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Strategies for tackling stress at work

Stress is a trade union issue

Tackling stress is a complex problem for trade unionists and workers, since the causes of stress are such fundamentals as lack of workers' control over the working arrangements, insufficient staffing levels, and the need to work long hours to earn a decent wage. Clearly such issues are challenging, but any trade union strategy must focus on removing the causes of stress at source, rather than trying simply to deal with the symptoms and teach people how to cope with unacceptable levels of occupational stress.

The mythology surrounding stress has trivialised the mental and physical anguish suffered by all sorts of workers made ill by their jobs. It is an attempt to divide the world into copers and non-copers. Of course, this victim-blaming approach is nothing new in relation to any workplace hazard. The myth of the careless worker is pernicious. Treating stress as an individual problem to be solved in an individual way is an approach that is always destined to fail. Very often lifestyle factors are highlighted - exercise, diet and so on. However workers who have no choice or control over their working environment or the organisation of their work, workers who do dirty, dangerous, monotonous low paid work are scarcely going to be impressed by the benefits of the typical ready-made stress solutions, such as taking up yoga, or joining a squash club.

Anne Greaves of the UNISON Health and Safety Unit, (formerly Health and Safety Officer for NALGO) was one of the first union health and safety officials to produce accessible guidance for safety representatives on tackling stress in the workplace. Speaking to the London Hazards Centre about the hundreds of representatives that have used Tackling Occupational Stress over the years she said: "This document was important because it focused on stress as a collective, rather than an individual, issue. Representatives reported that raising the issue in this way reduced the alienation of individual members and changed the agenda for joint union management meetings from considering only counselling, to considering a stress prevention policy for everyone".

Stress is not a mysterious ailment suffered by individuals who are either unfortunate or incompetent. As we have shown, stress is suffered as a direct result of a poor working environment, poor job design, poor contractual arrangements and poor management of work organisation. Trade unions can negotiate to reduce stress in the same way as any other occupational hazard.

Difficult as it may be, tackling occupational stress provides trade unions with the ideal and legitimate opportunity to systematically investigate job design and work organisation as well as integrating this with the more traditional workplace environment inspections which trade union safety representatives carry out.

The aims in tackling occupational stress must include:

• employer recognition of the legal responsibility to prevent occupational stress
• employer recognition that workers are experiencing occupational stress
• the establishment of a negotiated management/union policy on occupational stress that is implemented in practice, monitored for its effectiveness, and regularly reviewed with the aim of progressive improvement. The safety committee should be used to set this up, with the involvement of the shop stewards committee where one exists.
• recognition that there are no magic solutions to banish stress from the workplace. There has to be an ongoing process, which involves every level of the workforce and has commitment from the highest levels of management.
• the policy must be in the clear context of a preventive strategy, encompassing the principle in health and safety law that work should be adapted to the worker, not the other way round
• reporting systems must be set up to allow early recognition of symptoms and detection of causes
• workers suffering from stress should be assisted and protected from loss of pay or status
• management must agree to actively involve workers and unions in planning work organisation
• ultimately, management must be willing to relinquish and devolve some of its control over work organisation.

Countering arguments against recognition of occupational stress

Clearly it is easier for management to point to factors outside work which contribute to stress. (Even in cases of exposure to toxic substances at work employers and their lawyers will argue that the victim's illness was caused by smoking, for example.)

This tendency to concentrate on non-workplace stressors is encouraged by much of the popular literature on stress, which considers the psychological and emotional impact of long lists of life events, such as death of close relative, death of spouse, moving house and so on. Usually only a few items correspond to peoples' working lives, such as redundancy or having a serious illness/accident (although work-related accidents and illnesses are rarely explicitly mentioned).

So, the first thing to get clear is that it is understood that there are many factors outside work which also contribute to stress, not least transport to and from work! However, we are not looking at the kind of "How stressed are you?" lifestyle questionnaires published in popular magazines. The information on the causes and symptoms of occupational stress given in Part 2 of this handbook, can be used to establish an agreed list of workplace factors which may give rise to stress, and those symptoms which are agreed to be associated with them.

There are three main problem areas we may anticipate that employers will throw up.

• Managers will not accept that their employees are genuinely experiencing symptoms of stress and that this is caused by work.
• If managers do accept that workers are experiencing occupational stress, they will not treat it as a collective or organisational problem, but will only treat it as a problem affecting some susceptible individuals.
• Managers may refuse to act at all, or to respond appropriately.

Management stress prevention strategies

In contrast with the CBI's claim that 60 per cent of UK companies design jobs to alleviate stress, the Health and Safety Executive reports that "only a minority of organisations appear to be directly and deliberately addressing the management of occupational stress" (Cox 1993). Of those companies which do, only a few concentrate on stress prevention. Some companies have strategies for reacting when problems arise, and others only offer rehabilitation to help workers recover after the event.

Within each of these categories, there is often a further distinction between companies operating policies which focus on the organisation and those that focus on the individual stress management.

An individual approach

Despite a lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of such programmes, a large proportion of stress management activity in the UK and US is individually focused, designed for managerial and white-collar workers and concerned with changing the worker rather than the work or work environment. This has a great deal to do with the nature and influence of management views in this country. According to the HSE's report, in Scandinavia, where responsibility for working conditions is shared more equally between labour and management groups, organisational approaches to stress management are more common (Cox 1993). In the US, the dominance of management views has been largely responsible for the development of Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs).

Employee assistance programmes

EAPs largely consist of counselling and helplines for individual employees and focus on issues such as drug abuse, personal difficulties and family problems. The assumption used is that it is the failure of the worker to deal with these issues that is the root cause of stress. More sinisterly, it has been suggested that EAPs could be used by employers to demonstrate that they have 'given workers a chance' in order to meet legal requirements to enable the employer to sack the worker. However, it could equally be argued that using EAP provision alone demonstrates that the employer has failed to carry out adequate risk assessments and eliminate the hazards.

Workers at a major glass manufacturer have discovered that far from considering stress reduction programmes following restructuring, management are more likely to discipline sick workers. One worker disciplined while on long-term sick leave died of cancer before he could attend an appeal against the disciplinary action. Others lose long-term benefit for being off sick for more than seven days in the past three years.

Stress management training

Another popular method of palming off responsibility for stress management on to individual employees is stress management training. This consists largely of training in such techniques as meditation and relaxation. Whilst we are not suggesting that these techniques in themselves are harmful, they are not designed to reduce or eliminate sources of stress at work, but only to teach workers more effective coping strategies. The reliance on such techniques may in the end contribute to ill-health as follows: By failing to tackle the causes of stress, the symptoms of stress inevitably recur. The worker feels frustrated and disappointed that the stress management training has failed and conscious of failing the employer's expectations and this in turn exacerbates the stress.

We need to develop approaches to get management to adopt a more enlightened and positive attitude.