Workplace wellness programs - a wrong path to promoting workers' health and well-being

There is a growing body of research and academic literature calling into question the basic tenets underpinning workplace wellness programs and highlighting their discriminatory aspects. This research has also documented an increase rather than a decrease in employer spending on health care with these programs, with no net health benefit. At the same time, NIOSH, through its Total Worker Health (TWH) agenda, is promoting the advancement of workers' health and well-being by integrating problematic workplace wellness programs with traditional occupational safety and health programs. This presentation will review recent research uncovering serious problems with workplace wellness programs, discuss lawsuits filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against employers whose programs the agency considered non-voluntary and illegal, and recommend a different course of action for NIOSH. Twentieth–century journalist and social critic Henry Louis Mencken wrote, “…There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.” NIOSH’s vision for a National Total Worker Health Agenda, with its linchpin of integrating flawed workplace wellness programs with occupational safety and health programs, unfortunately seems to fit that mold. This presentation will highlight the need for NIOSH to abandon its current TWH vision and return to its exclusive focus on the identification, elimination and reduction of workplace exposures that can cause or contribute to workers’ ill health. Such a program would comport with NIOSH’s statutory mission and duties, and unambiguously improve workers’ health and well-being.