- In my experience, most people are willing to make immense sacrifices to keep their children safe and happy. In a country with a moth-eaten social safety net, health care tied to employment, and few job quality differences between working at McDonald’s, Burger King, or Walmart, corporations have long since figured out that workers will put up with nearly anything if it means keeping their jobs. This fulcrum is being used to leverage more and more out of workers — even, ironically, the ability to spend time with their families. Many of my coworkers were in the O’Henry-like position of providing for families they barely got to see because of their work schedule.
Free market capitalism doesn’t assign a negative value to “how much stress workers are under.” It just assumes that unhappy workers will leave their job for a better one, and things will find a natural balance. But when the technologies that make life miserable spread everywhere at the speed of globalization, finding something better isn’t really an option anymore. And a system that runs by marinating a third or more of the workforce in chronic stress isn’t sustainable.
Chronic stress will destroy your body like doing burnouts will destroy a rental car that someone else is paying for. It’s a huge factor behind the epidemics of heart disease, obesity, autoimmune disorders, depression, anxiety, and drug misuse that afflict developed countries — the “diseases of civilization.”
And right now, corporations kind of are treating the low-wage workforce like a rental car someone else is paying for. Because while American jobs have gotten safer in terms of limbs caught in machinery, individual companies are extremely unlikely to be held accountable for workers’ long-term stress-related health problems. They’re doing burnouts with the bodies and minds of millions of American workers, because either workers or taxpayers will pick up the bill.