UC Irvine Institute of Transportation Studies

This bibliography was prepared as supporting documentation for Project I/BTH-Bl-002 (ITS) conducted by the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Irvine, under the sponsorship of the State of California's Business, Transportation and Housing Agency. 

This project reviewed three facets of human resource productivity in public transit: workers' compensation costs, extraboard scheduling and operator stress. These seemingly disparate topics share a common attribute: they each have been associated with the costs of absenteeism in the transit industry. Management concerns about abuses of workers' compensation have led them to regard this program as a significant incentive for absenteeism. Extraboards, in contrast, have helped to insure schedule reliability by providing a ready pool of labor to replace absent employees. 1 The phenomenon of operator stress has occupied a middle ground, viewed by some as a cause of workers' compensation claims, and by others as a result of traditional scheduling practices, such as the extraboard. 

This bibliography reviews over 50 international studies which have addressed the interrelated issues of absenteeism, workers' compensation, extraboard scheduling and stress-related illness in the transit industry. Section I provides bibliographic information and summary abstracts of each of these studies. Section II describes two recently initiated U.S. research projects which are exploring transit operator stress, hypertension, and operator performance for the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Academy of Science's Transportation Research Board. Section Ill, prepared by project assistants Susan Lesh and Marianne Miasnik, lists a number of general studies of workers' compensation reviewed as background to our current study.