Employment and compliance with pandemic influenza mitigation recommendations

DOI: 10.3201/eid1602.090638
Suggested citation for this article: Blake KD, Blendon RJ, Viswanath K. Employment and compliance with pandemic influenza mitigation recommendations. Emerg Infect Dis. 2010 Feb; [Epub ahead of print]

Employment and Compliance with Pandemic Influenza Mitigation Recommendations
Kelly D. Blake, Robert J. Blendon, and Kasisomayajula Viswanath

Author affiliations: Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (K.D. Blake, R.J. Blendon, K. Viswanath); and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston (K.D. Blake, K. Viswanath)

In the event of a serious pandemic influenza outbreak, businesses must play a key role in protecting employees' health and safety. With regard to pandemic influenza mitigation recommendations requiring social distancing, we examined whether some US employees would disproportionately fail to comply because of job insecurity and financial problems associated with missing work. We used the 2006 Harvard School of Public Health Pandemic Influenza Survey and multivariable logistic regression to determine whether employment characteristics such as inability to work from home, lack of pay when absent from work, and self-employment would be associated with less ability to comply with recommendations. We found that inability to work from home, lack of paid sick leave, and income are associated with working adults’ ability to comply and should be major targets for workplace interventions in the event of a serious outbreak.

The world needs a detailed operational blueprint for the best way to get through 12–24 months of a pandemic influenza outbreak; that type of planning must be on the agenda of every public health agency, school board, state legislature, and business (1). In January 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlined several recommendations (2). In the event of a serious outbreak, employers must play a key role in protecting employees’ health and safety (2). Specifically, businesses should “forecast and allow for employee absences during a pandemic due to factors such as personal illness, family member illness, community containment...

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