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Retirement disability among workers in a natural gas distribution company
Author(s) -
Stanbury Martha,
Liveright Timothy
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
american journal of industrial medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.7
H-Index - 104
eISSN - 1097-0274
pISSN - 0271-3586
DOI - 10.1002/ajim.4700040505
Subject(s) - medicine , environmental health , occupational exposure , distribution (mathematics) , gerontology , mathematical analysis , mathematics
Epidemiological investigations of occupational disability are severely limited because of the inherent difficulties in standardizing definitions of disability and because of the lack of appropriate comparison data. Nevertheless, occupational disability is of great concern to workers. An investigation of disability, defined as permanent retirement due to medical disability, among hourly employees of a natural gas distribution company was undertaken in response to a request by the employees' union. Because of the above limitations, a hypothesis‐generating rather than hypothesis‐testing approach was taken, utilizing both disability retirement incidence rates and a prevalence survey of the living disabled retirees. It was hypothesized from the analysis that this group of workers did experience an excess of retirement disability for the period 1971–1980 when compared to estimated disability incidence rates of the general Social Security insured population, and that this excess may have been due in part to an excess of musculoskeletal disabilities associated with occupational physical stresses and strains.