Workin' 9 to 5

We turn now to a topic that I have avoided like poison.

Overwork.

Don't you love how a group of experts will do a long detailed study to come up with a totally obvious conclusion? 

• Gargling with gasoline can be dangerous!
• People who drive while drunk tend to be involved in car accidents!
• Ham and cheese together on a kaiser roll makes a tasty sandwich!
• Working long hours poses an occupational health risk that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, according to the World Health Organization!

You really didn't have to do much to convince me, but the WHO says "People working 55 or more hours each week face an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared to people following the widely accepted standard of working 35 to 40 hours in a week."

This came out in a WHO study published this week in the journal Environment International.

"No job is worth the risk of stroke or heart disease," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. He wants governments, businesses and workers to find ways to protect workers' health.

The study dates back to 2016, when 488 million people suffered the hazard of working long hours. And more than 745,000 people of them died that year from overwork that resulted in stroke and heart disease.

Of course, the statistics don't even touch this past year, when COVID-19 threw a giant wrench into the works all over the world. But one trend that developed, and seems likely to stay around, is telework, and all indications are that people whose home becomes their office or workplace tend to put in more hours on their tasks, because the home/work borders melt away.

"Teleworking has become the norm in many industries, often blurring the boundaries between home and work," Ghebreyesus said. "In addition, many businesses have been forced to scale back or shut down operations to save money, and people who are still on the payroll end up working longer hours."

One of the saddest things I have ever heard is when people packing for vacation also pack up their office laptop, and plan to keep up with office emails, and the vicissitudes of the O'Callahan account, and that Brown & Serve merger on the west coast. It seems to me that it's insecurity, more than ambition, that drives this "gotta work 24-7" mentality. People worry that that new man or woman is angling to take their job away.

If you're good at your job, do it and go home. There is a life out there for you. People who stick around the office til 9 PM (and you know who they are; they always say something like "I heard a noise from your office last night about 8:30. I hope everything was ok, but you weren't there...") are just saying they aren't capable of getting their job done on time.

And I'll be even more blunt. If you disappear tomorrow, sure, the gang will miss you. They'll send flowers, they'll clean out your desk, they'll mention your name for a week, tops. Then someone else will slide right on in there, and life will go on, trust me.

As Casey Stengel said, "The parks are full of statues of people whom everyone used to think were indispensable."