I Honestly Don’t Understand This.
There’s an article in today’s icWales that discusses the severity of the stress Welsh workers are experiencing. This is far from a Welsh problem - it extends around the world.
The article cites, as the main causes, long work hours, high levels of debt, the sheer stress of trying to deal with a workload that’s far beyond realistic and keeping up this pace whilst dealing with the demands of personal and family life.
According to Derek Walker, head of policy and campaigns for Wales TUC, stress is the biggest health and safety issue for employees. He stated: “Stress is increasingly a problem because of excessive working hours, excessive workload and other problems at work, such as bullying. Stress is not something that just affects ‘wimps’, it can affect anyone in any walk of life. It is a very serious issue and can be very damaging to our economy.”
They did a study of 32-year-old workers and found that every one in twenty people were at risk for developing mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety as a direct result of job-related stress. And, what they also found was that if you work in a profession that requires “excessive workloads” and “extreme time pressures” your risk is doubled.
And then everyone wonders why we’re all angry, stressed, exhausted and depressed?
Well, I’m sure the pharmaceutical companies are jumping for joy. But what about all the families who lose their Dad at a young age from a heart attack? Or the people who are forced to take mind altering medication to deal with their daily lives? Is this right?
Of course it isn’t. And I guess what I really don’t understand about the whole situation is why it’s even happening. In reality, what would happen if you failed to get that report finished by 4:00 p.m.? Would the world end? The company go instantly out of business? In a word, NO. These are artificial deadlines. So if they’re artificial why are they made? I wish I could answer that.
And further, if you have too much work for your employees to handle, why are you overworking them rather than hiring additional people? I can answer that one; money. If you hire more people there’s less for the pockets of the directors and the corporate officers. And don’t anyone tell me that the President of a company making £200k a year is more valuable than the guy sitting in his office making £35K a year negotiating the contracts that are keeping the President in his/her £200K lifestyle.
Which is another thing that irks the daylights out of me. I do not understand why there is such an enormous disparity between what the guy at the top makes and what the people down the ladder make. They both, normally, have equal educations. Their jobs are equally important to the welfare of the company. So what makes one worth 5 times the other? Share the bloody wealth a little, will ya? I promise it won’t hurt. And you’ll have happier workers with more loyalty to the company and higher productivity. And since productivity seems to be the word of the day you would think companies would be doing everything they could to improve conditions for their employees. But they don’t do they? Instead they overwork us, overload us and underpay us.
I guess it’ll end someday. When the whole bloody workforce crashes and profits plummet then perhaps one of these fools will wake up and realize there’s merit to the way things used to be done in the corporate world.
And by the way, the study was not limited to one group of people. They sampled individuals from many different walks of life, including stockbrokers, surgeons, helicopter pilots, primary school teachers, politicians, police officers, laboratory technicians and computer systems workers through to fish packers, forest rangers, massage therapists, journalists and chefs.