Syracuse’s poorest workers: Health problems, low wages

BY JIM HOWE
An ongoing study of the Syracuse area‘s lowest-paid workers finds they often face aching backs, constant stress and a lack of respect as well as a skimpy paycheck.

Dishwasher.
These concerns are documented in “Healthy Work in Syracuse? Conversations With Low-Wage Workers,” the second phase of the Low-Wage Workers‘ Health Project. It‘s a study from the Occupational Health Clinical Centers, a state operation based in Syracuse that serves 26 counties and is affiliated with Upstate Medical University.
Defining who is a low-wage worker is difficult, explains project manager Jeanette Zoeckler, but in this study it means workers struggling to survive at a basic level, earning less than $15 an hour, depending on family size and other factors.

Cashier.
“Occupations that are giving people less than a living wage tend to have certain characteristics that impact health, and that can range from poor air quality to poor ergonomics, physical factors on the job that influence health and also mental factors on the job that influence health, and so in the new economy we‘re curious about how the low-wage worker‘s work impacts their health,” Zoeckler says.

Cleaners.
These jobs are described as “precarious” because they can end suddenly and “dead-end” because they tend to offer little long-term chance for a raise, promotion or desirable career.
More than 450 people were interviewed over the first two years of the study, and “I think we‘re starting to get a good picture of the kinds of struggles that the workers are facing on the job with regard to their health, and with regard to the entire context of what it means in their lives,“ Zoeckler says.

Health aide.
Workers also reported stress from being bullied and disrespected, having poorly defined duties and not being paid what they are owed by employers.
The report‘s contributors have met in the past year with Gov. Andrew Cuomo‘s task force on exploited workers, distributed the report to lawmakers and hope it will help point the way to both short- and long-term solutions to low-wage workers‘ problems.
The third phase of the report is to be published soon.

Jeanette Zoeckler, project manager for an ongoing study of low-wage workers' health conditions, and Michael Lax, MD, medical director of the Occupational Health Clinical Centers.


This article appears in the fall 2016 issue of Upstate Health magaz. Click here for a radio interview/podcast about the low-wage workers' health study with Zoeckler and Lax.