[lit-ideas] Killing People with Work
- From: Eric Yost <NYCEric@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 04:00:54 -0400
Extract of larger article full of more disgusting news about the slave
future for Americans and everyone else, from
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/health/05stress.html?pagewanted=1&hp
SICK OF WORK
Always on the Job, Employees Pay With Health
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: September 5, 2004
American workers are stressed out, and in an unforgiving economy, they
are becoming more so every day.
Sixty-two percent say their workload has increased over the last six
months; 53 percent say work leaves them "overtired and overwhelmed."
Even at home, in the soccer bleachers or at the Labor Day picnic,
workers are never really off the clock, bound to BlackBerries,
cellphones and laptops. Add iffy job security, rising health care costs,
ailing pension plans and the fear that a financial setback could put
mortgage payments out of reach, and the office has become, for many, an
echo chamber of angst.
It is enough to make workers sick - and it does.
Decades of research have linked stress to everything from heart attacks
and stroke to diabetes and a weakened immune system. Now, however,
researchers are connecting the dots, finding that the growing stress and
uncertainty of the office have a measurable impact on workers' health
and, by extension, on companies' bottom lines.
Workplace stress costs the nation more than $300 billion each year in
health care, missed work and the stress-reduction industry that has
grown up to soothe workers and keep production high, according to
estimates by the American Institute of Stress in New York. And workers
who report that they are stressed, said Steven L. Sauter, chief of the
Organizational Science and Human Factors Branch of the National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, incur health care costs
that are 46 percent higher, or an average of $600 more per person, than
other employees.
"The costs are significant," Dr. Sauter said, adding, "Those are just
the costs to the organization, and not the burden to individuals and to
society."
American workers are not the only ones grappling with escalating stress
and ever greater job demands. European companies are changing
once-generous vacation policies, and stress-related illnesses cost
England 13 million working days each year, one British health official
said.
"It's an issue everywhere you go in the world," said Dr. Guy Standing,
the lead author of "Economic Security for a Better World," a new report
from the International Labor Office, an agency of the United Nations.
White-collar workers are particularly at risk, Dr. Standing said,
because "we tend to take our work home."
Most stress-related health problems are a far cry from the phenomenon
known in Japan as karoshi, or "death from overwork." But downsizing,
rapid business expansion, outsourcing - trends that some have credited
with increasing the nation's economic health - translate into increases
in sick days, hospitalization, the risk of heart attack and a host of
other stress-related problems, researchers find.
The changing workplace, said Hugo Westerlund, a researcher at the
National Institute for Psychosocial Medicine in Stockholm, "does pose a
threat to people's health."
Growth of the Untraditional Job
The days when an employer said "if you do your job, you'll have a job"
are long gone.
The traditional career, progressing step by step through the corridors
of one or two institutions, "is finished," said Dr. Richard Sennett, a
sociologist at New York University. He has calculated that a young
American today with at least two years of college can expect to change
jobs at least 11 times before retirement.
Business has moved away from traditional employment, now an almost
quaint concept described in a recent RAND Corporation study as
"full-time jobs of indefinite duration at a facility owned or rented by
the employer."
Instead, that study found, one in every four workers in the United
States is "in some nontraditional employment relationship," including
part-time work and self-employment. Four out of 10 Americans now work
"mostly at nonstandard time," according to figures cited by Harriet
Presser of the University of Maryland. The odd hours include evenings,
nights, rotating shifts and weekends to meet the demands of global
supply chains and customers in every time zone.
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