Why do workers leave jobs after periods of sickness?

Blackburn-based Partwell Special Steels Limited have been fined £80,000 after an incident on site killed an employee, when he was crushed under a machine.

Connor Borthwick (22) was working for the company at its Bruce Street site on 25 November 2021, moving a large cutting press machine across a workshop floor.

Connor and another employee were attempting to place skates underneath the machine to move it more easily. It was whilst the machine was being lowered by a jack onto these skates that it became unbalanced, and toppled backwards onto Connor.

Connor was trapped beneath, where he suffered catastrophic crush injuries. Subsequently, he died from these injuries.

Connor’s sister Emily has released a statement on behalf of the family, saying Connor was her “amazing, caring, loving and funny little brother”.

The Work Foundation at Lancaster University has tracked the employment records of over 9100 workers, aged between 16 and 60 from 2017/18 to 2021/22, focusing on those who became ill within the first two years of the study. 

It wanted to examine the reasons behind workers dropping out of the UK jobs market after sickness and to see what can be done to stem the flow of people leaving work due to ill health.

Researchers found that 9% of employees who had experienced a decline in health had left the labour market by the end of the four-year study period and almost half of them had left work within the first 12 months.

Men were more likely to leave within the first year (4.7%) compared to women (3.9%). 

The Foundation argues that flexibility at work is key for those with health conditions being able to remain in work as it found that employees without any flexibility in their job roles were four times more likely to leave work after a health decline.

Similarly, those with low levels of control over their working hours, pace, tasks, order and work manner were 3.7 times more likely to leave their job.

However, when more than 1000 senior business leaders across Great Britain were surveyed, 64% said poor employee health had a detrimental effect on their organisation’s economic performance but just 48% offered flexible working arrangements to their employees. 

Work Foundation Director, Ben Harrison, said: “The evidence is clear that once someone leaves work due to ill health, it becomes increasingly more challenging to help them back into employment.

To achieve the Government’s ambition to boost the employment rate to 80%, we must take action to stem the flow of those leaving work due to sickness and find new ways to ensure they remain connected to the labour market.” 

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