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Bad jobs making people sick

Why Having a Bad Job Is Worse for Your Health Than Having No Job at All

Paul Ratner

If you work in a low-paying job you hate, you are likely more chronically stressed out than if you were just unemployed. That’s the conclusion of a new study from researchers at the University of Manchester.

Focusing on how job transitions affect health, sociologists monitored 1116 unemployed British adults who didn’t have a job in 2009-2010, and discovered that those who ended up finding good jobs had improved mental health. But those who found stressful, badly paid or unstable jobs showed no improvement in their mental health and, in fact, physical indicators of chronic stress were worse in such people than in those who stayed unemployed.

The scientists, led by the study author Professor Tarani Chandola, followed up with the study participants for a few years, noting their self-reported health and chronic stress levels as indicated by hormones and other stress-linked biomarkers.

The goal for Chandola was to find out if any job is better than no job. She focused on job quality as defined by pay, job security, job satisfaction and levels of anxiety.

“Job quality cannot be disregarded from the employment success of the unemployed, said Chandola. “Just as good work is good for health, we must also remember that poor quality work can be detrimental to health.”

As she described her process in an interview with ResearchGate, to gauge stress levels, Chandola focused on biomarkers “based on elevated levels of hormones, inflammatory, metabolic and cardiovascular levels such as higher blood pressure and cholesterol.”

“I was trying to test the common assumption that any job is better than no job,” said Chandola. “I have been working on work, stress, and health for a number of years, and people accept that having a stressful job is not good for your physical and mental health. But most people then say, “but at least you have a job,” with the implicit assumption that being unemployed is far worse for your health than having a stressful and poor quality job.”

While the research involved British adults, Chandola said that a few studies in other countries like Australia showed similar results. Having a bad job is worse for your health than having no job at all. Of course, having no money at all can also be quite a stressful experience.

The key, says Chandola, is for people to understand whether their work could be making them ill. Maybe you don’t need to leave it, but not working with your doctor and manager to improve how you deal with the job could be detrimental to you.

You can read the study here, in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

The stress of low-paid work is making our country sick

Dawn Foster

On Tuesday Heather left her desk, locked herself into a toilet cubicle and wept for 30 minutes, covering her mouth with a fistful of toilet paper to avoid being heard by her colleagues. For the last year, the 26-year-old has been having nightmares about her workplace, and has been signed off with depression on and off for the past four months. The Glasgow customer service call centre she works in has a high turnover of staff, who are often signed off with anxiety and depression, and the constant management warnings about being laid off if calls aren’t dealt with in strict timeframes are massively stressful for staff on zero-hours contracts with barely any employment rights.

Heather’s experience isn’t unusual. Researchers from Manchester University this month released research showing poor-quality jobs are actually worse for mental health than unemployment. Adults who transitioned from unemployment into low-paid work had elevated risks for a number of health issues, especially chronic stress.

Prior to her call centre job, Heather was unemployed for two years after a slipped disc made her job caring for a disabled couple physically impossible. “I often felt miserable and useless, being unable to find work, endlessly sitting through interviews and never even getting a rejection email, just silence,” she tells me. “But now I honestly think it was preferable to how I feel now.” Speaking on the phone from the bus she takes to work, Heather admits that an anxiety attack before she left the house left her vomiting – an increasingly common occurrence as the pressure of the job weighs ever more heavily on her.

The idea that unemployment is more detrimental to long-term health than any kind of work is simply false, the Manchester researchers found. The received wisdom that work is intrinsically beneficial and preferable to worklessness simply does not hold up in today’s employment market. The study focused on 1,000 people between the ages of 35 and 75 who were unemployed in 2009-2010, tracking their self-reported health and chronic stress levels – measured through blood tests examining hormones and markers of stress – in the following years. Chronic stress was clearly higher for adults who moved into poor-quality work than for those who remained unemployed.

The UK is facing a crisis of health and quality of work: the decline of industry and casualisation of the workforce has led to a boom in jobs that are high stress, low paid and now, it seems, actively harmful.

