Workers feel more stress and anxiety than ever before

Source: USA Today

From The Guardian:

Whether they’re slogging endlessly or just barely scraping by, people feel like they’re drowning. Why?

In towns and cities across Australia, one gets the sense that many people are just barely hanging on.

You see it on their faces, hear it in their voices, and sometimes even fear the consequences of it via spontaneous outbursts of public incivility over things that, decades ago, one would not have expected to cause any disturbance of the peace.

You see it on the street in the menacing – or at least defensive – looks people give one another, and even more in traffic, where people feel emboldened by their relative anonymity to behave with pointless recklessness and breathtaking selfishness.

Why is this happening?

When people open up after just a few gentle questions – and it’s surprising how much they want to – many report symptoms including depression, constant anxiety, sleep difficulties, exhaustion, racing thoughts, feelings of helplessness, diminished libido, appetite disturbances and frequent infections. These are all symptoms of chronic stress. What is making us so stressed?

Put simply, the world of work is making us sick.

Many of those in full-time permanent employment are now expected to work staggering hours, frequently without commensurate remuneration. They are expected to be contactable 24/7, to meet arbitrary targets eternally renewed. They are subjected to faddish managerial practices and to feral managers empowered by an amoral ethos that blindly ignores all but the pursuit of a few narrow metrics. People at this end of the workforce often feel they’re toiling in white collar sweatshops.

Then there are those working far too few hours for their own good. These are not merely the much-maligned unemployed. There is also that huge class of persons you seldom hear discussed by politicians on either side of politics but whom you see everywhere: on trains, buses, trams, walking the streets or perhaps looking in the mirror as you shave or apply your makeup. They are the involuntarily underemployed: the people drowning in the gig economy who want more work, more hours, but can’t get them.

Though they’re not called unemployed by the government, at the extremes they often live very similar lives to the unemployed or fear that they soon will, their heads bobbing up and down in a sea of global economic insecurity generated by forces over which they have no control. Adding the percentage of involuntarily underemployed to the percentage of involuntarily unemployed, somewhere between 20% and 25% of the Australian workforce suffer chronic stress due to insufficient work.

And it’s the knowledge of this, not necessarily of the statistic, but of the difficulty of finding adequately paid employment, that makes those who do have a full-time job so fearful of losing the one they have, even if they absolutely hate it.

[Read more here, and subscribe/donate to The Guardian here]

Is it any wonder people vote for extremists?  For Trump?  For the One Neuron party in Australia?  For ultra-nationalists in Europe? 

Capitalism is broken.