Stress at Work

5 Mar 2002

Address by David Begg, General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to Health & Safety Seminar on Tuesday 5 March 2002

I recall watching an interview with Graham Scouness a few years ago in which he was asked about the stresses in his life as a football manager. He replied, very honestly in my view, that stress was a relative thing. He considered the prospect of not knowing whether you would have a job next week or where your next meal would come from as much more stressful than being in charge of a Premier League Team.

In the run up to the launch of the Government's Health Strategy recently the ESRI did a study of health and equality. They found that people at the senior management and higher professional levels are much less likely to suffer from certain diseases than semi-skilled or unskilled workers. Amongst the contributory causes of this differentiated health status was insecurity at work being a direct cause of stress. Stress in turn contributed to illness.

When we talk about stressful occupations we are more likely to immediately think of the high flyers in business or in sport or politics. We are less likely to think of people working in factories and offices. A recent survey by Dr Rob Briner, Occupational Psychologist at Birkbeck College in London considered survey results for two private sector companies. He found that stress was caused by such factors as:

  • Workload
  • Communications
  • Home-Work Balance
  • Team Working
  • Performance Feedback
  • Low Ambiguity
  • Lack of Management Support
  • Hours of Work
  • Job Insecurity

Dr Briner's views on solutions tended to depart from conventional wisdom. He said that he was not persuaded that surveys about the level of stress in the workplace were necessarily the best solution. He likened it to "offering a medical dictionary to a hypochondriac". His solution was to establish management standards for work distribution and management and to have these implemented as a matter of routine.

The private sector was the subject of this particular study but one can immediately think of jobs in the public service that would be extremely stressful. Teaching, with the associated problems of discipline in the current climate, is an obvious one. So also is being a policeman dealing with increasing levels of crime. In the last fortnight we saw evidence of extremely stressful work in the medical area where the Accident and Emergency Unit of Beaumont Hospital had to be closed for a period because of demands of stress on the staff.

As a matter of fact the two professions I admire most are Nurses and National Hunt Jockeys - the former for their caring and the latter for their courage. They are two very different but interdependent professions and stress is a feature of both. If statistically you are likely to get a fall once in every ten rides then by definition your work is bound to be stressful. But it is in the nature of that work to be like that and no amount of stress management could clearly make any difference to it. The point is that one must be pragmatic - there are certain conditions of professions that cannot be changed and the best that can be done is to minimise the risks.

It is true also that quality of life issues affect stress. If you have to spend a long time commuting to work or if you have difficulties organising childcare or other family responsibilities this may contribute significantly to the stress you feel at work. It is also true that people's coping skills vary widely. I am sure that it is much easier to deal with work related stress if you have a stable home life. Work that is difficult may be more tolerable if you can switch off at the end of the day.

The scale of the problem of stress appears to be quite significant. Statistics from the Health & Safety Executive in the United Kingdom indicate as follows:

  • Half a million stress at a level that makes them ill;
  • 6.5 million days are lost every year due to stress related illness;
  • The cost to employers is 370 million pounds per annum.

A survey by the Industrial Society revealed that 86% of workers felt stress was a problem in their organisation and 36% believed it to be a significant issue.

These statistics alone clearly makes stress a significant issue for employers. But there are other factors as well. As far back as 1993 an ILO report stated "Of all the personal factors related to the causation of accidents only one emerged as a common denominator, a high level of stress at the time the accident occurred.......... a person under stress is an accident waiting to happen". Our colleagues in the TUC in Britain have told us that there has been a twelve-fold increase last year in the number of cases going to litigation where stress is the issue. The numbers increased from 516 in year 2000 to 6,428 last year. UNISON, a public sector union, secured a settlement of £175,000 in Court for a social worker suffering from acute levels of stress in her work. As you know, there have also been significant settlements here in the last few months relating to stress caused by bullying at work.

A number of cases in the United Kingdom had been referred to the Court of Appeal and the awards have been modified in some cases as a result. This would seem to suggest that the Courts have not yet fully been able to set criteria by which these cases are judged. However, the Judge in one of the recent appeals indicated that any employer who offers a confidential counselling advise service with access to treatment is unlikely to be found in breach of duty to the employee. This is interesting in that it seems to put the emphasis on taking precautions to minimise the risk rather than dealing with the cause of stress as such. There is an interesting case starting this week in the UK where 260 former soldiers are suing the Ministry of Defence for post-traumatic stress as a result of the involvement in the Gulf War, the Falklands and Northern Ireland. The cases are being presented, not on the basis of the conflict as such, but rather on the fact that the Ministry of Defence did not adequately prepare them for the horrors of war.

Congress takes the view that the law does have a role in, for example, requiring that risk assessment programmes deal with stress as a separate element of risk. However, we would also be very anxious to negotiate with management on protocols for dealing with this problem in day to day work situations. It is not a simple issue because I suspect that in many cases staff would be reluctant to make too much of the stress they are under. They might well be told "there are two types of people in this job, those who can do it and those who can't". Stress is a phenomenon of our times. We have to learn to deal with it effectively. It is entirely appropriate that the title of this conference places the emphasis on solutions. Congress is very happy to be part of the search for those solutions.