Companies today often require employees to work overtime without compensation. Because of the high unemployment rate, people feel lucky to have a job, and companies take advantage of that situation. When the economy is tight, they know they can save money by having existing employees carry the load, rather than hiring new employees and paying additional salaries and benefits.
“Everybody just does it,” a patient who works for a blue chip corporation complained recently. “It’s like you don’t have a choice. If you don’t go along with it, you get laid off. It’s a kind of company extortion.”
In many cases, a people’s jobs take over their lives. They can’t plan any personal events on weekdays, and sometimes not on weekends. They are always on call by their jobs and never know if or when they will have time off. The result is that people are experiencing increasing job-related stress, which spills out into their domestic lives.
In typical cases, workers may leave for their jobs at about 7 am and won’t get home to their spouses and children until 9 pm. They are made to feel guilty if they take a vacation, and when they do manage to take a week off their cell phones may be ringing and they may end up having to interrupt their vacations by handling things or attending meetings over the phone. This can cause domestic friction.
Spouses often feel resentment and anger at what seems like abandonment. The spouse who is being overworked tries again and again to explain that he or she can’t help it, The abandoned spouse sometimes assumes that the overworked spouse loves their job more than they love their family. I call this a “job-related abandonment syndrome.”
When this syndrome is ongoing and lasts for months and sometimes for years, it can bring families to the breaking point. People are not getting enough sleep nor enough time for personal leisure. Their lives are all work and no play. They resort to alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes to handle their stress, and their domestic friction rises to a level where there is constant fighting and sometimes even violence.
This constant strife between parents effects their kids. The kids don’t feel secure at home and therefore they don’t feel secure at school. This in turn affects their school performance and they also may resort to alcohol or drugs to handle their stress.
Company bigwigs do not seem to care about any of this. It is well known that there is a wide gap between the salaries of CEOs (which can be as high as 20 million a year in large corporations) and the salary of the average worker (which is currently about 50 thousand a year). Company higher ups also make sure they have leisure time to spend on their yachts and their trips to exotic places.
Is there anything an employee can do under the circumstances? Unfortunately white collar workers don’t have a union. So each must handle the problem individually. One method is to let bosses know that job stress is affecting their health. If that doesn’t work, they may complain that overtime is causing so much stress that it is effecting job performance. Anything relating to job productivity will get their boss’s ear.
If nothing can be done about the work situation, then the only alternative is to adjust one’s attitude and find ways not to fret yourself about what can’t be helped.
Gerald Schoenewolf, Ph.D., a licensed psychoanalyst, adjunct professor and author of 20 books, has a website at www.drschoenewolf.com.