Long Hours, Stressful Jobs Begin to Produce Backlash

He may not have known it, but Justus Bauschinger had a brush with what the Japanese call karoshi, or death from overwork. During his 20-year career in the garment-manufacturing business in San Francisco, Bauschinger designed plants, machinery and fabric. He made and spent huge amounts of money. He lost his business, then started another that brought him many personal problems and much stress.

By the time he was 45, he had had three minor heart attacks, a drinking problem and three failed marriages.

“I thought this was sort of normal,” Bauschinger said. “I thought I was a victim of life because I never stopped to think.” He now runs a toy store and pays close attention to his health.

Bauschinger was one of those American workers who give and give at the office--to the exclusion of family, friends, intellectual pursuits and simple relaxation.

“When work is the major value driving a person’s life, it does result in some major problems,” said Kenneth R. Pelletier, a clinical psychologist at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco.

Employers pay at least some of the price. In California alone, there was a 434% increase in stress-related disability claims by state employees between 1982 and 1986, Pelletier said. In short, employees are linking their health problems to work, blaming everything from symptoms of debilitating anxiety to coronary heart disease on work pressures.

Experts trace the rise in so-called work-related illnesses to a network of factors. Many workers are pressured to work harder by employers who feel competitors, particularly the Japanese, breathing down their necks. Others have been affected by staff reductions that resulted from the wave of takeovers.

Another factor is that the nature of jobs themselves is changing. More jobs now demand sophisticated technical or interpersonal skills. In addition, the rise of the two-career couple has increased the pressures on both men and women.

The result of these forces for many employees is longer workdays.

A survey of middle managers by Priority Management Systems Inc. found that 85% worked 45 hours a week or more, and that many worked through lunch, took work home or worked on weekends.

Priority Management, a consulting firm that teaches business people how to set priorities, offers courses in how to achieve a balance among career interests; intellectual pursuits; family, social and community relationships and physical and spiritual well-being.

Most people are strong in two areas--career and physical well-being--when they enroll, the company says. “They exercise so they don’t drop dead on the job,” said Daniel Stamp, president of Priority Management.

Carol Orsborn, president of the Orsborn Group, a public-relations firm in San Francisco, noticed that colleagues and clients were exhibiting symptoms of work-related burnout, so she formed Overachievers Anonymous and began publishing EGADS, a quarterly newsletter whose acronym stands for Exposing the Glorification of our Anxiety-Driven Society.

The overachievers group, which promotes “downward mobility,” expects nothing of “recovering overachievers” and holds no meetings. Its existence, like that of the newsletter sent free to 200 chief executive officers in major corporations, is intended as a reminder that the business environment has “sunk to glorifying self-destruction as a life style.”

As evidence, Orsborn points to advertising that celebrates disheveled executives in states of zombie-like exhaustion.

Orsborn, who wrote a book about the subject called “Enough Is Enough,” speaks from experience. Until she decided that her business existed to support her life rather than the other way around, she was working 60 to 70 hours a week and expecting the same of her employees.

Then she cut her hours, put her employees on a 40-hour workweek, and encouraged them to take vacations and paid “mental-health breaks” such as a walk or an afternoon at the movies. Her business now operates with half the number of employees it used to have, profits have risen by 20%, and staff turnover is practically nil.

“I never expected to boom as we did,” Orsborn said. “This is the key to revitalizing our economy.”

Experts in workplace behavior predict that as Baby Boomers get older and wiser and as their family responsibilities increase, the workplace will become a place where hours count for less and work accomplished for more.