Stop her before she’s all worked up
AS WE PEER through the thicket of Hurricane Katrina remembrances and gear up for the five-year anniversary of 9/11, it’s easy to forget that Monday is Labor Day, the holiday created to honor the American worker by offering us a day of rest from our toils.
To borrow from the Passover seder table’s ritual question: How is Labor Day different from all other days? Answer: It’s not. The banks may be closed and the mail might not come, but most of us probably will be thinking about work anyway, even if we’re floating on a raft trying like crazy to appear leisurely.
But isn’t that what progress is all about? Thanks to cellphones, pagers, e-mail, text messaging, BlackBerrys and various other life-improving technologies, we can shill for our employers while simultaneously camping/sky diving/undergoing scheduled C-sections.
Besides, what better way to pay homage to the American worker than to keep working on the commemorative day? Memorial Day, after all, does not merely signal the OK to wear white shoes; it is supposed to honor fallen war veterans. And what did we do last Memorial Day but make more of them when two soldiers were killed in Iraq?
As stressful as Labor Day can be, it hardly compares to the days leading up to it, when we’re forced to work overtime -- often picking up the slack for vacationing colleagues -- to keep from falling behind in the wake of the holiday. In some businesses (such as, ahem, the newspaper business) there’s simply no getting around this extra work; last Labor Day, thousands of journalists were working around the clock (often without electricity) reporting on Katrina.
But even when business is moving at its usual clip, many of us suffer from what Joe Robinson, a work-life coach who runs a Santa Monica company called Work to Live, calls “the paranoia of productivity.” The fallacy, Robinson explained to me, is that we think that because we’re using our minds rather than our bodies, we can sit in a chair for 12 hours and work nonstop.
“But there’s actually evidence that the mind goes before the body,” he said. “We’re in this vice-grip of spiraling work hours right now because there’s all this technology that allows us to work every waking minute,” he says. “And no one wants to talk about it because they’re afraid they’ll look like wimps.”
There’s all sorts of evidence that working too hard is bad for our health. Robinson notes that annual vacations reduce the rate of heart attacks by 50% in women and 32% in men. A study released last week shows that workers who put in more than 51 hours a week were 29% more likely to have high blood pressure than those who worked 39 hours or less.
The researchers at UC Irvine who published the findings in the journal Hypertension said they originally began the study on Asian workers in an effort to understand a Japanese syndrome called karoshi, which means “death from overwork.”
Noting that today the workweek is longer in the United States than in Japan, the researchers expanded their sample to include nearly 25,000 Californians. Even when factoring in body weight, they found that high blood pressure increased with the number of hours worked.
This may seem like a memo from the department of “no duh,” but I’m interested in the methodology here. How did the subjects quantify the whole notion of “work”?
Did they count only the number of hours at the jobsite, or did they include commute time, home computer time, cellphone-at-the-dinner-table time? What about BlackBerry-in-front-of-the-TV time or BlackBerry-in-bed time? What about using the cellphone and the BlackBerry while eating hot dogs with the kids at a Labor Day barbecue?
For many of us, work is as integral to our existence as breathing. What about the actor who spends hours at the gym and the salon trying to stay cast-able? Or the academic who must write largely nonrevenue-generating books in order to have a shot at tenure?
What about people like Martin, the Guatemalan immigrant who’s been fixing a plumbing problem at my house in recent days?
He works as a shoe repairman during the week and does plumbing and electrical work at night and on weekends. He doesn’t have a car, so he walks or takes the bus around town, which, depending on where he’s going, could easily double his “work time.”
This week, Martin had to buy me a garbage disposal -- I was too busy trying to meet six different deadlines to do it myself -- and as I imagined the time he spent on this, I wondered how much thought he gave to the concept of his own billable hours. If he’s anything like me, probably not much. It might be smart to add up the hours, but it would also be pretty depressing, and if we’re already all at risk for high blood pressure, why get all bummed out on top of it?
Sure, there may be a lucky few who have the self-discipline to relax on Labor Day, but chances are most of us will be secretly prepping for Tuesday. And let’s hope it gets here soon. After the stress of the holiday, it’s bound to be a calm day at the office -- and good riddance to those white shoes.
