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Long Working Hours Lead To a Rise In Premature Deaths, WHO Says (seattletimes.com) 117

Posted by BeauHD from the underpaid-and-overworked dept.
Long working hours are leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, according to a new study by the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. The Seattle Times reports: Working more than 55 hours a week in a paid job resulted in 745,000 deaths in 2016, the study estimated, up from 590,000 in 2000. About 398,000 of the deaths in 2016 were because of stroke and 347,000 because of heart disease. Both physiological stress responses and changes in behavior (such as an unhealthy diet, poor sleep and reduced physical activity) are "conceivable" reasons that long hours have a negative impact on health, the authors suggest.

Other takeaways from the study:

- Working more than 55 hours per week is dangerous. It is associated with an estimated 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of heart disease compared with working 35-40 hours per week.
- About 9% of the global population works long hours. In 2016, an estimated 488 million people worked more than 55 hours per week.
- Long hours are more dangerous than other occupational hazards. In all three years that the study examined (2000, 2010 and 2016), working long hours led to more disease than any other occupational risk factor, including exposure to carcinogens and the nonuse of seat belts at work. And the health toll of overwork worsened over time: From 2000 to 2016, the number of deaths from heart disease because of working long hours increased 42%, and from stroke 19%.
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Long Working Hours Lead To a Rise In Premature Deaths, WHO Says More

Long Working Hours Lead To a Rise In Premature Deaths, WHO Says

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  • Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Random361 ( 6742804 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @03:02AM (#61426754)
    Guess they need to stop having doctors work 80 hours a week in school and residency, eh? Physician, heal thyself.

    • Guess they need to stop having doctors work 80 hours a week in school and residency, eh? Physician, heal thyself.

      Which Doctors? The WHO doctors who published the study? You asked the authors if they work 80 hours a week? My local doctors (non American) certainly don't.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

        Thanks. Now I've got a butchered version of that Chipmunks song going round in my head.

        "I called the witch doctor he told me to ask WHO."
        "oo ee oo aa aa, ting, tang, walla walla bing bang""

    • At least that would apply to some of the worst jobs I've had. Fortunately, the only jobs that had long working hours were the ones that were worth working at, but I was probably just lucky. And in some cases, I might have been lucky to be fired quickly.

      Well there was a joke in there that fizzled somewhere, but I did object to the null subject.

  • Healthier at home. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @03:13AM (#61426766) Journal

    Good thing we have work at home so people can have healthier hours and a bed close by.

    • And example of a good use of sarcasm.

    • Trust me, I take full advantage of my work-from-home situation.

      And when I say "full", I mean a max of 30 hours a week, period. I'm nearing the end of my career- I have no one to impress, there's no corporate ladder I want to climb, and I don't give a flyin' fuck about advancement. I don't want recognition (in fact, the less they know I exist, the better lol).

      Don't waste a minute of your time trying to "motivate" me to "ramp up" or "exceed in my performance goals". Bitch, I'm as motivated as I'm ever going t

  • "..., says WHO"

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Freischutz ( 4776131 )

      "..., says WHO"

      Missed opportunity? Why? According to the right wing the WHO is an evil cabal run by China that is trying to destroy Western Judeo-Christian conservative culture as we know it. Obviously the Trumpistanis are going to read this story and work twice as many hours just to prove China and the Libtartds wrong. Assuming for a moment that the Trumpistanis are right about the WHO being an evil cabal then it stands to reason that the WHO obviously caught an opportunity here mid flight. "4D chess baby, this is the C

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        The person writing "Trumpistanis" just might not be a dispassionate observer or commenter on the situation. Perhaps you would like to discuss the reliability of the WHO rather than just hurl invective.

