Organisational justice and health of employees: prospective cohort study

Aims: To examine the association between components of organisational justice (that is, justice of decision making procedures and interpersonal treatment) and health of employees.Methods: The Poisson regression analyses of recorded all-cause sickness absences with medical certificate and the logistic regression analyses of minor psychiatric morbidity, as assessed by the General Health Questionnaire, and poor self rated health status were based on a cohort of 416 male and 3357 female employees working during 1998-2000 in 10 hospitals in Finland.Results: Low versus high justice of decision making procedures was associated with a 41% higher risk of sickness absence in men (rate ratio (RR) 1.4, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.1 to 1.8), and a 12% higher risk in women (RR 1.1, 95% CI 1.0 to 1.2) after adjustment for baseline characteristics., The corresponding odds ratios (OR) for minor psychiatric morbidity were 1.6 (95% CI 1.0 to 2.6) in men and 1.4 (95% CI 1.2 to 1.7) in women, and for self rated health 1.4 in both sexes. In interpersonal treatment, low justice increased the risk of sickness absence (RR 1.3 (95% CI 1.0 to 1.6) and RR 1.2 (95% CI 1.2 to 1.3) in men and women respectively), and minor psychiatric morbidity (OR 1.2 in both sexes). These figures largely Persisted after control for other risk factors (for example, job control, workload, social support, and hostility) and they were replicated in initially healthy subcohorts. No evidence was found to support the hypothesis that organisational justice would represent a consequence of health (reversed causality).Conclusions: This is the first longitudinal study to show that the extent to which people are treated with justice in workplaces independently predicts their health

Factors underlying the effect of organisational downsizing on health of employees: longitudinal cohort study

Objective: To explore the underlying mechanisms between organisational downsizing and deterioration of health of employees. Design: Longitudinal cohort study. Data were assembled from before downsizing (time 1); during major downsizing affecting some job categories (time 2); and after downsizing (time 3). Contributions of changes in work, support, and health related behaviours between time 1 and time 2 to the relation between downsizing and sickness absence at time 3 were assessed by multilevel modelling. Mean length of follow up was 4.9 years. Setting: Raisio, a town in Finland. Subjects: 764 municipal employees who remained in employment after downsizing. Main outcome measures: Records of absences from work from all causes with medical certificate. Results: Downsizing was associated with negative changes in work, impaired support from spouse, and increased prevalence of smoking. Sickness absence rate from all causes was 2.17 (95% confidence interval 1.54 to 3.07) times higher after major downsizing than after minor downsizing. Adjustment for changes in work (for instance, physical demands, job control, and job insecurity) diminished the relation between downsizing and sickness absence by 49%. Adjustments for impaired social support or increased smoking did not alter the relation between downsizing and sickness absence. The findings were unaffected by sex and income. Conclusions: The exploration of potential mediating factors provides new information about the possible causal pathways linking organisational downsizing and health. Downsizing results in changes in work, social relationships, and health related behaviours. The observed increase in certificated sickness absence was partially explained by concomitant increases in physical demands and job insecurity and a reduction in job control. A considerable proportion of the increase, however, remained unexplained by the factors measured

Failure to protect.:The Path to and Consequences of Humanitarian Interventionism

This book investigates the reasons and consequences of military operations by Western powers. It focuses on interventions aimed at protecting civilians from terror, dictators and criminals in fragile states. By doing that it contributes to the cosmopolitan, feminist and post-colonial literature on interventions. By studying the 12 cases of protective interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Central African Republic, Somalia, Yemen, Mauritania, Libya, Mali and Syria, and by comparing developments in these conflicts with conflicts in fragile states, which have not been intervened by great powers, the book reveals that 1. The interventionist era after 1999 has been associated with an increase in conflict fatalities, while the non-interventionist era 1989-1999 was associated with declining conflict violence. States continued to strengthen their control over violence all though both periods.2. States that experienced humanitarian interventions generally became more fragile and violent than before the intervention. On average their state fragility deteriorated. Fragile conflict states that were not intervened by protective great powers tended to strengthen their control over violence and their conflict violence developed more favourably and conflicts ended, on average, in a shorter time than in the case of protected fragile states. 3. Intrastate conflicts in fragile states that were intervened were escalated more than conflicts that were not intervened. The book also traces the discursive path to such failure by analysing quantitatively and qualitatively the interactive discourses of the proponents and opponents of humanitarian protection in these 12 cases. This analysis revealed that there were three main reasons why Western protection escalated conflicts. 1. The lack of strong global agency in the protection lead to the need to justify operations for national constituencies in a way that made operations look selfish in fragile states. The terrorist strike on 11 September 2001 dramatically deteriorated this problem as the victimhood of the US meant that discourse on protection had to assume even more nationalistic tones. 2. The willingness to conduct operations outside the UN mandate and global agency lead to view in the target countries that protection was really motivated by a hidden geopolitical agenda. The confusion of the UN role in the first protective operations created a precedence of unilateralist operations and this escalated conflicts. 3. Finally, there was a political need to signal strength and determination against violent impunity in fragile states, and this led to militaristic strategies of protection. Such strategies created a situation where proponents and opponents of protection justified their own violence by references to the violence of their opponent. The book concludes that the cosmopolitan protection is political and therefore it requires representative global agency and institutions to be legitimate and to avoid accusations of partisanship. Furthermore, the book concludes that protection is marred by militaristic stereotypical masculinity and power bias. There is a need to reveal the masculine gender bias in protection and to denaturalize the militaristic biases in protection. To avoid escalation, cosmopolitan protection requires what the book calls “democratic matriotism”: an approach that emphasizes local ownership and feminine experience in dealing with violence. <br/

Employee control over working times: associations with subjective health and sickness absences

Study objective: To investigate the impact of employees' worktime control on health, taking into account other aspects of job control. Design: Analysis of questionnaire data in 1997 and register data on sickness absence during 1996–1998. Setting: Eight towns in Finland. Participants: 6442 municipal employees (1490 men and 4952 women) representing the staff of the towns studied. Follow up was 17 706 person years. Main results: In women, poor health and psychological distress were more prevalent among those in the lowest quartile of worktime control than those in the highest (after adjustment for potential confounders including other aspects of job control, odds ratios and their 95% confidence intervals for poor health and psychological distress were 1.8 (1.5 to 2.3) and 1.6 (1.3 to 2.0), respectively). Correspondingly, the adjusted sickness absence rate was 1.2 (1.1 to 1.2) times higher in women with low worktime control than in women with high worktime control. In men, no significant associations between worktime control and health were found. These results, obtained from the total sample, were replicable within a homogeneous occupational group comprising women and men. Conclusions: Exploration of specific aspects of job control provides new information about potentially reversible causes of health problems in a working population. Worktime control is an independent predictor of health in women but not in men. Dissimilarities in the distribution of occupations between men and women are not a probable explanation for this difference

Kim Jong-un is not the only obstruction to peace in Korea

The article analyses the relationship between domestic and security policies in South Kore