| Work is the source of wealth, so why does it cause ill health for workers? The culprit is capitalism... |
Stress and mental health in the workplace
WORKERS, SEPT 2005 ISSUE
Why does WORK, the source of all goods, often feel so bad? The Community Service Volunteers (CSV) conducted a survey which indicated that voluntary work helps people to overcome stress. So what is it that causes so many workers to feel stressed and become mentally unwell as a result of working for their employer?
The cost of stress
Psychiatrists writing in the British Medical Journal claim that stress and depression have overtaken back pain as the main reasons for workers claiming incapacity benefit. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) revealed that in 2002 about five million workers in Britain said they experienced stress, of whom half a million felt it made them ill. This costs the nation £3.7 billion. In fact the International Labour Organisation suggests that the cost of stress amounts to over 10% of Britain's Gross National Product.
In 1996 the Institute of Management estimated 270,000 people take time off work every day because of work-related stress; this represents a cumulative cost in terms of sick pay, lost production and NHS charges of around £7 billion annually. The HSE gives more recent figures of 13 million days a year lost, with an average of 29 days per case.
Two extremely high stress areas are nursing, where three out of ten people suffer from stress, and teaching where the figure is four out of ten. It can be seen that work-related mental health problems account for a considerable proportion of total mental health costs to the British economy which come out at some £40 billion every year. This is borne out in the 2003 Stressed Out survey by the Samaritans. The survey found: "People's jobs are the single biggest cause of stress - with over a third (36 per cent) of Britons citing it as one of their biggest stressors."
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found more than half of employers reported an increase in stress-related absence. Research in Northern Ireland even found that 30% to 40% of all sickness absence is due to some form of mental or emotional disturbance.
Photo: Jonny Olsson/www.arbeidstilsynet.no
The causes of stress
Causes of stress are numerous, including overwork, increasing pace of work, tighter deadlines and increasing pressure, bullying, low job control and satisfaction, job insecurity, new ways of working, and poor work organisation.
The TUC's view is that a workplace with a lot of stress may suffer from high absenteeism, higher risk of accidents, industrial relations problems, de-motivation and high labour turnover. Unions have long striven to reduce the working life of workers whether it be in the form of shorter days, or hours per day, sufficient breaks and time between shifts, longer holidays or earlier retirement age.
With respect to the issue of a shorter working life, the government's response to the anti-sex discrimination legislation was to increase the pension age for women rather than decrease that for men. This flew in the face of the widespread understanding that increased life expectancy among women was partly due to the fact that they retired earlier than men.
In fact the government's policy for retirement age is genocidal in nature, as it intends to move retirement even further back, to the age of 70. (See First Thoughts, Workers February 2005).
The Blair government early in its third term has encouraged European ministers to support the continuation of the opt out on the maximum 48 hour week. So much for being protected by the EU.
The National Work-Stress network mentions studies from around the world which show that workers tend to have high blood pressure if they work over 50 hours, or have jobs that are both demanding and over which they have little control. Even rumours of impending plant closure can raise blood pressure. The Network also cites China with its rapid capitalist economic change where there has been a huge rise in cardiovascular disease. There has been a massive increase in work rates, reduction of control over the workplace by the workers, and fear of unemployment.
The June edition of Hazards Magazine contains items on increased heart attacks associated with boring jobs, and increasing rates of heart disease, mental illness, bowel disease and diabetes among those workers doing long hours.
It is not just at work that there is stress, for most workers there is the twice daily ordeal of getting to work, often on congested roads. A better public transport system might improve this. But in London the underground system places stresses on the hundreds of thousands who use it daily to get to work. Trains in the South East and other areas are overcrowded and frequently delayed adding to the anguish felt by commuters.
GP services are frequently unable to provide adequate care for the mentally ill. The Royal College of Psychiatrists is presently campaigning to show how consultant psychiatrists are overburdened and are themselves under stress. They aim to improve working conditions for consultant psychiatrists, reduce caseloads and to get more time to deal with emergencies and high risk situations.
The legal response
The TUC has pointed to the costs to the employers who fail to tackle bullying, in lost time, low morale, reduced work output and quality of service, lost resources if staff leave, and tribunals or court costs. In 2002 in the case of Walker v. Northumberland County Council it was estimated that the cost to the employer was over £400,000. The case pointed to a duty of care that employers have to their employees where it was reasonably foreseeable to an employer that his employee might suffer psychiatric illness through stress at work.
Last year union legal services won £330 million for their members, over the whole range of issues from health and safety to discrimination and unfair dismissal. But over reliance on the law or the European Union (EU) does not solve the problems in the workshops, classrooms, wards, offices, etc.
Employers have found a loophole that they can exploit by providing confidential counselling services — as happened when the appeal court overturned cases of numerous teachers in 2002. The General Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers said around this time that if the employee doesn't like the job because it is proving stressful they must shout or leave. Well most workers don't have the option of leaving, and the working class as a whole certainly does not. So there needs to be a lot of shouting and more. It is therefore up to unions to continue the battle in the workplace for better conditions.
The trade union response
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) see a way to deal with workplace stress and the resulting sickness. They have criticised as a "gimmick" the company's scheme for holiday vouchers and prize draws. They say that only continued investment in Royal Mail's workforce will see further improvements in attendance levels. CWU deputy general secretary Dave Ward explained, "Over the last 18 months our members have benefited from pay increases of more than 18 per cent. Their working week has also been reduced from six days to five."
Ship officers' union Numast is to campaign against fatigue and cuts in crewing levels in response to new research showing almost one-third of ships' masters and officers do not get the legally required daily rest periods. Last year the TGWU campaigned on a similar matter on behalf of tug masters.
The further education union Natfhe is campaigning on the amount of unpaid overtime worked by lecturers. The union says this has a serious effect on their home lives and their health. A union survey has found, over two thirds of respondents worked unpaid hours averaging 11 hours a week.
In Milton Keynes the wardens in sheltered housing recently won a legal case, after the GMB union stood behind its members who had to work and be on call from Monday morning till Friday afternoon. Meanwhile the GMB has started to highlight the number of workers particularly in retail centres who are having to wear tags to monitor and speed up their work. The GMB says this is dehumanising.
The TUC and many unions educate health and safety representatives and stewards to help them deal with the range of workplace problems including stress. Unions also support campaigning organisations and the paper Hazards which bring news from around Britain and the world about aspects of Health and Safety in the workplace, and how unions are dealing with them. Unions often support or commission reports from leading academics.
Prevention is better than cure. Professor Tom Cox in the late 1990s in his report for Unison manual workers showed that stress was an occupational health issue rather than just a matter of mental health. But we know that under some conditions work can be highly satisfying and even therapeutic. So we must consider under what circumstances work becomes drudgery. Over 150 years ago Marx pointed out that for the worker time spent at work did not belong to the worker, because he sold his capacity to work to the boss.
Despite the best efforts of unions, who day by day attempt to wrest some control over this part of their life in an effort to humanise the work process, capitalism seizes control back in hundreds of different ways The point then is that it is not work that makes us sick but that it is capitalism's control of work which causes stress in the workplace. To prevent stress and the consequent ill-health and deaths, it is necessary to get rid of capitalism.