For five years Luke worked night shifts in an office job in Bristol while his partner worked during the day. The shift patterns drastically affected his day-to-day life, and the pay was not enough to offset the personal costs of the work. “I lost the ability to sleep at night during my time off, and it became very difficult to live a normal life outside of work. I was generally more ill than I had been before, picking up bugs and the common cold much more often,” Luke says. “In retrospect I realise it affected my mental health: I was moodier, and more prone to depression. I now view it as having lost most of my twenties.” He now cares for his daughter full time while his partner works.

This week NHS England announced a plan for a Healthy Towns scheme to offer residents in several areas of the country incentives to keep fit. Locals who run, walk or use outdoor gyms in certain areas will be able to earn rewards by tracking their activity using downloadable apps. Money off supermarket shopping, free cinema tickets and discounts on sports gear are among the carrots offered to people who opt to up their activity level. The scheme’s architects hope that incentivising exercise will help combat obesity, diabetes and heart disease and illnesses that can be curbed through lifestyle changes. The idea is a commendable one, and aims to make activity easier through design changes in architecture and infrastructure, making towns and housing developments more exercise friendly, with outdoor gyms, running tracks and free bicycles for locals to use.

But reasons for low levels of activity are myriad: for Luke, playing football became impossible because he had to sleep while his friends played after work and at weekends. For Heather, anxiety and feeling emotionally drained means she struggles to find the energy for a jog in the evenings. Having insufficient help when caring for two people led to her back injury, which continues to limit her activity and causes significant flare-ups of pain. For both of them, work barely altered their finances compared with unemployment, yet made them physically ill.

The Conservative manifesto at the general election repeated the party’s mantra that work is the best route out of poverty. But for millions of people, this simply isn’t true. The majority of households in poverty are in work, and the poor quality and stress of the work they are doing is making the country sick.

Moralising over the inherent virtue of work may have held some sway in the past, but with the fragmenting of employment rights, the rise of the precariat, the proliferation of zero-hours contracts and the stagnation of wages since the recession, being in work is often worse for people, in terms of health and quality of life, than unemployment. Most people, given the choice between unemployment and work, would plump for the latter, in the hope of financial reward, escaping poverty, and even gaining status – and because being out of work is teeth-grindingly dull and caustic to individual self-worth.

But for Luke and Heather, work created more problems than it solved. When Luke and his partner were expecting their daughter, the pair calculated that when commuting costs, child benefit and childcare costs were taken into account, they would be only £100 a month better off if Luke continued to work instead of staying at home with the baby. It seemed a small price to pay for a much better life; and while childcare is occasionally monotonous and lonely, he gets to spend time with his daughter, and more time with his partner and friends, and is far happier as a result. For their family, more stringent budgeting was preferable to staying in a job: on balance, work didn’t pay. Forfeiting £25 a week is a small price to pay for better mental and physical health.

Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist

Having a bad job can be worse for your health than being unemployed

A new study by The University of Manchester has found that people employed in low-paying or highly stressful jobs may not actually enjoy better health than those who remain unemployed.

The aim of the study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, was to examine the association of job transition with health and stress. The researchers were particularly interested in comparing the health of those who remained unemployed with those who transitioned to poor quality work, and examining whether the health impacts of good or poor quality jobs.

The study monitored over 1000 participants aged 35-75 who were unemployed during 2009-2010, following up with them during the next few years about their self-reported health and their levels of chronic stress as indicated by their hormones and other biomarkers related to stress.

There was a clear pattern of the highest levels of chronic stress for adults who moved into poor quality work, higher than those adults who remained unemployed. Adults who found a good quality job had the lowest levels of biomarkers.

Working into any type of job (whether it was a good or poor quality job) was not associated with an improvement in physical health compared to those who remained unemployed. Good quality work was associated with an improvement in mental health scores compared to remaining unemployed, but there were no differences in mental health scores between those who transitioned into poor quality work and those who remained unemployed.

In summary, researchers found evidence that formerly unemployed adults who moved into poor quality jobs had elevated risks for a range of health problems, compared to adults who remained unemployed.

They found little evidence that reemployment into poor quality jobs was associated with better health and lower adverse levels of biomarkers related to chronic stress compared to remaining unemployed – instead, the evidence suggested that it was associated with higher levels of chronic stress-related biomarkers.

Linked from 27/8/2017 Journal