CDC Shelves Workplace Obesity Website After Complaints
The
CDC has taken down a website that offered an “obesity cost calculator”
to help American bosses tally financial losses linked to their
overweight employees, a spokeswoman for the agency confirmed Tuesday.
Called Lean Works!,
the federal program drew recent criticism from some nutritionists and
advocates for overweight Americans who claimed the site and its obesity
calculator fueled workplace discrimination and perhaps even led some
companies to fire fat people. NBC News first reported those concerns Nov. 2.
Brittany Behm, a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said via email that content once posted
at Lean Works! “is under review,” adding: “The calculator is also under
review and will be potentially updated with new information,
technology.”
“The recent attention
to the LEAN Works! program caused us to put this part of the website at
the top of the list for review, hence why it is currently down,” Behm
wrote. “… The potential misuse of this information is something we will
certainly consider in our upcoming content review.”
Joanne P. Ikeda,
nutritionist emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley called
the move a “victory” for people who are “committed to ending
discrimination based on body size.”
At the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, vice chairman Peggy Howell said: “I am over here doing a happy dance.”
Is the CDC Fueling Anti-Fat Bias in Workplaces?
A
CDC campaign that gives U.S. bosses an “obesity cost calculator” to
tally the financial losses linked to their overweight employees is being
criticized as spurring workplace discrimination — and perhaps enticing
companies to fire fat people.
LEAN Works!, a program
offered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, states
on its website that “many organizations realize the need to assess the
costs of obesity as it relates to their bottom line,” and reports the
annual health care cost of obesity exceeds $140 billion.
Workplace weight bias is in the news again following the release of a Vanderbilt University study that found heavier U.S. women earn about 5 percent less than average-size women who hold similar jobs.
Now, some nutritionists
and advocates for overweight Americans claim LEAN Works! is boosting
anti-fat sentiments at work via its “obesity calculator.”
That online tool lets supervisors plug in the body mass indices of all
employees then tabulate the resulting costs to the companies in
prescriptions, hospitalizations and work days lost.
For example, according
to the LEAN Works! calculator, if a 520-person financial company,
conducting business in several states, employs 200 people whose BMI (30
or higher) designates them as being obese, the company's annual “medical
and work loss costs” would total $438,600. (Those numbers are also
based on U.S. Labor Department figures showing the average wage in financial jobs is $31 per hour.)
“Supposedly, LEAN Works!
is meant to help companies provide support services for people who are
fat. But I think it’s nothing more than a way to identify employees who
should be terminated,” said Joanne Ikeda, nutritionist emeritus at the
University of California, Berkeley. She said she wrote a letter of
complaint to CDC leaders, saying LEAN Works! sends a bad message to
American bosses.
“It really pisses me off,” Ikeda added, “that the government has allowed this to happen.”
CDC officials contend,
however, that LEAN Works! offers a range of evidence-based resources to
help work sites design wellness programs that improve the health of all
employees, from worker bees up to CEOs.
“To our knowledge, no
organization has used the LEAN Works! tool to ‘target’ overweight
workers for termination,” said Deborah A. Galuska, associate director
for science at the CDC’s division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and
Obesity.
“Informing employers
regarding the cost of obesity to their organization can help make the
business case for providing a healthier work environment — one where
nutrition and physical activity is valued,” Galuska added. “… LEAN
Works! is not intended to contribute to workplace discrimination."
She points out, too,
that the cost calculator's webpage states: “CDC’s LEAN Works! should not
be used to promote discriminatory practices such as considering weight
in hiring or other personnel decisions. Weight discrimination is a
serious issue and evidence indicates that it occurs in the work place.”
Another weight-bias
expert argues that such workplace discrimination is motivated not by the
costs associated with heavier workers but simply by a personal distaste
some supervisors hold against the image of larger people, especially
larger women.
“If medical costs or
productivity costs were driving the lower wages and lower employment
experienced by obese workers, we would expect to see obese men and obese
women encountering similar barriers in the labor market,” said Jennifer
Shinall, assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt, and author of the
earnings study. “In fact, we see much bigger penalties in the labor
market for obese women than we see for obese men.”
But the CDC’s program is
compounding those existing job disadvantages through its messaging and
through its obesity cost calculator, said Peggy Howell, vice chairman
and public relations director at the National Association to Advance Fat
Acceptance.
“It concerns us that the
government would invest all this time … to further stigmatize an entire
segment of the population,” Howell said.
Further,
the mathematical foundation for LEAN Works! — body mass index — is
misguided, Howell contends, because BMI was never intended to be an
assessment of an individual’s overall fitness. (BMI is a measure of
relative weight based on a person’s mass and height).
“The fact that this
program is based purely on a person's weight with no consideration for
their health is a problem,” Howell said.
Then, there is the
question, she added, of how companies choose to incorporate LEAN Works! —
and whether they punish employees who don’t participate or who don't
cut weight.
“What may be intended as
a ‘voluntary’ program with incentives and rewards may be turned into a
‘mandatory’ program which, according to the (U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission), is possibly illegal,” Howell said.
“The belief that a
person's body size makes them less valuable than another can lead to
discrimination in hiring and compensation practices for a whole segment
of the population.”
CDC Shelves Workplace Obesity Website After Complaints
The
CDC has taken down a website that offered an “obesity cost calculator”
to help American bosses tally financial losses linked to their
overweight employees, a spokeswoman for the agency confirmed Tuesday.
Called Lean Works!,
the federal program drew recent criticism from some nutritionists and
advocates for overweight Americans who claimed the site and its obesity
calculator fueled workplace discrimination and perhaps even led some
companies to fire fat people. NBC News first reported those concerns Nov. 2.
Brittany Behm, a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said via email that content once posted
at Lean Works! “is under review,” adding: “The calculator is also under
review and will be potentially updated with new information,
technology.”
“The recent attention
to the LEAN Works! program caused us to put this part of the website at
the top of the list for review, hence why it is currently down,” Behm
wrote. “… The potential misuse of this information is something we will
certainly consider in our upcoming content review.”
Joanne P. Ikeda,
nutritionist emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley called
the move a “victory” for people who are “committed to ending
discrimination based on body size.”
At the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, vice chairman Peggy Howell said: “I am over here doing a happy dance.”
IN-DEPTH
- Is the CDC Fueling Anti-Fat Bias in Workplaces?
- Overweight Women Tend To Earn Smaller Paychecks, Study Claims
- New Obese Crash Dummies Developed to Help Save More Lives
SOCIAL
-- Bill Briggs
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