Overwork Is Taking a Huge Physical and Mental Toll on Workers

“It was like working while covered in rug burn,” says Britney, 21, of her experience as an essential worker during the pandemic. Last year, Britney got an administrative support job at a major New York City hospital just as the city became a coronavirus epicenter and beginning her first full-time job when everyone around her was losing theirs. She wanted to move to New York because she is visually disabled and needed access to public transportation, so she was desperate to work whatever job would keep her there. But entering the full-time workforce during a crisis taught her lessons about overwork that might otherwise have taken a lifetime to learn. “I really see work for what it is: labor. A means to an end,” Britney shares via text. “And some of those means are important and can give drive to a lot of people. But I see work much more like a hostile machine so we can live the lives that we do.”

The statistics on overwork are grim: A global study from the World Health Organization (WHO) found that in 2016, 488 million people were exposed to long working hours, with more than 745,000 people dying that year from stroke and heart disease as a result of overworking. According to a 2019 report published by People’s Policy Project in collaboration with The Gravel Institute, in one year, the average American works more hours than the average worker in any peer nation. According to the WHO study, overwork is the single largest risk factor for occupational disease and has significant impacts on physical and mental health.

The researchers on the WHO study define overwork as 55 hours or more per week. But individuals who are juggling multiple jobs, caregiving, parenting, or working and going to school at the same time are grappling with compounding stress. And the link between this kind of productivity and meeting basic needs makes overwork feel like a necessity, not a personal choice. For chronically ill or disabled young people there’s pressure to be “extra” productive to compensate for times when they can’t be. For those supporting families or loved ones, the idea of not overworking can be especially intimidating. But the idea that overwork should be a given — a sign of commitment to your employer — is something younger workers are pushing back on whenever they can.

“Frankly, if overwork was a purely individual problem, people would choose to work less and the issue would resolve itself,” Molly Bashay, senior policy analyst on Education, Labor & Worker Justice at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), tells Teen Vogue via email. Instead, the experience of overwork has become even more common during the pandemic, which “points to an underlying systemic issue that doesn’t allow workers the luxury of choice.” As Bashay explains, overwork can manifest as physically working too many hours and the stress that comes with that, but there’s also a mental and emotional drain, where individuals are working long stretches without the ability to decompress.

Britney says her employer hosted small meditation classes, but she couldn’t prioritize time for that. Taking days off also didn’t seem like an option: “If I stop, I will make things harder for everyone else who already has it hard enough,” she explains. It’s personal guilt, but it’s also the knowledge that if you leave, someone will immediately take your place. “If you get fired or quit, you know that so many others are in need of work to live, and who are you to throw your luck away?”

Alex*, 25, says that “being a person of color, you really are told both in ways explicit and implied that you have to work harder than anyone else.” That leaves even less time and fewer resources for decompression. After Alex was forced to leave college last year because they were unable to cover the cost of tuition, they had a severe mental and physical breakdown. “It felt like running so fast just to survive and then a sudden forced stop,” they tell Teen Vogue. They spent years undoing the toll of overworking. They say a recent employer framed itself as supportive of staff and instead, the job made things worse. “At some point, my exhaustion was so intense I had a seizure mid-workweek that left my speech impacted and my head in permanent headache mode.”

“I think the pandemic really made it impossible to not see and feel how workers are often treated as disposable but expected to lay their lives down for their work,” Alex says. In the past, coordinating with coworkers, writing letters to the entire team, and coming in with a plan helped them express these inequities. But even most of those best practices are a privilege, Alex says, explaining how their former coworker, a person of color with darker skin than Alex, would be treated as aggressive or lazy for speaking up about overwork. In the future, Alex says, they plan to have franker discussions, in writing, about money and boundaries with employers and coworkers. “I was too naive to see that no matter how many times people do mental health check-ins or express value in words, what's important is solid proof of their intention and promises,” they add.

