Overworked? Stressed? You’re not aloneBritain is in a recession and the stress levels at work are rising. Anecdotal evidence indicates that here in Oxford the number of NUJ members who are having to take time off work or take early retirement on the grounds of stress is increasing. And we are only at the beginning of what looks to be a difficult period that could last several years. The branch would like to issue a red alert – health and livelihoods can be ruined if stress is allowed to get out of hand. Don’t let it happen to you, and don’t let it happen to your colleagues. Few of us are immune to the anxieties associated with a recession. We worry about our income and job security, we worry about our levels of spending and debt, our savings and our pensions. On top of all this, most of us find ourselves under increasing pressure at work. Widespread redundancies, unfilled vacancies and a clamp-down on using freelances mean that many people are having to work much harder than they should – skipping their lunch breaks and staying late at work to get it all done.
Newsrooms have a reputation for being high-pressure workplaces, so stress is often dismissed as simply part of the job. While line managers in book and journal publishing houses can find it much easier to blame their staff for “poor time management skills” or an inability to deal with pressure, rather than acknowledge that they are trying to squeeze ever greater workloads out of every member of staff.
Too stressed to stand back and see what is happening, undermined by being told that they themselves are at fault, people can give into the pressure and end up driven by work, at the expense of their personal and home lives. Management sees an open door and keeps piling on the work, staff can’t find the strength or energy to say ‘enough is enough’ and it carries on in a vicious circle.
Stress or pressure?
Stress and pressure are very different. While some pressure is an acceptable part of most jobs, if demands on an individual become excessive, it can begin to have a negative impact.
Stress is the adverse reaction of individuals to too much pressure and it can have major implications for mental and physical health.
Stress isn’t always easy to spot. But there are workplace indicators that could imply that stress is a problem, such as high levels of sickness absence, high staff turnover, long hours, workloads that are near impossible to achieve and an aggressive workplace culture.
Risk assessment
If you think that stress could be a problem then management should take steps to assess the risks. Stress is a health and safety hazard and your employer should treat it just as it would treat other dangers in the workplace. That means it should undertake a thorough risk assessment and act on that assessment to minimise the risks to staff.
The Health and Safety Executive has developed a tool that can be used to assess the levels of workplace stress. The NUJ has been using this in newspapers, broadcasting and book publishing in Scotland and is using the results to put pressure on managers to act. At Trinity Mirror’s Glasgow titles, the Daily Record, Sunday Mail, and Evening Times, a work-to-rule following publication of the stress survery results led to an agreement to slow down the introduction of new systems. At Harper Collins, the chapel and full-time officers have demanded action over excessive hours and stress levels as part of the house agreement talks.
Following the Scottish lead, a similar survey was conducted throughout the Newsquest group last autumn, the results of which are expected soon.
A trade union issue
This branch and all our chapels have a responsibility to help ensure that stress is not allowed to affect our members’ health and wellbeing. With pensions going the way they are, many of us will need to work well into our late ‘60s. If stress-related health problems impact on your career and job prospects now, this could have major implications for your future earning capacity.
The culture of long working hours is a menace and needs to be tackled collectively wherever we have organised chapels, by monitoring the hours people work, publishing the results and acting collectively. Individuals can also take grievances over being subject to too heavy workloads that result in stress. It is possible to take out a constructive dismissal case (if you feel you were forced out of your job because of the stress) or a personal injury claim, if necessary. In such cases you will need evidence of injury or illness, and must be able to demonstrate that it was caused by your employer's neglect, with foreseeable consequences. With stress cases, you must also be able to show you suffered from a clinically recognised psychological injury, eg depression.
A recent tribunal case taken by the NUJ against Trinity Mirror resulted in a total payout of around £300,000 for a woman who was made redundant after being off with work-related stress for more than a year. Such payouts, however, are quite rare, and it is far better to take action long before stress levels take such a toll on your health. Management will be far more willing to take early complaints seriously knowing that a failure to act early could make them liable for big payouts.
If you need advice about how to deal with a stress issue, talk to your M/FoC or contact the branch on oxnuj@aol.com and we can put you in touch with someone who can help.
For further information on the NUJ’s Stressed Out campaign, please visit www.nuj.org.uk
AW 2009-03-01
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