1. Best Medical Health Insurance Plans
Irregular employment in its relation to industry has been the main topic of many investigations.
Though these investigations have already been made out of other purposes in mind, they have shown
that irregular employment has a very definite regards to the health of the workers both as a cause
and aftereffect of sickness.
E-effects of irregular employment upon health. - The specific ramifications of irregular employment
upon the health of workers, as observed by physicians and students of industrial conditions, are so
familiar they need not be discussed here at any length. The very fact that the income of an employee
is uncertain has been found to become a cause of impaired physical efficiency. The detailed
examination of male garment workers in NEW YORK by Schereschewsky afforded the foundation for
the following conclusion:
Through the busy season the workers drive themselves at top speed to be able to earn just as much
money as you medical health insurance possibly can, to tide them on the slack seasons, while,
through the dull periods, they are without sufficient occupation to keep up their interest. Such
conditions are productive of considerable mental stress, the worker through the busy season
overdriving himself and spending the slack season in wondering if work will undoubtedly be
forthcoming later on. This condition of affairs Is reflected in the relatively large number of operators
found to be distinctly neurasthenic or of neurasthenic tendency.
Similar conclusions were indicated by Schwab's investigation of garment workers in St. Louis.
The effects of irregular employment are not limited to the physical impairment caused by worry and
periodic overdriving. The lessened opportunity to earn wages due to irregular employment or by
physical disability means a smaller income and therefore a lessened capability to maintain a
healthful quality lifestyle. The earnings of workers whose rates of pay will be adequate to provide for
healthful conditions of living if they could work steadily tend to be so reduced by irregular
employment a condition of poverty is the result. In most cases the unemployed worker is forced right
into a lower level of occupation. The unemployed worker will probably take any job that he can get
in order to supply the bare necessities of life, and the tendency is for him to drift in to the " floating "
or " casual " labor class.
The casual laborers at the docks in NEW YORK are comprised largely of workers who've gradually
lost their economic status in industry, and the dock worker continues to slip down in the industrial
scale until he reaches the class of " shenangoes," the down and-out longshoremen who are with the
capacity of only light work and who finally become burdens upon public and private charity.
According to testimony prior to the "USA Commission on Industrial Elations’, most of the
7,000 applicants for work at the San Francisco Cooperative Employment Bureau were of the casual
labor class, and one-half of the total number of applicants were found to be incapacitated for work
on account of poor nutrition, disease, and exposure. The records of many investigators of the
unemployed abound with similar instances.
Where the wageworker is the breadwinner of a family group, the loss of his earnings occasioned by
irregular employment or by his drop into a poorer paid occupation cannot but have serious effects
upon the fitness of the family. Either the household is forced into that class whose income is
insufficient to keep up a healthful standard of Using or the wife is compelled to become wage earner
to be able to supplement the household income. Either of the conditions has serious consequences