Standing Still: Why North American Workers are Not Insisting on Seats despite Known Health Benefits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prolonged standing is associated with health problems. Despite regulations providing for access to seats, most Québec (Canada) workers usually stand. Only one in six can sit at will. Standing service workers such as cashiers and sales personnel are often confined to a small area where sitting is theoretically feasible. In many other countries, such workers have access to seats. This study asks why North American workers do not press for seats. In a qualitative, exploratory approach, 30 young workers who usually work standing were interviewed about their perceptions and experiences of prolonged standing at work. All but one experienced discomfort associated with this posture, and two-thirds reported that they had changed their lifestyle in some way as a result of their symptoms. However, their accounts of relationships with employers, health care personnel, and the health and safety system suggest that many environmental factors as well as attitudes toward work, employers, health, and the body contribute to maintaining the status quo. Workers describe problems with the image of a seated worker and thought that asking for a seat would threaten their relationship with the employer. Personal comfort was considered an insufficient reason to challenge worksite design, attitudes, and organization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".