Workers’ satisfaction with job safety rebounds to pre-pandemic level: Gallup

Workers’ satisfaction with job safety rebounded to pre-pandemic levels last month after dipping nearly 10 points last year, according to a new Gallup poll.

The survey found that 72 percent of workers are completely satisfied with the physical safety conditions of their workplaces. That number was a significant bounce back from Gallup’s 2020 survey, which found that 65 percent of workers were completely satisfied with safety conditions at work.

In 2019, 74 percent of respondents told Gallup the same.

Twenty percent of respondents said they are somewhat satisfied with their work’s safety conditions this year, and seven percent said they were somewhat or completely dissatisfied.

The rebound in work safety satisfaction comes as more workplaces are beginning to mandate vaccinations for employees, especially after the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last month.

According to a Gallup survey released last week, 56 percent of Americans support companies requiring that employees show proof of vaccination to go to offices or work sites, with 44 percent opposing such a measure. 

The U.S. is, however, still seeing a nationwide spike in COVID-19 cases, driven largely by the highly contagious delta variant that is now the dominant strain in the U.S.

Satisfaction with the physical safety conditions of workplaces was tied for the job characteristic that received the highest marks from respondents this year. Relations with co-workers also received a 72 percent completely satisfied rate.

The amount of on-the-job stress tracked the lowest level of satisfaction, with only 32 percent of respondents saying they were completely satisfied with that aspect of their work.

The poll interviewed 1,006 adults in the U.S. between Aug. 2-17. The margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points.