Slashdot Mirror
Your Boss Is Not More Stressed Out Than You, Science Says (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Work under capitalism is a brutal psychological gauntlet -- low pay, long hours, and little to no safety net. But bosses usually expect you to take some solace in the fact that you're not doing their (supposedly more difficult) job, even if they make more money. Some part of you might think that's bullshit, but hey, what do you know? Well, according to new work from researchers from the University of Manchester, University College London, and the University of Essex, it probably is bullshit. According to their study, published on Friday in the Journals of Gerontology, people lower on the corporate ladder are, on average, more stressed than people higher up. Worse, according to the study, the elevated stress continues into retirement for average working people. 'Workers in lower status jobs tend to have more stressful working conditions -- they have lower pay, poorer pension arrangements, less control over their work, and report more unsupportive colleagues and managers,' Tarani Chandola, a professor of medical sociology at the University of Manchester and one of the paper's authors, wrote me in an email.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (began in 1967)
"The studies, named after the Whitehall area of London and led by Michael Marmot, found a strong association between grade levels of civil servant employment and mortality rates from a range of causes: the lower the grade, the higher the mortality rate. Men in the lowest grade (messengers, doorkeepers, etc.) had a mortality rate three times higher than that of men in the highest grade (administrators). This effect has since been observed in other studies and named the "status syndrome".[3]"
Capitalism today is broken. Capitalism has lead us down a path of unbridled consumption that rather than fix or upgrade things, we throw them out and buy new things. The attitude towards capitalism is predictable. It's broken, so let's just get rid of it for something new and shiny.
The people who are pro-capitalism though, regard the bugs in capitalism as features. And until that changes, capitalism will just get worse, and the people calling for its replacement will become more justified in their point of view.
We need to start regarding the bugs, as actual bugs, and fix them, if we want capitalism to continue in one form or another, because at some point, enough people will feel so disenfranchised from capitalism that they will successfully overthrow it.
"Work under capitalism is a brutal psychological gauntlet -- low pay, long hours, and little to no safety net."
Compared to what?
Why does it need comparison? Is it not a brutal psychological gauntlet with increasingly lower pay, long hours and little to no safety net? The minimum wage isn't increasing as the value of money decreases or as productivity increases. Office working hours were previously a total of 8 hours where now it's 9 hours. Our social safety nets are really lacking.
Just because brutality is par for course doesn't make it any less brutal.
This is just another example of Slashdot leftwing clickbait, because evidently covering actual News For Nerds is evidently too boring compared to launching yet another left vs. right flamewar.
How is this a partisan issue? Are people on one side of the political spectrum not working at all or something? We're in this together, bro.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
But she deals with a bunch of garbage that I don't have to care about because she insolates me from it so I can get my work done. I see some of the E-mails about the issues she's keeping off my plate and I shudder to think what my life would be like if she didn't do what she does. She takes the stress so I don't have to and I owe her both my loyalty and thanks.
But I can assure you, my current manager isn't typical.... No sir. In my 25 years of having all sorts of managers, she's in the top 5% and I will be sad when she retires. My previous manager was totally opposite, visited his scorn for failure to meet real and imagined (by him) requirements when he demanded (regardless of if they'd been communicated or not). I'm sure he was stressed too, given all his direct and indirect reports generally didn't care one bit about keeping him out of trouble given the likelihood of getting your head handed to you when you raised an issue. He was a moron of a manager and I am lucky I escaped with my self respect from that place. I find this kind of manager much more common....
So, Yes, my managers ARE more stressed than I am.... I'm guessing the good managers are LESS stressed though than the ones who should have never taken the job in the first place.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No, "We're in this together" means we share something in common. In this particular case, people in the US are part of a single capitalism based economic system regardless of their own political affiliation or beliefs.
If you are so blind that you cannot see that then you need to take a break from politics because your viewpoint has become so heavily distorted that it has no bearing on reality.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.