Putting “Work” Back in Working-Aged Mortality: Employment, Occupation, and Cause-Specific Mortality among Contemporary Working-Aged U.S. Adults

• In Event: 1431 - Health and Mortality in Midlife

Abstract

The recent rise in U.S. midlife mortality has been conceptualized as a “working-class” crisis, defined by increasing mortality among blue-collar and/or unemployed workers and the decline of manual labor; yet research on the topic overwhelmingly focuses on education as the key socioeconomic determinant of midlife mortality. The present study addresses this gap by using restricted National Health Interview Survey-Linked Mortality Files (1997-2015) to examine the relationship between individuals’ employment status, occupations and working-aged mortality risk for key causes of death, including accidental poisonings and suicides. Results show that service, agricultural, manual labor, and transport workers have significantly higher mortality risk than their “white-collar” counterparts, although there is variation in the steepness of this occupation-mortality gradient across different causes. Accounting for education attenuates some of these associations, but overall patterns are largely unchanged. Analyses further demonstrate the considerable mortality disadvantage among the unemployed and those not in the labor force, especially for poisoning-related deaths. We conclude by discussing the significance of occupation for mortality in the U.S., as both a standalone measure of social class shaped by broader sociopolitical and economic forces and as a crucial pathway that regulates the flow of health-positive resources associated with higher educational attainment.

Authors

• Iliya Gutin, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Robert A. Hummer, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill