Exploring U.S. food system workers’ intentions to work while ill during the early COVID-19 pandemic: a national survey
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Abstract
Background
While “stay at home” orders were in effect during early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, many U.S. food workers attended in-person work, charged with maintaining operation of the national food supply chain. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many U.S. food system workers encountered barriers to staying home despite symptomatic COVID-19 illness.
Methods
We conducted a national, cross-sectional, online survey between July 31 to October 2, 2020, among 2,535 respondents. We used multivariable regression and free-text analyses to explore factors associated with U.S. food system workers’ intentions to attend work while ill (i.e., presenteeism intentions) during the first four to six months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Results
Overall, 8.8% of workers surveyed reported intentions to attend work while symptomatic with COVID-19 disease. Almost half of respondents (41.1%) reported low or very low household food security. Workers reporting a high workplace safety climate score were half as likely to report presenteeism intentions (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0.52, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.37, 0.75) relative to those reporting low scores. Workers reporting low (aOR 2.06, 95% CI 1.35, 3.13) or very low (aOR 2.31, 95% CI 1.50, 3.13) levels of household food security had twice the odds of reporting presenteeism intentions relative to those reporting high/marginal food security.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that workplace culture and safety climate could enable employees to feel like they can take leave when sick during a pandemic, which is critical to individual health and prevention of workplace disease transmission. However, the pressure experienced by food workers to work when ill, especially by those experiencing food insecurity, themselves, underscores the need for strategies which address these vulnerabilities and empower food workers to make health-protective decisions.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2022.04.25.22274276: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Institutional Review Board considered this study exempt (category 2) from oversight (IRB No. 12549). Sex as a biological variable While these efforts enhanced participant inclusion so that, for each variable no more than 10% were missing data, associations remained between missing USDA Food Security Module scores and identifying as non-white, female or “other” gender, and Hispanic/Latinx. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis Sample size calculations determined(? Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Statistical analyses: We used STATA 14 I/C software (College Station, Texas USA) to generate … SciScore for 10.1101/2022.04.25.22274276: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Institutional Review Board considered this study exempt (category 2) from oversight (IRB No. 12549). Sex as a biological variable While these efforts enhanced participant inclusion so that, for each variable no more than 10% were missing data, associations remained between missing USDA Food Security Module scores and identifying as non-white, female or “other” gender, and Hispanic/Latinx. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis Sample size calculations determined(? Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Statistical analyses: We used STATA 14 I/C software (College Station, Texas USA) to generate descriptive statistics and used Chi Squared or Rank Sum tests (significance value p < 0.05) to examine differences between participants reporting presenteeism intentions versus not. STATAsuggested: (Stata, RRID:SCR_012763)Atlas.ti (Version 8.0, Berlin, Germany) and Microsoft Excel (Washington, USA) were used to sort, organize, and manage free-text data. Microsoft Excelsuggested: (Microsoft Excel, RRID:SCR_016137)Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:LIMITATIONS: As with other Internet-based surveys, our sample overrepresented white, female, and high-income individuals (Ali et al., 2020; Lehdonvirta et al., 2020) (despite considerable measures to improve sample diversity); and attrition resulted in missing data. Our treatment of missing data strengthen this study by identifying limitations in generalizability. Because respondents identifying as Hispanic/Latinx are more likely to lack outcome data and our sample sizes of non-white workers are small, our analyses may underestimate or fail to detect effects felt by African American and Hispanic/Latinx or other Black/Indigenous/People of Color (BIPOC) individuals. These groups are of high interest because we expect they were more likely to feel negative impacts related to COVID-19 (Waltenburg et al., 2021). Future studies must focus on the inclusion of these groups. While our efforts to recover scale data allowed us to include more respondents, it is likely we are underestimating levels of presenteeism intentions, work demands, and food insecurity while overrepresenting organizational safety climate due to these missing data patterns. We used validated scales and measures; however, these scales measure perceptions (e.g. concern about food insecurity, not actual food insecurity) which could have been influenced by the widespread anxiety felt by many Americans during the early pandemic. Still, our findings fill an important research gap by documenting conditions facing food sys...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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