“Mal”. As in Latin for “bad” or “wrongful”.
As in “when what you do for a living makes you want to kill yourself.”
“Ruin my weekend? My boss ruined my life!”
So wrote JJ Jeffers, one of a few hundred commenters on last week’s story, “Is your boss ruining your weekend?”
“My new boss makes me work every weekend,” wrote commenter kit8. “Hence, I don’t feel stress about going to work on Monday as I am always at work.”
It’s the plight of the malemployed, defined by Urban Dictionary as “when what you do for a living makes you want to kill yourself.”
“[W]hat’s fouling up my weekend is that my boss keeps bringing in more work and not planning enough personnel to do it,” wrote another commenter, randumb guy. “We are building an economy based on extracting more from fewer.”
Dude agreed: “Our department … got busier and busier until we reached a point where we were at a full sprint from the moment you clocked in until you left for the day. …Then they added additional work. Then even more work … there was always one that came up a little short at the end of the week. At the weekly meetings they would always bring them up and mention ‘disciplinary [sic] up to and including termination.’”
Stress is not necessarily a bad thing, Dr. Rajita Sinha, the head of Yale’s Stress Center, once told me.
“It’s stress that is sustained, uncontrollable and overwhelming, where people can’t figure out options to solve their problems, that is damaging.”
Unfortunately for many, work fits this latter bill.
A vast body of epidemiological and public health literature suggests that certain types of workplace practices have an adverse effect on human health and life span, according to Jeffery Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and author of “Power: Why Some People Have It – and Others Don’t.”
And so JJ Jeffers’s comment is not far off the mark. Your boss may not just be ruining your weekend; he or she may be doing severe physical and psychological harm.
“Look at it in terms of ‘exposures,’” says Pfeffer. Layoffs, being uninsured or underinsured, the absence of job control and long work hours can all serve as exposures to a host of diseases and pathologies – high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, sleep disorders and alcoholism, among others.
And many of the toxic practices that are harming employees are also harming their companies.
“When you don’t offer your employees health insurance, they come to work sick,” says Pfeffer. “They suffer from absenteeism and presenteeism. They are so distracted, they don’t get much done. And long working hours being more productive? That’s a myth that turns out not to be true.”
So what options does a malemployed worker have?
Read the rest…