        The WHO saw fit to echo China's denial of person-to-person transmission in January 2020. (Chinese report: "The possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be excluded, but the risk of sustained transmission is low." WHO summary: "We have not found proof for human-to-human transmission.") They

  • Thou shalt do overtime (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @04:12AM (#61426850)
    So where I live, overtime is not payed. It is included in your monthly salary. It is considered a part of the job. For office jobs, that is. It depends a bit on the company culture how far this goes, but there definitely is a pressure to do constant overtime. It also is a sort of measure of how important you are. The more overtime, the higher you are regarded. It goes pretty far. If you only do the hours written down in the contract (typically 40h/week) you are considered as a bad employee with no commitment. Not only by management, but by your colleagues as well. Personally I agree with this to some degree. You get the job done. Of course it is not that black and white, but you get the point. Nice to see that the WHO puts a number on the amount of hours that is healthy. Yeah, it depends on the type of job and the circumstances etc, but I think I will use the 55hs as a rough personal limit from now on. I will also gladly point people bragging about their "80h" workweek to the WHO conclusion. I guess they will need to find a different method for compensating ;-)

    • Re:Thou shalt do overtime (Score:5, Insightful)

      by famebait ( 450028 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @04:48AM (#61426898)

      Personally I agree with this to some degree. You get the job done.

      The job is never done. Scope expands to fill the time available.
      Are all jobs done after specifically 55 hours but not 40? Why not 100?

      Finding the right balance between profitability and sustainability is non-trivial, but expected performance is not a given universal constant. It is a matter of experience with a certain level of effort. If expected input was 40h, 'the job' would need to be shaped to fit, just as it has for 55 or whatever.

      But that is ignoring all the reasearch showing that for many office-type jobs, the added value of overtime is often marginal or even negative.

      • Personally I agree with this to some degree. You get the job done.

        The job is never done. Scope expands to fill the time available. Are all jobs done after specifically 55 hours but not 40? Why not 100?

        Finding the right balance between profitability and sustainability is non-trivial, but expected performance is not a given universal constant. It is a matter of experience with a certain level of effort. If expected input was 40h, 'the job' would need to be shaped to fit, just as it has for 55 or whatever.

        But that is ignoring all the reasearch showing that for many office-type jobs, the added value of overtime is often marginal or even negative.

        You just need to listen to your inner Wally [dilbert.com].

    • Re:Thou shalt do overtime (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @04:57AM (#61426912) Homepage Journal

      That's the safety issue. Of course, the 55 hour limit may already be past the point of negative sustained productivity and is almost certainly at least well into diminishing returns.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      Where I live overtime can be considered "part of the job" and not be paid only for executives in very high positions. A normal office worker's overtime needs to be compensated at a higher rate than standard working hours. Furthermore, the amount of overtime cannot exceed specific parameters.

      There are culture aspects at play, but very strict regulation is also very important. Basically once it becomes a problem for the company if you do too much overtime, then the company will naturally prevent you from doin

    • Re:Thou shalt do overtime (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday May 27, 2021 @09:58AM (#61427394) Homepage Journal

      > It also is a sort of measure of how important you are. The more overtime, the higher you are regarded. It goes pretty far. If you only do the hours written down in the contract (typically 40h/week) you are considered as a bad employee with no commitment.

      Are you highly paid? Is there high loyalty from the company such that you'll never be laid off if times are tough?

      Sometimes these are true but far more often these are just abusive cultures using people without compensation. It's like when prisoners enforce the rules for the warden.

    • In the U.S., any employee categorized as Professional, Administrative, Executive, or Computer related is exempt from labor laws (that covers basically everything except for flipping burgers or mowing lawns). Since you're "professional", you're paid for getting the job done, not for how long it took to do it.

      But this is a one sided game. So....

      Work 80 hours in a week? You only get paid for 40.
      Got all your work done in 4 days and want to take Friday off? Nope. You have to burn one of your 10 vacation day

  • Long ago and far away (Score:5, Interesting)

    by snegbuff ( 591727 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @05:11AM (#61426924)
    I lived and worked in Michigan many moons ago. The basis for hiring a new worker was if the current workers needed to exceed 58 hours to meet production, then it was cheaper to hire. The theory was based on overtime pay costs, union benefits, governmental costs (unemployment insurance, social security, workmen's compensation, and whatever else). Workers opinions varied: In Detroit, if you only worked a guy 40 hours, you were starving him and he would start looking for a new place to work; in Ann Arbor 40 hours was the absolute maximum you could get out of an employee. For a bit of perspective, 58 hours paid 40 hours of straight time (regular pay), plus 18 hours at time and a half, 27 hours of straight time, giving you 67 hours pay for the week, that's with or without a union. Most everybody felt you could live a lot better and a lot healthier with over half again as much income. But that was back in the day when men were men, and women were necessary, and bread was a nickle a loaf!

