Abstract B1: Promoting environmental worksite wellness among minority owned businesses: A feasibility study
Authors: Bowen Deborah J. , Wallace Phyllis M. 
Published: December 2010

Introduction: Chronic disease is common among working adults, with rates of chronic disease and associated costs comparable to the general population. Workplaces are an important place for health promotion activities, because they can reach the majority of adults with policies, programs, and resources proven to improve health behaviors and improve chronic disease outcomes. In general, the more resources that a business or workplace has, the more it is able to spend some of those resources on employees. Minority businesses, those workplaces that are owned by an ethnic minority individual, might have potential to improve the health behaviors of ethnic minority employees and thereby reduce health disparities. However, one concern is that there are fewer resources in minority-owned businesses that could make it more difficult for them to support employees in health promotion efforts. Not much is known about the abilities of minority workplaces to engage and sustain health promotion policies, practices, and programs. This paper will present the formative research phase of a multi-site intervention study to determine the feasibility of introducing a worksite health promotion program aimed at improving workplace structural and policy environments to improving employee healthy eating, physical activity, and cancer screening, and tobacco cessation. We will present and compare characteristics of minority-owned and white-owned businesses in the greater Boston Massachusetts area. We hypothesize that minority-owned businesses will report lower levels of important resources compared with white-owned businesses.

Methods: These data were collected as part of the 1997 Economic Census of minority and woman-owned businesses, the most recent survey conducted nationally with all businesses labeled “minority-owned.” We selected only those businesses with paid employees to avoid consultants and other owner-only businesses.

Results: White-owned businesses (n=74,615) reported higher sales/receipts ($45,582,400), higher numbers of employees (n=23), and higher payroll output ($8,585,500) per business than did minority-owned businesses (n=4,779) ($6,404,600; $7,907,900, respectively). Of all minority owned businesses, black-owned businesses (n=847) reported lower sales/receipts, lower numbers of employees, and lower payroll output per business compared with Hispanic (n=836), Native American (n=171), and Asian/Pacific Island-owned (n=2,989) businesses.

Discussion: These values indicate that minority-owned businesses are smaller, make less money, have fewer employees, and spend less money on employees than do white-owned businesses. These data also indicate that black-owned businesses are the lowest resourced group of businesses studied. Compared with other minority-owned businesses, black-owned businesses are less able to meet the health promotion needs and requests of their employees and less able to provide them with resources. This disparity could lead to interventions to improve the support for black-owned and minority-owned businesses for their health promotion efforts.

Citation Information: Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2010;19(10 Suppl):B1.