Elizabeth, 22, who just graduated, says that, as a Black student at a predominantly white institution (PWI), she noticed “a lot of my Black friends — we all were babysitting, nannying, doing like 150 different jobs. Our standards for when we were working too much seem to just be so much higher than the other people around us,” she continues. Elizabeth recalls the day when she realized she “was doing entirely too much.” A family she babysat for unexpectedly canceled, so she finished up her homework in the library, then just went home. “And I was like, is this what people do when they don't have jobs?” It was an eye-opening experience because, as a low-income student, she has had to divide her time between résumé-building, working to pay expenses, and navigating her academic workload. Plus, she says, so many people see the caregiving work she does as work on the side, or something to do temporarily for extra money, not “an actual job.” That means Elizabeth doesn’t put it on her résumé the way peers list unpaid internships targeted toward a certain career field.

Non-salaried care work like babysitting is often devalued as unskilled, invisible labor. But salaried jobs also include a good deal of “invisible” work that employees take home with them, contributing to the overwork crisis that young people are attempting to combat. When Breana, a 25-year-old teacher, was student teaching, she ended up severely ill, which she attributes to stress that weakened her immune system: Last February, she was so sick she thought she’d gotten COVID-19, but in her program, you were not allowed to miss a day of school. She passed out in the classroom, ended up going to the emergency room, and still had to continue teaching class and grading. And because of the way student teaching is structured, she was not paid for any of that labor. “It takes your whole life,” she says, explaining that she often pays out of pocket for classroom supplies too. There is no off switch, and she adds that the self-care and health tips employers suggest aren’t doing much. “The whole self-care thing is just something they bought into that they want to tell people — slow down, take a breath, do this — but you're not really being allotted that freedom in real life,” Breana says. Caring, she explains, means actually paying people more, making sure they have adequate time to do their jobs, and no longer expecting teachers to take on the responsibilities of several different jobs within one.

Some experts have noted that work-life balance and the idea that personal or health issues related to overwork are the burden of the employee to solve, still put the onus back on the worker to set boundaries that often aren't compatible with their work demands. But as Bashay points out, overwork can’t be divorced from conditions that enable it. Bashay says low wages provide the clearest connection to overwork: Workers compensate for poor pay with multiple jobs or more shifts; unpredictable schedules complicate workers’ lives and make it more challenging to arrange transportation and education, manage a budget and stable income, and obtain childcare; and benefits like health care, paid sick leave, and family leave are necessities, not work perks that employers sometimes frame them as. (According to CLASP, three-quarters of workers earning low wages don’t have access to healthcare through their jobs. Numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, cited by the Center for American Progress, highlight that workers of color, especially women, are more likely to receive lower wages and have less access to paid sick leave and paid leave for childcare. As Teen Vogue reported, a full-time worker making a $15 minimum wage can’t afford a two-bedroom apartment in any state.)

Many of these jobs, Bashay adds, don’t provide meaningful opportunities for advancement, which leaves workers “on a carousel of low wages and long hours, leading to overwork and burnout with nowhere to turn.” When conditions of work compile to limit the power workers can exert in their own lives, Basahy says, it leads to stress and economic instability — and it gets looked at as an individual problem rather than systemic policy failure.

Changing a culture of overwork demands changing work itself. Employers should prioritize higher wages, good benefits, and professional development on the local level, Bashay explains. But, to “move the needle for every worker or would-be worker, that priority has to be set at the federal level,” meaning a federal minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, inclusive national paid family leave and medical leave that covers absences for illness, caregiving, and bereavement, national fair workweek laws, and renewed investment in accessible education.

Some policymakers are prioritizing significant changes to how we work. “In the wake of incredible loss, grief, and trauma, workers are shouldering an unprecedented burden,” Representative Ayanna Pressley tells Teen Vogue. “Even before the pandemic, many were working for unjustifiably low wages in undignified conditions. It’s time to pursue bold, intentional policies that affirm workers’ humanity,” Pressley continues. “A federal job guarantee, which I have proposed in Congress, would address the historic economic challenges we face by ensuring that everyone who wants a job can get a job that offers a livable wage and robust benefits.”

Young people are pushing for this kind of tangible support. They want to create space for more than just work in their lives, and better, healthier conditions while they’re at work. “Under capitalism, we all have to put so much of our lives into work, and the rest of our lives have been manipulated to cater to that and to deem it okay,” says Britney. Stress and the use of anti-inflammatory medicines to fight headaches destroyed the lining of Britney’s stomach to the extent that she had to be admitted to the hospital. She’s still grappling with the impact 10 months later. “It is not worth it.”

Editor’s note: Alex’s name was changed to allow them to speak freely about their work experience.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue