Garth George: It's no wonder there's stress in the workplace

If "business" - that economic icon to which we're all supposed to kowtow - is bothered about being made responsible for stress and fatigue in the workplace, it has only itself to blame.

But I have little sympathy either for the unions which have encouraged their Government to impose this new workplace safety provision in the Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill.

Business cannot expect to have inflicted years and years of downsizing, restructuring, redundancies, wage-paring and other cost-cutting without having created a climate of stress in the workplace.

This lean, mean business ethos has, too, imposed on many a heavily increased workload as those who are left strive to take up the slack of those who are gone - with no hope of increased reward - and always in the back of their minds the thought that they might be next for the chop.

Thus has been created in many workplaces an atmosphere which breeds fear, resentment, insecurity, fatigue and feelings of powerlessness - and there are no more potent triggers of stress than those.

I remember a year or so ago listening to a mate of mine - sales manager of a large enterprise - as he told me that he had just been presented with his budget for the next financial year in which his employers demanded a 15 per cent increase in the productivity of the sales department but at the same time had mandated a 10 per cent cut in its allocation of resources.

That, accompanied as it was by a management cost-cutting decision which my mate knew would seriously damage the credibility of the firm's product - though customers wouldn't realise that until they'd paid their money - made him decide to quit before the stress he was under really got him down. Thus did he take ownership of his stress and deal with it, in this case by withdrawing himself from its source. And that is important.

My argument with the unions and their Government is that by trying to put the onus on the bosses for work-related stress, they are perpetuating the victim mentality which insists that someone else is to blame for what is often a personal problem.

I have a good deal of sympathy with the employers and manufacturers' advocate who suggested to a parliamentary select committee the other day that the main beneficiaries of the amendment bill would be "the trade unions, the burgeoning army of stress and fatigue consultants and a host of other bounty hunters who all see large dollar signs on employers scalps".

He's probably right in a society in which few of us are prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and are always looking for someone or something else to blame for the condition we are in, and in which too many have no compunction about ripping off the system, be it ACC or IRD.

Some people react badly to stress, others take it in their stride. And who can tell whether the stress you see manifested in a workmate results from his or her job or from a private life in disarray?

These are not things that can be addressed by legislation. When will we learn that there are some problems that you can't attack from the top; you have to start at the bottom.

Surely, rather than impose legislation which makes the bosses the scapegoats for all workplace stress, they and the unions could get together and work out ways in which stress levels can be kept reasonable and those who suffer from it can get treatment before it becomes debilitating.

But perhaps I'm being idealistic.

For it is unlikely that business, which screams as if it's being castrated every time anyone suggests it might have to spend some money - except on directors' fees, executive salaries and dividends - would buy into such a scheme unless it could be persuaded that it was cheaper than the alternative.

And I doubt also that the unions would front up with any cash since they, too, having amalgamated and streamlined, seem disinclined to spend members' hard-earned dues on much more than salaries, motor vehicles and expense accounts so their officials can strut their stuff.

Nevertheless, I remain persuaded that legislation is not the answer to stress and fatigue in the workplace. The whole ethos of business (and unionism, too) has to change if we are to become as productive a nation as we would like.

It's not as if all the cost-cutting and restructuring and downsizing and redundancies have worked. Academic research suggests that rather than increase productivity and profitability, those things have had the opposite effect.

There has to be some other way to get the best out of capital and the best out of labour.

Meanwhile, if you really want to know what stress is all about, today is just the day to find out. All you have to do is waylay a war veteran and see if you can get him to tell you what it was like.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz