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From the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, 3,280 injured workers involving 5,204 events during 1988 through 2000 were followed up. Longitudinal analyses with 29,520 observations were conducted using SAS 9.1.

Different types of job insecurity at different level (e.g. at macro local economy level, job characteristics level, company level, and social structure level) were explored. Moreover, how different job insecurity measures at different levels are empirically related to workers' compensation outcome in the NLSY79 data was investigated.

Many covariates including education, income, occupation (measured by either injury risk or psychosocial factors such as decision latitude, job satisfaction), industry, and type of injury were considered. Both GEE logistic regression results (OR predicting filing by insecure contract = 0.55, 95% C.I. = 0.34_0.89, OR recent unemployment experience = 0.79, 95% C.I.= 0.65_0.96, OR combined job insecurity =0.75, 95% C.I. = 0.63_0.90) and panel data analysis results (beta = -0.18, p<0.0001) showed that workers in the low job security group are less likely to file for workers' compensation when they were hurt on the job.

Out of the filed cases, 53.5% were denied. The results showed that workers who have severe injury (OR = 1.85, 95% C.I. = 1.71_2.01), job insecurity (OR=1.82, 95% C.I.=1.52_2.17), low income (OR = 1.94, 95% C.I.=1.60_2.36), and manual jobs (OR =1.84, 95% C.I.=1.51_2.24) were more likely to lose wages when they filed claims.

The study found that there exist negative effects of workers' compensation filing such as lost earnings, employment disadvantages, and under-compensation by workers' compensation insurers. The study suggests that workers with low job security need to be protected from any reprisal action against their employment when they were filing for workers' compensation.