Better Life Lab Podcast Season Four: American Karoshi

In this episode, we tell the story of Joe Liebman, a one-time newspaper distribution executive who lost his job as technology transformed the industry and now works in a warehouse in St. Louis. MIT economist David Autor shares his research finding that, as automation and technology continue to rapidly change work, it’s not the robots we should be worrying about.

In Japan, generations of workers have given their all to the code of Karoshi. It’s a word that literally means, “Work til you die."  

Few Americans know the word “Karoshi.” We don’t think it happens here. But the workplace now actually ranks as the fifth leading cause of death in America. 

To help us understand work stress better, we’re joined by the co-directors of the Healthy Work Campaign. Marnie Dobson and Peter Schnall. How do we shift from work being something that can make your life miserable, to something that can enhance the quality of your life? It comes down to how much power, control and autonomy you have at work.

In the future, robots may take over tasks such as doling out medications. But no machine can raise a child or truly care for a disabled, ill or aging loved one. 

And home care jobs are projected to be among the fastest-growing jobs in America. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects care jobs will grow 33 percent by 2029. By some estimates, 70 percent of people over 65 soon will require long-term care. 

But care jobs are also, for the most part, poverty-wage jobs. They are low-paying, stressful, emotionally taxing, unpredictable and precarious. Half of all care workers in America earn so little that they qualify for public benefits. Nine out of 10 home health workers are women, 62 percent are people of color and one-third are immigrants. 

In what many scholars say was an overt act of white supremacy and patriarchy, care workers were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. They were denied the federal right to organize and collectively bargain, demand a minimum wage or overtime pay. What would the future of care work look like if they could?

While men have regained nearly all the jobs they lost since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re still missing 2 million women. So where have all the women gone? We’ll hear Holder’s insights, as well as the stories of two women, each with young children, whose thriving careers were turned upside down by the rigidity — and sexism —built into the American workplace.

Recent years have seen a rise in “non-standard” work arrangements — independent contractors and gig workers who work without benefits or job protections. Gig-work platforms offer workers the tantalizing promise of flexibility and freedom.

The Civil Rights movement opened up new work opportunities for Black workers. But, decades later, African-Americans work disproportionately in low-wage jobs and are over-represented in the jobs at highest risk of vanishing because of workplace automation.

As workplaces have navigated the COVID pandemic, new technologies have amped those stresses to 11. Bossware. Tattleware. After-hours nastiness on Slack. Now there’s a whole different kind of “technostress” wearing on warehouse and retail workers, whose every movement is tracked and rated by algorithms.

Could Guaranteed Basic Income programs play a central role in lifting all of us up — and boosting the standard of life for all Americans?

Being unemployed in the United States is bad for you. It’s bad for your mental, physical and emotional health. Bad for your family stability. Bad for your ability to survive. It’s just bad news, period.

Are bad jobs an inherent part of the workplace — or can we actually do what it takes to make the jobs of the future good jobs, big enough to support real human life for all of us?

Meeting the challenges of automation, inequality, and care with shared responsibility for action.

The problem with work stress. It’s not just you. It’s the way work itself is organized

When it comes to work stress, I’ve been intrigued by two things in particular: how little awareness we have of how widespread and damaging it is, and how we tend to think it’s all an individual problem, one that can be solved by individual self-helpy solutions, like lunchtime yoga, a meditation app, hot bath or wellness program. When in fact, work stress is the result of how public policy favors businesses over workers, how U.S. companies organize and manage work and how we’ve embraced a cultural norm that devoting oneself to work not only gives us identity and value, but is almost a sacred duty. And that’s what has to change.

That’s what led me to start hosting the Better Life Lab podcast a few years ago — reporting on the search to find a better way to work, so we can all live fuller, healthier lives. And this season, that need to transform work is what’s fueling our exploration of work stress and how we — businesses, policymakers, workers — can choose to create a better future of work and wellbeing, and the consequences we’ll face if we don’t.

The coronavirus pandemic is ravaging the health and wellbeing of people around the globe, and it is shining a harsh spotlight on just how many systems that impact health and wellbeing in America don’t work. That includes the way we work itself. Long before the pandemic, Americans were spending more than one-third of their waking hours at work, and working among the longest, most extreme and irregular hours of any advanced economy, with among the fewest worker- and family-supportive public policies. In recent decades, as corporations have been driven by shareholder profit to the exclusion of the wellbeing of workers, stakeholders and communities, outdated public policies, laws and regulatory regimes have failed to adapt to that change, and worker power has dissipated. The social contract between workers and employers has frayed and inequality has grown to grotesque proportions. Workers now shoulder more of the risks and precarity of an unpredictable market and must cover more of the rising health and wellbeing costs out of pocket, even as worker wages have stagnated and executive compensation and corporate profit skyrocketed. Now, the American Way of Work, the way it’s organized and structured, has become a critical social determinant of health that shapes the lives, health, wellbeing and ability of individuals and families across race and class to survive and thrive.

Now is our urgent call to action to design work systems that center on the health and wellbeing for workers and their families.