Both ABC news and the New York Times ran stories over the weekend about the relationship between job loss and health. New research by sociologist Kate Strully, a sociologist at the State University of New York-Albany, examines unemployment data from 1991, 2001, and 2003 and finds that job loss is “linked to a higher risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, diabetes or depression, even when the person finds a new job. Losing a job through no fault of one’s own, if a company shut down, for example, led to a 54 percent increase in that person reporting poor health.”
She told ABC News:
“Jobs are so fundamental to who you are and where you fall into society,” said Kate Strully, an assistant professor in sociology at the State University of New York at Albany and the author of a new study. “In looking at what happens to people after they lose such a big component of their class position and social identity … [the study asked] did they lose their job because they were sick or did they get sick because they lost their job?”…
Still, Strully’s data is based on situations from the 1990s and early 2000s, when the economic climate was not as universally challenging as it is now. People who lost their jobs may have been in a better position to find alternate employment or receive financial help via credit, mortgages or family and friends.
“We were looking at a situation where the economy was better than now and there were still sizable health hazards associated with job loss,” Strully said. “Common sense suggests that the situation today for displaced workers is probably worse.”
The New York Times reported:
Workers who lost a job through no fault of their own, she found, were twice as likely to report developing a new ailment like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease over the next year and a half, compared with people who were continuously employed. Interestingly, the risk was just as high for those who found new jobs quickly as it was for those who remained unemployed.
Though it has long been known that poor health and unemployment often go together, questions have lingered about whether unemployment leads to illness, or whether people in ill health are more likely to leave a job, be fired or be laid off. In an effort to sort out this chicken-or-egg problem, the new study looked specifically at people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own — for example, because of a plant or business closing. The author, Kate W. Strully, said she looked at situations in which people lost jobs for reasons that “shouldn’t have had anything to do with their health.”
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