Job-related stress, illness all too common
January 10, 2008
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Paul Dalby
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Veronica Gibson and Jane Moore have had very different jobs in Canada's workforce. But their dreams of a successful career brought both the same lethal cocktail of job-related stress and illness.
Trying to meet impossible demands placed by their bosses, the two suffered acute lack of sleep, anger and depression that landed them both in their doctor's waiting room.
Their experiences are an all too common part of the occupational health hazard picture for women in this country, according to an intensive study of 31,571 workers, both male and female, conducted by Canadian researchers.
The survey on work-life conflict was conducted by Dr. Linda Duxbury, of Carleton University, and Dr. Chris Higgins, of the University of Western Ontario, on behalf of the Canadian Public Health Agency. It found:
More than half the people surveyed felt stressed.
One-third felt burned out or depressed.
One-quarter thought of quitting their jobs at least once a week or more.
And one in 10 reported high absenteeism due to emotional, physical or mental fatigue.
The price tag for this workplace epidemic is huge – Statistics Canada estimates the cost of work time lost due to stress in Canada is $12 billion a year. Stress as a reason for absence has increased 316 per cent over the past decade.
Work overload and unrealistic demands were a recurring theme in the study that sampled Canadian employees working for medium to large (i.e. 500 or more employees) organizations in three sectors of the economy: public (all levels of government), private and not-for-profit (health care and educational sectors).
Overall, a majority of the workers polled – about 58 per cent – were female, and the study provides a new insight into the particular stresses and strains experienced by women at work.
"A lot of the impacts of stress and burnout on women are caused by working in not-so-good jobs, jobs over which they have no control," Duxbury says. "Women can't say no, they need the income and yet they work for a jerk."
Duxbury, Canada's foremost expert on work-life balance in Canada, adds: "Women are more likely to be in the bottom or middle of the organization, men are usually in the middle or upper level. So, women are more likely to be in very boring jobs and that brings a high stress level."
Duxbury says the common denominator in many of the jobs is that women have no control over their work lives, yet must meet unrealistic demands from their bosses, often resulting in unpaid overtime at the cost of their home life.
Veronica Gibson (not her real name) experienced those kind of demands in her job at a Toronto TV media company, managed by men mostly unsympathetic to the extra demands placed on her because she is the mother of two pre-kindergarten children.
When she was ordered to work a four-month night shift in the control room from midnight until 8 a.m., she felt she had little choice but to "suck it up."
"It was one of the worst periods of my life," she says. "I didn't feel I could tell my bosses that this is much more than I can handle. They are the people who make all the decisions and not surprisingly, they were all men. "
With her husband travelling for his work, Gibson, 35, hired a daycare provider to come into her home during the day to look after her children so she could sleep. It didn't work.
"After four months, I didn't know which way was up, I couldn't sleep, I was constantly fatigued, I was overwrought and I was an emotional wreck," she says. "I don't even know how effective I was at my job."
Gibson went to her doctor who immediately diagnosed chronic stress fatigue, and ordered a month of complete rest without work.
Duxbury says "job overload" is the number one reason for visting a doctor, and that over the years repeated warnings to major employers have gone largely unheeded.
"In the `80s and `90s, because of the baby boom, there were more good-quality workers than good-quality jobs, so the employees had no bargaining power," she says. "Women found they simply couldn't balance their work and a family, so they delayed having children, and then when the time was right, they only had one child."
She might have been describing Jane Moore, now 48, (who asked her name be changed), who worked in a key post for a Toronto university, second-in-command to a department chair and responsible for all undergraduate studies.
It was a dream job that she loved and at first she was prepared to delay starting a family. Then, university rules demanded her boss had to move after passing a five-year tenure and be replaced by one of his professors.
"I went from a very progressive chair who respected all our expertise and allowed us to do our jobs, to a new inexperienced chair who wanted to micromanage everything," she says. "We were put in an awkward position of having to correct him because he was violating university policy. But he became very aggressive to me. He criticized me for having an untidy desk and said I was incompetent."
Ironically, Moore had taken over the job from a staffer still on long-term disability because she had become ill from stress. Now, Moore herself began to suffer from a chronic loss of sleep, alcohol dependency and bouts of extreme anger.
"Worst of all, I had been trying to get pregnant but I couldn't and I'm sure it was because I was so stressed out," she says.
Moore tried to transfer to another job in the university but saw that her personnel file, which had rated her as "excellent' for six straight years, now carried a note reading "this person can be difficult".
"My career at the university was destroyed because of one man's ego," she says. Moore took the difficult decision of walking away from the job she loved and did temp work at a 50 per cent pay cut. She became pregnant two months later.
Duxbury singled out the two areas of the workforce that are dominated by women: health care and education – more than 90 per cent.
"Look at nursing," she says. "You are in a subordinate position to doctors who believe they have more education and think they are better than you. So, the nurse is left working in a high-demand, low-status job."
Occupational health worker Wendy Pearson gets to see first-hand the enormous toll that job stress takes on nurses in her front-line job at the Ottawa Hospital.
"There's nowhere in nursing that isn't busy and stressful," says Pearson, a 28-year veteran of nursing who is now part of a 17-member team looking after all the 10,000 workers at the hospital (three sites). "Nursing is a high-risk profession, predominantly female and subject to many stresses – shift work, exposure to hazardous illness.
"You're always trying to catch up one your sleep. When I worked shifts, I would set my alarm to wake up after only four ours sleep just so that I could have some time with my family. Today, it makes me more sympathetic to people who are working nights."
Have Canadian employers learned any lessons from the past 20 years about their female employees?
Duxbury believes they still have some way to go, but says there are encouraging signs from Western Canada, where a booming economy has produced more skilled jobs than people to fill them and employers are "paying more attention to their workers."
"Toronto is the last bastion of the `You want a job? You'd better work long and hard' business culture," Duxbury says. "This is no longer an option. If we don't value our human resources, where will that leave us?
"Working women employees like dogs costs employers billions of dollars in sickness and absenteeism. We have told them this repeatedly but they were more interested in balancing their budget."
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