  • "Working more than 55 hours a week in a paid job..."

    That one is easy.. just get rid of the pay. /s

  • Does it count? (Score:3)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @05:57AM (#61426966)
    Does it count if half the time is browsing slashdot?

  • that is just what the government wants (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:10AM (#61427054)
    they want everyone to work long hours so they have big paychecks to tax, and then everyone dies before they are old enough to collect social security

    • Quite the opposite actually. Governments want to reduce working hours so that the work gets spread around to more people, thereby reducing the unemployment rate. For example if you have 7 people working 50 hour weeks, they could be replaced by 10 people working 35 hour weeks. That's a huge increase in employment. This is exactly the strategy behind France's push to reduce working hours to 35 hours per week [wikipedia.org] to combat France's (then) double digit unemployment rate. Many other Western European countries do so

      • if they really wanted to do that they would make it a law, enforced with strict penalties, just like child labor laws, i would love to have a 5 hour a day 5 day a week job giving me 35 hours a week that paid 15 dollars an hour

      • Governments want to reduce working hours so that the work gets spread around to more people, thereby reducing the unemployment rate.

        But not spread too thin. Being employed and still costing the government money is the worst of both worlds. Walmart is the biggest welfare queen there is. About half are full time and they count 34 hours as full time. It's only this year that they are finally making a push to convert hourly to full time.

      • Re:that is just what the government wants (Score:5, Insightful)

        by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @11:01AM (#61427640)

        Quite the opposite actually. Governments want to reduce working hours so that the work gets spread around to more people, thereby reducing the unemployment rate.

        Your problem, is lumping America in with "governments".

        For example if you have 7 people working 50 hour weeks, they could be replaced by 10 people working 35 hour weeks. That's a huge increase in employment.

        No, that's viewed as a massive increase in costs. Overtime hardly matters when the bean counters are counting heads, not hours. Why? Because the fully loaded overhead is considerable per employee. (tends to happen when the business costs for health insurance are insane, along with other benefits like 401k, disability, etc.).

        This is exactly the strategy behind France's push to reduce working hours to 35 hours per week [wikipedia.org] to combat France's (then) double digit unemployment rate. Many other Western European countries do something similar with generous holiday hours and strict overtime regulations. Which is why Western Europe has the lowest annual working hours in the world.

        There's some sound logic to that, so naturally America created a "gig" economy instead, and will reject any notion that 55+ hours/week is really all that bad.

        Our future human employment utopia is doing a job you love, for maybe 20 - 30 hours a week. Just long enough to feel that satisfaction and self pride, but short enough to afford a life and not prematurely kill yourself. Unfortunately, Greed will look to replace the human workers instead, and leave you to hang in the financial winds of UBI, which will be lobbied down by Greed to be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses.

        • No, that's viewed as a massive increase in costs. Overtime hardly matters when the bean counters are counting heads, not hours. Why? Because the fully loaded overhead is considerable per employee. (tends to happen when the business costs for health insurance are insane, along with other benefits like 401k, disability, etc.).

          I agree 100%, it's very bad for businesses. Which is why in we now know this plan doesn't work. Much of Western Europe still has the stubbornly high unemployment it was struggling with before. But it also has lower growth, lower productivity, and lower incomes relative to the US at least in part to these reduced work hour schemes.

          There's some sound logic to that, so naturally America created a "gig" economy instead, and will reject any notion that 55+ hours/week is really all that bad.

          Our future human employment utopia is doing a job you love, for maybe 20 - 30 hours a week. Just long enough to feel that satisfaction and self pride, but short enough to afford a life and not prematurely kill yourself. Unfortunately, Greed will look to replace the human workers instead, and leave you to hang in the financial winds of UBI, which will be lobbied down by Greed to be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses.

