Long working hours & stress

AM Archive - Long working hours & stress:

"SHARAN BURROW: Well this is irresponsible of the Chamber of Commerce. If ACCI wants more research, then they should come and talk to us about how we might engage in such a project, but there is 10 years of recent research, and more going back three or four decades, that show that workplace stress can be a health hazard and we know that workplace productivity in the last decade has largely come from work intensification. What that means is as late as 2000, 1 in 4 people were saying that they take time off from work due to stress because it's making them sick."

I have just read an article in The Times about the impact of longer working hours in Britain and the problems it is is causing. There was also, what I considered to be the sensible achievement of the 35 hour working week in France which now has been challenged and dissipated as soon as they got it. This is an article from 2002, so we have been working on it, we have been researching it, we have information about it and we have IGNORED it. Why?? Why do employers push people harder than they push their cars? Why is the treadmill approach so lauded and valued when clearly the damage to employees and the resultant costs to workplaces become so obvious. I hark back to Gordon Rattray Taylor and his book Future Shock from the 1970s. He was able to foresee this. Why can't we when it is right in front of us? He was talking about the increase in violence, stress, reckless driving...so many of the things we abhor in our society. Stress and overworked people become depressed, ill, erratic, angry. They have no life. They are resentful at best and worn out and placid at worst. They become self destructive and other people destructive. There shouldn't be seamless integration between work and homelife. We fought that very thing at the turn of the last century. We shall have to look at it again. We just don't learn and yet we consider ourselves to be so "informed."