Australian Financial Review Jan 27, 1999 Little control kills workers Work Relations, By Stephen Long Do you sometimes think your job is killing you? Medical research suggests that your intuition may be spot on. The work environment is a major cause of coronary heart disease, according to a landmark epidemiological study by Professor M.G. Marmot and colleagues from the International Centre for Health and Society at University College, London. But those at greatest risk are not the stressed-out executives of folkloric fame: you won't die of a heart attack because your job is demanding. What makes you a prime candidate is lack of control at work. The Whitehall Studies analysed coronary heart disease rates among more than 7,000 British civil servants. The first study showed that there were higher rates of mortality among those in lower job grades, which is no surprise: research has long confirmed that people in lower social classes are more likely to suffer disease and premature death. The surprising finding was that employees just below the top grade were more likely to suffer heart disease than those at the very top. These people were not poor, nor were their education, nutrition or housing inadequate, so why were the well-off professionals more at risk than their bosses? Marmot's team undertook a second study to explore the hypothesis that high work demands and low control were related to cardiovascular risk. Its findings have profound implications. Work demand had nothing do with risk, but low control at work was the single largest contributing factor to disease frequency. More important than smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure, height, obesity or lack of exercise. It was the main reason why men in the lowest grade (clerks) were 150 per cent more likely to develop heart disease than men in the highest grade (administrators). This is deeply disturbing, but also a cause for hope. Disturbing because so many workplaces are managed in ways which deny people basic control of their daily lives. Hopeful because it suggests approaches that give people more say can make a real difference to social inequality. It helps explain why many people are opting for less pay but greater mastery of their lives as contractors. It also implies that management systems that strip workers of autonomy and discretion are -- quite literally -- killing people. There is no aggregate measure of how much control Australians have at work. But some findings in the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey provide a proxy. Two-thirds of employees reported having little or no influence in the way the workplace was managed or decisions affecting them. One-third were not consulted about major changes. Low-status occupations had least control -- 56 per cent of labourers and 54 per cent of sales and personal service workers had no say in decisions affecting them -- but the results were surprisingly high for professionals (29 per cent) and para-professionals (39 per cent). Yet studies show that devolving management control to the shop-floor improves morale and productivity. Perhaps it is time more employers had a change of heart. Feedback to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] .au ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use."
