Employee Assistance Programs

Abstract

strong impression that corporate-sponsored counseling for troubled employees, or assistance, is coming of age. The majority of the nation's largest and most prominent corporations now sponsor some form of organized employee counseling, and the alcoholism programs from which these larger efforts have developed are themselves proliferating. Occupational alcoholism programs expanded at a measured rate for over 30 years, but the pace began to accelerate sharply during the 1970s. In its 1981 report to Congress, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) charted this growth: from 4 to 6 programs from 1940 to 1945; 50 in 1950; 500 in 1973; 2,400 in 1977; and 4,400 in 1979-1980 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1981). The most recent of a series of surveys of United States corporations, conducted for the NIAAA, found that the number of executives reporting the existence of a company alcoholism program had more than doubled since the first survey seven years earlier (Opinion Research Corporation, 1979). A recent Conference Board report on approaches in the business world to the problem of alcoholism identified a marked diffusion of formal programs