factors, such as stress and psychological or psychosomatic problems resulting from the workplace violence could have a large impact on the duration of work absences.
Basandose en datos administrativos canadienses exclusivos de los anos 1996 a 1999, este estudio examina la duracion de las ausencias laborales debidas a lesiones ocasionadas por la violencia en el trabajo utilizando un modelo aleatorio. Encontramos que las profesiones de policia y enfermero, los gastos mas elevados en salud y los mas severos actos de violencia son asociados con ausencias laborales mas largas. Nuestras estimaciones son tambien muy sensibles a la inclusion de la distribucion heterogenea non observada, es decir un erecto individual especifico aleatorio. Esto sugiere que factores non observables, como el estres y los problemas sicologicos o sicosomaticos resultantes de la violencia en el trabajo podrian tener un amplio impacto en la duracion de las ausencias laborales.
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A recent study (Statistics Canada, 2007) offered an extensive and alarming illustration of the extent of criminal victimization in the workplace. Canadians reported some 350,000 incidents of violence in their workplaces in 2004. According to Statistics Canada (2007: 6), these incidents represent, "17% of all self-reported incidents of violent victimization, including sexual assault, robbery and physical assault." This study provides evidence that workplace violence is far more pervasive than the spectacularly violent and deadly acts of workplace violence that are occasionally reported on in the evening news.
The Statistics Canada study also confirmed that some occupations are more prone to workplace violence than others. Social assistance and healthcare workers, along with those employed in accommodation and food services occupations were particularly prone to acts of violence in their workplaces.
Those who are victimized by violence in the workplace are treated differently than those who suffer violent acts outside of the workplace in that any physical or psychological/emotional injury, and any lost earnings due to absence from work, as a consequence of violence is compensable under the workers' compensation system. Workers' compensation is a legislatively-mandated no-fault insurance program that pays for medical and vocational rehabilitation, and provides wage loss payments, for workers who are disabled as a result of a work-related injury or disease.
As a workers' compensation issue, policy makers have an interest in understanding the causes and consequences of incidents of workplace violence. This understanding may lead workers' compensation authorities to strategies for preventing workplace violence, and for limiting the disabling consequences, including time lost from work. The primary incentive for workers' compensation authorities to better understand violence at work is certainly to protect workers. However, there is also a financial incentive. Clearly, there are no financial costs to the workers' compensation system if violence can be prevented. As well, even when a violent act does occur, encouraging and facilitating a timely return to work will reduce the costs to the workers' compensation system of income replacement benefits.
While a number of previous studies have documented the frequency of acts of workplace violence and some of the consequences for its victims, there has been very little work on a key driver of the financial costs of workplace violence--the duration of absence from work resulting from the disabling consequences of violent acts. Based upon data on injuries resulting from workplace violence between 1996 and 1999, drawn from the administrative records of the Ontario Workplace Safety & Insurance Board (WSIB), this paper provides estimates of the determinants of time lost from work following an act of workplace violence. Importantly, we control for unobserved heterogeneity that may bias parameter estimates of the duration models. We find that when unobserved heterogeneity is included in the specification of the hazard model, some of the estimates for high-risk occupations (e.g., nursing and police officers) differ substantially from their counterparts in a specification without unobserved heterogeneity. This suggests that the unobserved factors, such as stress and psychological problems, might also have a large impact on the estimates.
The duration of workers' compensation claims arising from workplace violence merits separate analysis from the duration of other types of workrelated injuries (the latter itself is a subject of a sizable literature). The data used in this study indicate that the duration of absence from work associated with incidents of workplace violence is about 50 percent longer than for absences due to other workplace injuries and diseases. (1)
The next section of the paper contains a brief review of some current research on workplace violence. We present in the third section a description of the empirical methods we use and our data in the fourth section. The empirical results are presented in the fifth section followed by a discussion of our key findings and how they related to previous research on workplace violence. We conclude the paper with summary comments and a discussion of the implications of our findings.
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
A number of studies have examined workplace violence in the last decade. These studies have focused for the most part on the factors associated with increases in the prevalence/incidence of violence as well as the consequences of this violence. In contrast, very few studies have looked at the duration of the absences from work caused by workplace violence, which is the focus of our analysis. This paper will provide a review of some of the key findings in the literature from the last two decades. (2) Most of this previous research has been conducted using data from the United States and other countries, but there have been some Canadian studies. We provide a review of the U.S. and international evidence prior to discussing the Canadian evidence.
In terms of profiling the incidence of workplace violence, Chenier (1998) used Bureau of Labor Statistics data and Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines to assess which occupations were most likely to experience violence at work and to determine what workplace factors precipitated violence. The study found that taxi cab drivers were the most vulnerable. Other dangerous occupations included health care workers and employees of small retail stores.
In a similar vein, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (1996) statistical bulletin provided some comprehensive descriptive information on workplace violence in-the United States. The findings in this report indicate that retail industries and nursing-home workers experienced the highest incidence of non-fatal assaults, and that 56 percent of the victims of non-fatal violence were women. This report also provides ' some information on the duration of absences from work that resulted from workplace violence. Specifically, the median absence from work for victims of these beatings was five days. However, the median days away from work did vary by type of violence; 30 days for shootings, 28 days for stabbings, 3 days for biting and 4 days for squeezing, pinching, scratching or twists.
Other contributions to the literature have focused on determining the groups most likely to experience violence. For example, Saarela and Isotalus (1999) were interested in determining which occupations face the greatest danger of workplace violence with Finnish data. They found that some 4.1 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced violence or the threat of violence in the last 12 months. Episodes of violence in the health care and social services occupations accounted for 10.5 percent of all reported incidents. Workers in transportation occupations (drivers of buses, street cars, taxis, trucks, etc.) and service industry occupations accounted for 13.6 percent of the incidents of violence in their sample (6.8 percent each). Lord (1998) examined a stratified sample of 1,477 full-time state government employees (including university workers) in North Carolina in order to identify the occupations with the highest potential risk to encounter violence in the workplace. Overall, 22 percent of North Carolina's state government employees reported that they had been victims of some form of violence. The study also found that workers in protective services and law enforcement as well as professionals and administrators who work with patients have greater exposure to violence. Males were more likely to be victimized than females, but there were very few differences in incidence due to ethnicity. In addition, almost half (47.4%) of the victims were between 40 and 55 years old. Finally, the most frequent types of violence were the least severe. Specifically, verbal abuse was the most frequent type of violent act reported (83.2%).
One limitation of the earlier studies profiling workplace violence is that they were often based on surveys of limited populations. However, a few of the more recent studies have used data from the administrative records of workers' compensation boards to examine the incidence and composition of claims. The benefit of the administrative data from workers' compensation boards is that they provide a census of all reported claims, rather than a sample of the population.
Islam et al. (2003) examine workplace injury claims resulting from physical assault using data from administrative records of the West Virginia Workers' Compensation Board covering the period between July 1, 1997 and June 30, 1999. Islam et al. (2003) found that health care workers had the highest incidence of physical assaults at work. The other occupations that had a high incidence of physical assault were public safety and teaching. In fact, health care, public safety and teaching occupations accounted for about 75 percent of the victims of physical assault.
McCall and Horowitz (2004) examine workers' compensation claim data from the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Information and Management Division from 1990 to 1997. McCall and Horowitz (2004) found a number of interesting...
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