STRESS COSTS

The cost of stress for a nation and for particular organizations is currently extremely high. For example, if we explore costs to the U.K. economy, the British Heart Foundation Coronary Prevention Group has calculated that 180,000 people die each year from coronary heart disease, almost 500 people a day, and heart disease accounts each year for 70 million lost working days to industry and commerce. In addition, MIND, the mental health charity, estimates that between 30% to 40% of all sickness absence from work is attributable to mental and emotional disturbance, with another 40 million working days lost to the nation's economy. The country has also suffered increased rates of suicide, particularly among younger workers, rising 30% from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Instability and life stress have led to divorce rates rising from 27,000 in 1961 to 155,000 by 1988; they are still rising. Indeed, RELATE, the U.K. marriage guidance organization, estimates that by the year 2000 there will be 4 divorces in every 10 marriages. Finally, Alcohol Concern suggests that alcohol misuse costs society more than f:2 billion per annum, with an annual cost to industry from this cause alone of nearly f:1 billion. The latter group estimates that 1 in 4 men in the United Kingdom drink more than the medically recommended units per week and that between 8 and 14 million days are lost each year from alcohol-related problems, with 25% of accidents at work involving intoxicated workers. To assess your own stress levels, you may find it useful to complete the following questionaire (see Table 1.2).

Who Pays the Costs?

Let's start at the beginning. Why is it that some countries (e.g., the United States or Finland) seem to be showing declines in their levels of stress-related illnesses, such as heart disease and alcoholism, while the levels of these illnesses are still rising in other countries? Is it that American employers, for example, are becoming more altruistic and caring for their employees, less concerned about the bottom line? Unfortunately, the answer is "No." Two trends in the United States are forcing American firms to take action. First, industry there is facing an enormous and ever-spiraling bill for employee health care costs. Individual insurance costs rose by 50% over the past two decades, but employers' contribution rose by over 140%. Estimates are that more than $700 million a year is spent by American employers to replace the 200,000 men aged 45 to 65 who die or are incapacitated by coronary artery disease alone. Management officials at Xerox Corporation estimated the cost of losing just one executive to stress-related illness at $600,000. In Europe, however, employers can create intolerable levels of stress for their employees, and it is the taxpayer who picks up the bill through the various national health systems. There is no direct accountability or incentive for firms to maintain the health of their empIoyees. Of course, the indirect costs are enormous, but rarely does a firm actually attempt to estimate this cost; absenteeism, labor turn- over, and even low productivity are treated as intrinsic parts of running a business (Dale & Cooper, 1992).

TABLE 1.2  - Behavioral and Physical Symptoms of Stress

To assess your own level of stress symptoms, indicate how often you have been troubled by the following behavioral and physical symptoms.

NOTE: Scoring: It is not the total score in each section that is important, but the number of either behavioral or physical symptoms on which you score 2 or 3. If in either category you are showing more than 3 symptoms with scores of 2 or 3, then it is indicative potentially of some current stress-related problem.

There is another source of growing costs. More and more employees, in American companies at least, are litigating against their employers through worker compensation regulations and laws concerning job-related stress, or what is being lately termed cumulative stress disorder. For example, in California, the number of stress-related compensation claims for psychiatric injury now total over 3,000 a year, since the California Supreme Court upheld its first stress disability case in the early 1970s. The California labor code now states specifically that worker compensation is allowable for disability or illness caused by "repetitive mentally or physically traumatic activities extending over a period of time, the combined effect of which causes any disability or need for medical treatment." California may be first in this regard, but what happens there has a habit of reaching other places after a longer or shorter time lapse (Ivancevich, Matteson, & Richards, 1985).

In Europe, however, we are just beginning to see a move toward increasing litigation by workers about their conditions of work. Several unions are supporting cases by individual workers, and the trend is certainly in the direction of future disability claims and general damages being awarded on the basis of work stress in the United Kingdom, as Earnshaw and Cooper (1996) highlight in their report on worker compensation and stress-related claims.