Work Stress: The Making of a Modern Epidemic [Paperback]

The problem is that when workers adopt the identity of work-stress victim, and seek help from a counsellor or a doctor, they effectively relinquish sovereignty over their mental life. For some, it may be necessary that they acknowledge that they cannot cope with a stressful job. But for many, the very process of raising awareness of stress and offering 'support' may facilitate the transition from active worker to passive victim. Wainwright and Calnan are concerned that, while blurring the distinction between 'coper' and 'non-coper' may reduce the stigma of failure, it may also lower expectations of resilience.

Work Stress questions many of the assumptions of the work stress epidemic. For example, it is generally accepted that changes in working conditions and practices over the past twenty or thirty years have had a negative effect on workers. But there can be little doubt that working lives were much more arduous, dangerous and insecure in the first half of the twentieth century, when there was no epidemic of work stress.

Whether or not adverse experiences at work lead 'to more serious psychological or physical health problems appears to depend upon a wide range of personal, social and cultural factors that determine an individual's resilience'. In contrast with most accounts of work-related stress, which tend to take it at face value as an epidemic disorder of the modern workplace, Wainwright and Calnan emphasise the central importance of the subjective factor, of the outlook of workers themselves, in the emergence of this phenomenon.

'Has work become harder or have workers become less resilient?' - the authors concede that this straightforward question is 'surprisingly difficult to answer'. They set about trying to answer it, not only by reviewing the familiar changes in the workplace and the labour market over the past twenty years, but by placing these changes in the wider political and ideological climate that has emerged following the collapse of socialism and the transformation of the trade unions. The unions now play a central role in promoting the concept of 'work stress', together with issues of bullying and harrassment in the workplace. As Wainwright and Calnan put it, 'work stress is the phenomenal form taken by antagonistic production relations in Western society at the current time'.

In their conclusion, the authors champion 'resistance to the therapeutic imperative'. In place of the work-stress victim, they propose a 'mentally competent, emotionally resilient subject who has high expectations of human potential'. Their final sentence strikes a strangely familiar, but nonetheless inspiring, note: 'our aim has been to criticise work stress in theory; it can only be overthrown in practice'.

It is very worrying that as a society we are rushing headlong into the creation of a victim culture, where people are only too willing to consider themselves damaged by situations which in earlier ages would have been considered not just acceptable, but unimaginably comfortable.