          I strong disagree on this point. We all have a choice between more time off or more income, and each person will have their own preferences. But if we look across the developed wor

          • Re:that is just what the government wants (Score:4, Interesting)

            by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @12:40PM (#61428190)

            Our future human employment utopia is doing a job you love, for maybe 20 - 30 hours a week. Just long enough to feel that satisfaction and self pride, but short enough to afford a life and not prematurely kill yourself. Unfortunately, Greed will look to replace the human workers instead, and leave you to hang in the financial winds of UBI, which will be lobbied down by Greed to be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses.

            I strong disagree on this point. We all have a choice between more time off or more income, and each person will have their own preferences. But if we look across the developed world the average person seems satisfied with 40 hours a week. Were there a strong demand for more time off then we would see this in countries and industries with large unions. But we don't. The big unions aren't fighting for less working hours and neither are individuals. Given the choice workers and unions are fighting for more money, not more time off.

            You can disagree with this all you want, but at the end of the day Relentless Greed will decide. Your 40-hour a week job will be replaced by a robot if it can do it, and automation has already displaced human work.

            McDonalds faced a forced minimum wage hike in America, and what is Greeds response? Deploy thousands of kiosk bots to replace cashiers instead.

            Amazon will automate warehouses, eliminating the need for piss-in-the-bottle workers. They will fly drones to deliver packages, eliminating the need for a large percentage of deliveries by human driver. This kind of automation that will decimate human employment, will continue throughout many industries over the next decade or two.

            I said 20 - 30 hours a week recognizing that we will need to find a reasonable middle ground because the demand for human labor will likely drop well below 40 hours a week. Not to mention humans like to reproduce, so that many more I-need-a-job humans are being put into the demand pool every day. If a person could work 30 hours a week today and get paid the same as their current 40-hour week, I highly doubt you would find more than 5% of people that wouldn't take advantage of that. You get one ride in life. Do we really want to continue to justify a 40-hour workweek when it becomes harder and harder to do so? Yes, humans still need to do something to fulfill basic desires of wanting and needing to participate in a useful way in society. That's why we can't just all go the route of UBI, even if the machines already see that future. But I don't see a need for a 40-hour workweek going forward. Perhaps sooner than later.

            It's going to be weird when the entire purpose of a union, is to fight for human jobs, not merely hours or pay.

            • Your 40-hour a week job will be replaced by a robot if it can do it, and automation has already displaced human work.

              The problem is that people have been saying this since the luddites were smashing textile mills over 200 years ago and it's never been true. We have seen a huge amount of automation take places, especially in the last 50 years with the proliferation of computers and robots. Despite this, the employment rate [cloudfront.net] (the percentage of the working age population employed) has a long-term upward trend. Indeed, the employment rate in 2018 before the pandemic (~61%) was higher than at any point in the 60s or 70s. If aut

              • Your 40-hour a week job will be replaced by a robot if it can do it, and automation has already displaced human work.

                The problem is that people have been saying this since the luddites were smashing textile mills over 200 years ago and it's never been true. We have seen a huge amount of automation take places, especially in the last 50 years with the proliferation of computers and robots. Despite this, the employment rate [cloudfront.net] (the percentage of the working age population employed) has a long-term upward trend. Indeed, the employment rate in 2018 before the pandemic (~61%) was higher than at any point in the 60s or 70s. If automation is wiping out jobs then the data should show a smaller fraction of the population, but what it actually shows is the opposite.

                What you fail to understand, is that this form of automation is targeting something no other has before; your mind.

                For the last 200 years of automation, the answer was always "go get an education" when you found your job obsolete. That will not be the answer tomorrow. And we certainly won't need perfect AI to replace most human workers, who are far from perfect themselves, and still require all those pain-in-the-ass things from the employer's standpoint. Like time off, vacation, health and life insuranc

  • Type A people who work long hours are stressed out. That's been known for decades. But is it the work or the personality?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Arethan ( 223197 )

      More like Type A is more easily distracted by the trappings of work, so if left to their own devices will work longer hours by their own nature. This is because, at some level, the work is fun/entertaining.

