THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN
The Japanese term karoshi means “death from overwork.” This very real situation once was thought to be strictly a Japanese phenomenon. Now, however, the American quest for success has created what some believe may be a harmful obsession with work. The following reading focuses on the culture of work in the United States and provides an illustration of the problems of postindustrial societies discussed in Chapter 5: Social Structure and Society.
A thin, 40-something man with scattered white hair and wan complexion looked up from his notebook in a church basement on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
‘Hi, I’m Emerson,’ he said, ‘and I’m addicted to work.’
‘Hi, Emerson,’ answered his companions.
Emerson is a lecturer at a major university in the New York area. In addition to his course load, he developed two new classes last semester, submitted a book-length manuscript for publication and served as executive director of a small not-for-profit corporation. ‘In my own eyes I’m a lazy sloth,’ he declared. Heeven agonized over coming to this evening’s Workaholics Anonymous meeting….
Emerson is not alone. His condition is a product of the society that surrounds him…. America’s obsession with work has reached epidemic proportions, according to Dr Bryan E Robinson, family therapist and author of the 1998 book, Chained To the Desk (New York University Press). He believes that workaholism is a disease that kills people and ruins families. People obsessed with work often find their way to the city that never sleeps. In New York, time is money, and since one’s worth is measured by ability to earn, overwork isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law of supply and demand. According to psychiatrist Dr Jay B Rohrlich, in Hollywood where one’s appearance is paramount, the same problems might manifest themselves in anorexia. But inNew York, where working excessively to achieve success is the norm, people go overboard….But mention at a job interview that you’ll be in at nine and leaving at five and see who hires you.
That equation is reinforced by new technologies which makes workaholics of all of us. When Marilyn Machlowitz wrote Workaholicsin 1980, things were very different. ‘We didn’t have faxes, cell phones, cell phones with e-mail, beepers, Palm Pilots. Workaholics used to be the people who would work anytime, anywhere. What has changed is that it has become the norm to be on call 24/7…. And we haven’t seen all that high-tech has to offer yet, either.’ Twenty years ago we had enforced downtime, noted Ms Machlowitz:‘If we had to send a draft of a document to someone, we had time before they received it in the mail, read it and mailed it back demanding changes. That time has collapsed to nothing….
Despite 14 years of 80-100 hour work weeks for a Wall Street brokerage house, Jennifer, a stylish woman with a tasteful gold bracelet and Chanel dress, was not willing to admit that she was suffering from a ‘disease’ until two years ago. ‘I felt like I had on golden handcuffs,’ she said. ‘There was nothing else I could do to make so much money. So I kept at it until I was 35 years old, with no life, no personality and tons of money.’…
A study recently conducted by the health insurer Oxford Health Plans found that one in five Americans show up for work whether they’re ill, injured or have a medical appointment. This same obsession keeps one in five Americans from taking their vacation–a failure which has been found to put individuals at risk of early death. ‘Vacationitis’ may come from fear of returning to find someone else at your desk, or the idea that everything will collapse in your absence.
Workaholics Anonymous publishes a list of tell-tale signs including: working more than 40 hours a week; taking work with you to bed, on weekends and on vacation; talking about work more than any other subject; believing it’s okay to work long hours if you love what you do; thinking about working while driving,
falling asleep or when others are talking.
To New Yorkers, of course, these are simply the habits of successful people. To celebrate Labor Day, 3 September, the International Labour Office released findings that after passing the Japanese as the world’smost overworked population in the mid-1990s, Americans have pulled way ahead of the pack. Americans now work an average of 1,979 hours a year, about three-and-a-half weeks more than the Japanese, six-and-a-half weeks more than the British and about twelve-and-a-half weeks more than their German counterparts….
Companies often compensate for America’s chronic shortage of skilled laborers with demands of forced overtime. But while an inflated salary can dull the pains of overwork, excessive job stress can cause permanent degenerative damage to the heart….
In Japan, if a ‘salary man’ is found slumped over his keyboard in the morning, it triggers survivors to call for a karoshi investigation to determine whether the death was caused by overwork. In New York the coroner would call the same condition heart failure.
Cardiac disease is a complex malady affected by diet, activity, smoking, drinking and stress–and it occurs in epidemic proportions in the US. But coroners and judges refuse to entertain the notion that inordinate work stress can cause death, despite well established case histories. ‘If someone is working 14 hours a day, that person is not going to be eating right,’ said one physician at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center…. ‘They’re not going to have time for a nice home-cooked meal. That means fast food and increasedcholesterol. Secondly, the time constraints will not permit them to exercise. And if the person is a workaholic, often they’re going to be a smoker or, if they’re really stressed out, a drinker.’
An explosion in karoshi cases accompanied Japan’s economic boom in the early 1980s. Since karoshi was legally recognized in the 1980s, 30,000 Japanese have been diagnosed as victims. The large number ofwork-related deaths spurred Tokyo to legislate a national pension system for surviving members of karoshi victims’ families. But Washington continues to fail to react to such stimuli…. The law seems to suggest that ifeveryone is overworked to the point of debilitation, no-one therefore warrants compensation. This makes America’s Protestant work ethic a Puritan plague and affirms anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s comment that the market system has handed down to human beings a sentence of ‘life at hard labour’.
Matthew Reiss, “American Karoshi,” New Internationalist, Vol. 343 (March 2002), p. 16(2).
Name ______Date ______Period ______
THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN
DIRECTIONS: Using information from the reading, answer the following questions.
1. How has technology contributed to “workaholism”?
2. How many hours does the average American work each year? How does this compare to the hours worked by the Japanese, the British, and the Germans?
3. How might overwork contribute to cardiac disease?
USE YOUR SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION: Do you think that you will become one of the “overworked” Americans? What can you do to ensure that you succeed in the world of work without harming your health or your relationships?