Get More Pay, Get More Stress?
Feeling stressed-out lately? A lot of us are, and it's taking a toll on our health. Each day, about one million workers call in sick because of stress-related illness. It is estimated that between 70 and 80 percent of all visits to physicians are for stress-related disorders. A study by the University of London found that unmanaged stress was a more dangerous risk factor for heart disease and cancer than cigarette smoking or high-cholesterol foods.
In most cases, it's not a stressful home life that's to blame; it's work. In a study by Northwestern National Life, 40 percent of workers reported their job as "very or extremely stressful," and 25 percent reported their job as the number-one stressor in their lives. Furthermore, workplace stress can spill over into our home lives. A survey by the Anxiety Disorders Association of America found that of workers who said that stress affects their work, 81 percent said it interferes with their relationship with their spouse or significant other and more than a third said it affects their relationship with their children.
Why is work so stressful? One reason is that it's taking up a bigger chunk of our lives than it used to, leaving less time for relaxation and diversion. According to the International Labor Organization, Americans currently average about 43 work hours per week, compared to about 41 hours for most of the 1990s. Considering how much our work productivity has increased in the intervening years, it might be reasonable to assume that we actually would be working fewer hours now. However, most of the monetary benefits from those increases in productivity have gone to rich investors, while many of the rest of us have had to work longer hours to achieve higher incomes or just to keep pace with inflation.
Erosion in union membership has certainly contributed to longer working hours, plus fewer weeks of vacation.
Add to the longer work week the longer commute from home, driven by the American dislike of using or funding public transportation, and worsened by the boom in real estate prices that only recently ended and that has driven more people to live in the exurbs. Now the soaring price of gas is adding a new dose of stress to the long daily commute.
One interesting question is whether the changing work environment contributes to workplace stress. In "Modern Times," Charlie Chaplin portrayed the factory worker as a hapless cog in a sinister machine. But as our economy shifts away from manufacturing, is the Dilbert workplace any less stressful than Charlie Chaplin's factory? I would argue that it isn't when workers are being driven relentlessly toward greater productivity in response to foreign competition and when their output is paced by computer-generated metrics. And don't forget that nowadays the biggest industry of all is health care, which often involves physical strain, dealing with people in pain, and even life-and-death decisions.
Then again, perhaps the increase in stress is simply the result of rising expectations. When work was regarded as a necessary evil, perhaps workers could more easily shrug off its unpleasant aspects as they changed out of their work clothes. But since the 1970s, work has been idealized as a means of self-fulfillment, and perhaps workers are feeling stressed-out when their jobs turn out to be less fulfilling than expected.
Those of us who work in career development would like to believe that every worker can find some kind of work that will be self-fulfilling. But we also acknowledge that career decisions often require trade-offs in which workers must trade away a quantity of workplace self-fulfillment to achieve a quantity of income or another reward. What I have learned recently is how large this trade-off is. While researching a book about jobs that avoid high stress, I discovered that there is a demonstrable relationship between stress and earnings.
The O*NET database rates occupations on a demand called Stress Tolerance, plus several other work-context features that may be considered specific workplace stressors. I was able to match these occupational ratings with figures for median May 2007 earnings of 711 occupational titles. I computed the correlation between the two sets of figures and discovered a correlation of 0.23 between Stress Tolerance and income—not extremely high, but not easily dismissed either. Of the specific stressors, the one with the highest correlation with income was Duration of Typical Work Week (0.43), which means that occupations that pay better tend to demand longer work hours. (My guess is that the correlation would be even higher if the earnings figures included self-employed workers.) Other specific stressors that correlated fairly well with income were Impact of Decisions on Co-workers or Company Results (0.37), Level of Competition (0.29), and Importance of Being Exact or Accurate (0.24). If you want higher pay, you're more likely to have to endure some or all of these stressors.
On the other hand, life at the bottom end of the earnings scale is not stress-free either. In fact, one type of workplace stress is associated with lower-paying work: The correlation for the feature Pace Determined by Speed of Equipment was -0.35, meaning that the less you're paid, the more likely you are to be working in a job like the one in which Lucy and Ethel raced to wrap chocolate bonbons that sped by on a conveyor belt.
But income doesn't tell the whole story. I also computed the correlation between Stress Tolerance and occupational growth projected for the years 2006 to 2016. The resulting figure, 0.30, indicates that faster growth is to be expected among the more stressful occupations.
Another way of looking at this relationship is to consider the 150 occupations that are the focus of the book I was researching. I selected these occupations by discarding the most-stressful half of all occupations (based on Stress Tolerance ratings) and then identifying the 150 remaining occupations with the best combined scores for earnings, projected occupational growth, and projected job openings. Even though these comparatively low-stress occupations were selected partly on the basis of income, the weighted average of their earnings, $33,123, was only a little higher than the average for all occupations, $30,400. Their mean projected growth, 4.7 percent, was actually significantly lower than the mean for all occupations, 10.4 percent.
The lesson I take away from these findings is that if you want to avoid stress but still hold a job with good earnings and a good employment outlook, you're going to have to choose carefully.
Dr. Shatkin can be reached at laurence@myself.com
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