      The component that adds the undo stress are artificial deadlines and lack of work-life balance sentiment within leadership - ie "You've been at this for an hour straight. Go talk a walk and enjoy the nice day a bit. Work will still be here tomorrow"

      Telling people to work less hours but still meet the same

  • My relatives and acquaintances in the legal profession have observed that in law, particularly the big firms, a forty hour week is considered barely part-time and insufficient to sustain a career. And when I worked in IT management for a brokerage, the average work week for my peers was 72 hours -- between day shift, takehome work and random overnight interruption. And know of a few agencies where late night texts and emails were considered mandatory to show ones dedication. This tiny sample suggests that t

  • I'm wondering if the long-life gap will shorten now that women are a serious part of the workforce, but my guess is it won't, that women will continue to choose quality of life over working long hours.
    • How do you go from "...now that women are a serious part of the workforce..." to "...women will continue to choose quality of life over working long hours..." in a single sentence?
      • Significant part of workforce: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com] Hours worked: > employed men work an average of 42 minutes more per day than employed women,... an extra... 14 hours a month. ... from https://www.forbes.com/sites/k... [forbes.com]
        • Fair enough.
          So I see at least two considerations:
          • Men need to stop being suckers and learn a few lessons from women
          • As culture and industry continue to change and evolve, women will continue to increase their engagement

          The world isn't static, and this isn't necessarily an either/or situation. Things will very likeely continue to change and shift.

          • Should men learn from women? Women are getting everything they say they want — they're more educated than men, they're a larger part of the workforce than me, they have reproductive choice, and yet they keep getting less and less happy [berkeley.edu] decade after decade.
    • Google brings this up as the first result: Women's long work hours linked to alarming increases in cancer, heart disease [sciencedaily.com].

      Men with tough work schedules appeared to fare much better, found the researchers, who analyzed data from interviews with almost 7,500 people who were part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

      Women tend to take on the lion's share of family responsibility and may face more pressure and stress than men when they work long hours, previous research shows. On top of that, work for

  • So how did who manage a control group in this study? Seriously? It may even be self-selecting with Type-A's who will work more hours naturally also happen to have a higher risk of stroke. So is it being Type A that causes the increase or actually working more hours?
  • When I was studying Japanese back in the early 90s, m professor would occasionally inject words & phrases into her lessons for things we might have encountered (or will encounter later) and not realized it was borrowed from Japanese. I was reading six newspapers/day and brought up a word an article referenced for her to discuss which I'd encountered: "karoshi" - literally working yourself to death.

    On the humorous side, she hosted some of us at a private party at her apartment. When my fellow studen
  • How does this square with the long lives in Japan compare to the less worked Europeans?

    • Different genetic ethnicity, different diet, climate and exercise encouraged in school and work. What would would Japanese lifespan be without their stress? How do we know they're not losing years?

  • In my case, and that of many others, would also lead to premature death, not only for me, but for my family also. Unemployment is quite damaging as well.

    It's simply expected in the current economic and political climate where I am, and in the type of work I do, that a person will work at least up to the point when more work hours would cause a decrease, rather than an increase, in his or her work output.

  • "Long Working Hours Lead To a Rise In Premature Deaths"

    From the Department of NO FUCKING SHIT, SHERLOCK.

    Who, I ask, ever thought that working long hours resulted in better health outcomes?

    Anyone? Seriously, has anyone ever actually thought that?

    This is why I maintain a rigorous 25 to 30 hour-a-week schedule at work...they pay me for more but this lil' doggie ain't gonna work himself to death for anyone.

  • I work for a company where one of our VPs has this credo:

    "If your employees are routinely working overtime, your company is broken."

    They put very sensible limits on how much we're expected to work, and no one has a problem with it.

    As a salaried employee, overtime work is generally frowned upon.

    It meant the department was either understaffed or that you (for whatever reason) were taking on too much work. There are exceptions, but they're just that: exceptions.

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