Steven Sauter, Ph.D., chief of the Applied Psychology and Ergonomics Branch of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), says that workers today are reporting higher levels of stress with their jobs than in the past. 

Some of these stressors are physical. For example, 22 million health-care workers are at risk for HIV and tuberculosis exposure on the job. Eight hundred thousand workers are pricked with needles each year. 

Much of the job stress that is claimed is emotional in nature. Claims for emotional illness rose more than four times between 1981 and 1990 in the U.S. federal government work force. In 1996, a quarter of respondents in a survey said that their job was the single greatest cause of stress in their lives. 

Every time someone claims job stress, an average of 16 workdays are lost per year. And many experts warn that the problem is likely to grow as more and more women enter the work force. Dr. Derald Wing Sue with the California School of Professional Psychology, says that women generally face more stress on the job than men, because women have to not only manage their jobs, but are also frequently the sole caretakers of children and aging parents. Even when they are not, they normally have added pressures of greater domestic demands. 

What's the solution? No single solution is at hand. Clearly individuals need to learn how to better manager their work and job stress. But that's only a partial solution. 

Organizations need to carefully keep an eye out for physical stressors, including needle pricks for health care workers, and the physical stress of lifting heavy objects for warehouse personnel, and the ergonomic pressure of sitting for hours behind scopes and at computer terminals. Erratic work hours that make it difficult for working parents to be responsible for their children also put pressure on workers. At TMI, we have seen organizations schedule late after noon meetings without any regard to parents who have to be at a child care facility to pick up their children, at the risk of having their children put out on the street with no adult to tend them. 

It's a complex problem and needs to be looked at from a variety of points. All of us as individuals have responsibility to manage our own stress. At the same time, if we are placed in situations where organizations have no care for establishing reasonable work place conditions, our own personal stress management techniques will only carry us so far.   

Janelle M. Barlow, Ph.D.  

Author of The Stress Manager 

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