The verdict is in. Working long hours can kill.
This message in a 1996 editorial of the British Medical Journal came after the death of a junior doctor in Britain who, after reportedly working an 86-hour week, collapsed and died. The editorial notes the growing trend toward increased workload, pressure, and hours of work. And it warns that if overwork “is not to reap its predicted toll,” we need preventive measures including legislation to shorten the workweek, prevent overwork and thereby to increase employment.
Yet since the late ’70s in Canada, there has been a steady increase in the proportion of workers clocking 50 or more hours a week. Overtime is on the rise. By contrast, another growing proportion of workers is scrambling to find enough work to make ends meet.
In our conventional economic accounts, the costs associated with work trends such as overwork, underwork, and unemployment are invisible. The more hours we work for pay, and the less free time we have, the more the economy grows. Likewise, the more we spend on health care, crime, and family breakdown – all associated with unemployment – the more the economy grows. This growth is then mistaken for prosperity and progress. Overwork causes stress, workplace absenteeism, health problems
Statistics Canada cites many studies that show a relationship between work stress and illness. Work stress is associated with higher rates of smoking, drinking, sleep problems, violence, and depression, along with an array of health disorders from heart disease to ulcers. For example, a 25-year Finnish study published last year in the British Medical Journal reported that people with stressful jobs were twice as likely to die from heart problems as those with less stressful jobs.
The Japanese even have a name for sudden death caused by overwork – karoshi. Since it was first legally recognized in the 1980s, 30,000 Japanese have been diagnosed as victims of karoshi – their deaths attributed directly to overwork. Today, Japan has a national pension system for members of karoshi victims’ families. One Japanese study found that the overworked and the underemployed had similar stress rates and risks of heart disease.
In Canada, stress is now twice as prevalent as it was a decade ago, according to a 2002 Health Canada study. The study also found lower job satisfaction and lower commitment to employers compared to 10 years ago. And it reported increased absenteeism. Similarly, Canada’s 1994 General Social Survey found about one third of workers reported workplace stress from too many demands or too many hours. A new report by GPI Atlantic, titled Working Time and the Future of Work in Canada: A Nova Scotia GPI Case Study, estimates absenteeism caused by stress from long work hours in Nova Scotia cost the province nearly $70 million in 2001.
Unemployment brings health costs
But unemployment brings just as many health problems and hidden costs as overwork. The unemployed suffer higher rates of physical and mental illness than those with jobs.
In the early 1980s, University of Toronto economist Frank Reid estimated that each percentage point increase in Canada’s unemployment rate had an overall social cost of $270 million. A 1993 Ontario Medical Association report estimated that unemployment cost the Canadian health care system $1.1 billion in 1993. Likewise, GPI Atlantic’s report conservatively estimates illness associated with unemployment cost the Nova Scotia economy $182 million in 2001.
Lack of work associated with crime, family breakdown
But the costs of joblessness extend beyond health problems. Economist Belton Fleisher’s landmark work on the economics of crime found that cutting unemployment in half will reduce crime rates by 10 per cent. Using Fleisher’s methods, GPI Atlantic estimates that Nova Scotia would save between $60 million and $130 million a year in avoided crime costs by cutting the jobless rate to less than five per cent. All told, unemployment may cost Nova Scotia about $400 million a year in excess disease, divorce, and crime costs.
Evidence indicates that joblessness is closely linked with family breakdown. For example, one U.S. study found that four years after the loss of a job, the separation or divorce rate increased from less than eight per cent to 24 per cent among poor white families, and from 12 to 30 per cent among poor black families.
Work-time reductions cut unemployment and environmental costs
Work-time reductions bring an opportunity to cut unemployment. They also bring what author Anders Hayden calls an “ecological promise.” Commuting to work produces environmental costs in the form of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Thus a shift to a four-day workweek could reduce such costs by 20 per cent. In Vancouver, a four-day workweek experiment at City Hall saved 700 extra vehicle trips and 17,500 kilometres of auto travel per day, reducing air pollutants by 1,240 tonnes annually.
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.