I've also coauthored a few studies in occupational health, a lot of it with farm workers, but not all of it. One of them concerned older workers and the association of arthritis-related disability with broad occupational class. My dad was blue-collar (an autoworker, he retired from GMAD Leeds after 30 years and passed away in his early 70s) and my mom was pink-collar. Thanks to their hard work, I was able to make it to a white collar job. Here's the abstract from the arthritis paper, along with a link for anyone interested in reading more. The upshot is that arthritis is quite a bit more brutal for a blue collar worker than for a white collar worker. That may be obvious, but we were able to quantify the differences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154222/
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Originally Posted by "Arthritis, Occupational Class, and the Aging US Workforce" article in the American Journal of Public Health
Objectives. The working poor sometimes delay retirement to survive. However, their higher risk of disease and disability threatens both their financial survival and their ability to work through the retirement years. We used the burden of disease attributable to arthritis by occupational class to illustrate the challenges faced by the older poor.
Methods. We merged data from the National Health Interview Survey, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, and the National Death Index into a single database. We then calculated and compared age- and occupational class–specific quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) between workers with and without arthritis by using unabridged life tables.
Results. White-collar workers have a higher overall health-related quality of life than do other workers, and suffer fewer QALYs lost to arthritis at all ages. For instance, whereas 65-year-old white-collar workers without arthritis look forward to 17 QALYs of future life, blue-collar workers with arthritis experience only 11, and are much less likely to remain in the workforce than are those in service, farming, or white-collar jobs.
Conclusions. To meet the needs of the aging workforce, more extensive health and disability insurance will be needed.
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