Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 23, 1993 TAG: 9303230066
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
STRESSED OUT? SO IS THE REST OF THE WORLD
Job stress is a worldwide plague that afflicts British miners and Swedish waitresses just as it burns out Japanese schoolteachers and American executives, a United Nations agency reported Monday."Stress has become one of the most serious health issues of the 20th century," said the 1993 World Labor Report by the International Labor Organization. "The Japanese have even coined a term for death by overwork: karoshi."
The report said job stress has become a "global phenomenon." In Australia, stress claims by government workers have increased 90 percent in three years. A French survey showed 64 percent of nurses and 61 percent of teachers were upset over stressful working conditions. Another study said stress-related diseases such as ulcers, high blood pressure and heart attacks cost the U.S. economy $200 billion a year in absenteeism, compensation claims and medical expenses.
Blue-collar workers suffer from job stress even more than their white-collar counterparts, said Vittorio Di Martino, a stress expert for the U.N. agency.
Blue-collar workers tend to be paid less, work in harsher environments and - perhaps most significantly - have less control over their jobs and lives than do white-collar workers, De Martino said.
In country after country, women also suffer more from stress than men do, Di Martino said. This is probably because women still assume more duties involving family and job than their husbands do, he said.
With the computerization of the world, plugged-in employees are facing new pressures, including electronic monitoring by their bosses, the report warned. "Workers in airline offices, government agencies, insurance companies, mail-order houses and telephone companies find themselves operating on a sort of electronic assembly line where employers can tell at any minute how they are performing."
The report said stress stems from impersonal, ever-changing and often hostile workplaces.
"One way of considering stress is in terms of the `fit' between human beings and their environment," said the report. "When demands are being made which do not match a person's current abilities or needs or expectations, this poor fit causes them to come under greater stress."
Individual workers can deal with stress through relaxation techniques such as yoga, exercise, diet, counseling and changing their own attitudes and behavior, the report said.
On a broader scale, employers who "act on causes of stress - organizational or environmental - can eliminate these roots," said Di Martino.
Such organizational stress-busters involve giving employees more control over their job life - making work teams responsible for a variety of tasks, introducing flextime or job sharing to give workers more leeway in their work hours, adopting a less confrontational style of management, redesigning jobs or work pace with elimination of stress as a goal.
In a complex society, the problems often extend beyond the workplace.
Often stress is a "circular" ailment, said Di Martino. A worker leaves a stressful home life, builds up more stress during a commute to the job, works eight hours in a stressful environment, has another stressful commute home, then unloads on a family which reacts with anger, thus creating more stress.
"Companies that are likely to be most successful in the future are those that help employees cope with stress, and also carefully re-engineer the workplace to make it better suited for human aptitudes and aspirations," said Michael Hansenne, director-general of the ILO.