FREE ESSAY ON JOB STRESS

JOB STRESS

The official working week is being reduced to 35 hours a week. In most countries in the
world, it is limited to 45 hours a week. The trend during the last century seems to be
less work, more play. 
Yet, what may be true for blue-collar workers or state employees - is not necessarily so
for white-collar employees. It is not rare for these people - lawyers, accountants,
consultants, managers, academics - to put in 80 hour weeks. This trend is so widespread
and its social consequences so known that it acquired the unflattering nickname
workaholism, a combination of the words "work" and "alcoholism". Family life is
disrupted, intellectual horizons narrow, the consequences to the workaholic's health are
severe: fat, lack of exercise, stress take their toll. Classified as "alpha" types,
workaholics suffer three times as many heart attacks as their peers. 
But what are the social and economic roots of this phenomenon ? 
Put briefly, it is the result of the blurring borders and differences between work and
leisure. The distinction between these two types of time - the one dedicated to labor and
the one spent in the pursuit of one's interests - was so clear for thousands of years
that its gradual disappearance is one of the most important and profound social changes
in human history. 
A host of other shifts in the character of the work and domestic environments of humans
converged to produce this momentous change. 
Arguably the most important was the increase in labor mobility in the workplace. The
transitions from agricultural to industrial, then to the services and now to the
information age. and knowledge societies, each, in turn, increased the mobility of the
workforce. A farmer is the least mobile. His means of production are fixed, his produce
was mostly consumed locally because of lack of proper refrigeration, preservation and
transportation methods. A marginal group of people became nomad-traders. This group
exploded in size with the advent of the industrial revolution. True, the bulk of the
workforce was still immobile and affixed to the production floor. But raw materials and
the finished products traveled long distances to faraway markets. Professional services
were needed and the professional manager, the lawyer, the accountant, the consultant, the
trader, the broker - all emerged as both the parasites of the production processes and
the indispensable components to any enterprise. 
Then came the services industry. Its protagonists were no longer geographically
dependent. They rendered their services to a host of "employers" in a variety of ways and
geographically spread. This trend accelerated today, at the beginning of the information
and knowledge revolution. Knowledge is not locale-bound. It is easily transferable across
boundaries. Its short-lived quality gives it a-temporal and non-spatial qualities. The
location of the participants in the economic interactions of this new age are
geographically transparent. 
These trends converged with an increase of mobility of people, goods and data (voice,
visual, textual and other). The twin revolutions of transportation and of
telecommunications really reduced the world to a "global village"(Idea stolen from Mrs.
Clinton). Phenomena like commuting to work and multinationals were first made possible.
Facsimile messages, electronic mail, other modem data transfers, the Internet broke not
only physical barriers, but also temporal ones. Today, virtual offices are not only
spatially virtual, but also temporally so. This means that workers can collaborate not
only across continents but also across time zones. They can leave their work for someone
else to continue in an electronic mailbox, for instance. 
These last technological advances precipitated the fragmentation of the very concepts of
"work" and "workplace". No longer the three Aristotelian dramatic unities. Work could be
carried out in different places, not simultaneously, by workers who worked part time
whenever it suited them best, Flextime and work from home are quickly replacing commuting
as the preferred venue of the "workplace". This fits exactly into the social
fragmentation, which characterizes today's world. The disintegration of previously
cohesive social structures, such as the nuclear (not to mention the extended) family.
This was all neatly wrapped in the ideology of individualism which was presented as a
private case of capitalism and liberalism. People were encouraged to feel and behave as
distinct, autonomous units. The perception of individuals as islands replaced the former
perception of humans as cells in an organism. 
This trend was coupled with the unprecedented successive annual rises in productivity and
increases in world trade. These trends were brought about by new management techniques,
new production technology, innovative inventory control methods, automatization,
robotization, plant modernization, telecommunications (which facilitates more efficient
transfers of information), even new design concepts. But productivity gains made humans
redundant. No amount of retraining could cope with the incredible rate of technological
change. The more technologically advanced the country - the higher its structural
unemployment (attributable to changes in the very structure of the market) went. 
In Western Europe, it shot up from 5-6% of the workforce to 9% in one decade. One way to
manage this flood of ejected humans was to cut the workweek. Another was to support a
large population of unemployed. The third, more tacit, way was to legitimize leisure
time. Whereas the Jewish and Protestant work ethics condemned idleness in the past - they
now started encouraging people to "self fulfill", pursue habits and non-work related
interests and express the whole of their personality. 
This served to blur the historical differences between work and leisure. They were both
commended now by the mores of our time. Work became less and less structured and rigid -
formerly, the main feature of leisure time. Work could be pursued - and to an ever
growing extent, was pursued - from home. The territorial separation between "work-place"
and "home turf" was essentially eliminated. The emotional leap was only a question of
time. Historically, people went to work because they had to - and all the rest was
designated "pleasure". Now, both were pleasure - or torture - or mixture. Some people
began to enjoy their work so much that it fulfilled for them the functions normally
reserved to leisure time. They are the workaholics. Others continued to hate work - but
felt disoriented in the new, leisure enriched environment. They were not qualified or
trained to deal with excess time, lack of framework, no clear instructions what to do,
when, with whom and to what. 
Socialization processes and socialization agents (the State, parents, educators,
employers) were not geared - nor did they regard it as being their responsibility - to
train the populace to cope with free time and with the baffling and dazzling variety of
options. 
Economies and markets can be classified using many criteria. Not the least of them is the
work-leisure axis. Those societies and economies that maintain the old distinction
between (hated) work and (liberating) leisure - are doomed to perish or, at best,
radically lag behind. This is because they will not have developed a class of workaholics
big enough to move the economy ahead. 
And this is the Big Lesson : it takes workaholics to create, maintain and expand
capitalism. As opposed to common beliefs (held by the uninitiated) - people, mostly, do
not engage in business because they are looking for money (the classic profit motive).
They do what they do because they like the Game of Business, its twists and turns, the
brainstorming, the battle of brains, subjugating markets, the ups and downs, the
excitement. All this has nothing to do with pure money. It has everything to do with
psychology. True, the meter by which success is measured in the world of money is money -
but very fast it is transformed into an abstract meter, akin to the monopoly money. It is
a symbol of shrewdness, wit, foresight and insight. 
Workaholics identify business with pleasure. They are the embodiment of the pleasure
principle. They make up the class of the entrepreneurs, the managers, the businessmen.
They are the movers, the shakers, the pushers, the energy. Without them, we have
socialist economies, where everything belongs to everyone and, actually to none. In these
economies of "collective ownership" people go to work because they have to, they try to
avoid it, to sabotage the workplace, they harbour negative feelings. Slowly, they wither
and die (professionally) - because no one can live long in hatred and deceit. Joy is an
essential ingredient. 
And this is the true meaning of capitalism : the abolition of work and leisure and the
pursuit of both with the same zeal and satisfaction. Above all, the (increasing) liberty
to do it whenever, wherever, with whomever you choose. Unless and until the Homo East
Europeansis changes his set of mind - there will be no real transition. Because
transition happens in the human mind much before it takes form in reality. It is no use
to dictate, to legislate, to finance, to cajole, to offer - the human being must change
first. It was Marx (a devout non-capitalist) who said : it is consciousness that
determines reality. How right was he. Witness the USA and witness the miserable failure
of communism.