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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Why Are Workers Stressed Out. It's a Deep Mystery

America's Workers: Stressed Out, Overwhelmed, Totally Exhausted (Rebecca Rosen) from the Atlantic
"... you’re beginning to see the conversation change—even conservatives now are looking at birth-rate declines and work like Stewart D. Friedman’s Baby Bust showing that more young people don’t see a way to combine work and family in a rational way, so are choosing not to have families. That’s huge. That’s when work-life issues become the problem of society, especially one that purports to value families and that wants to survive into the future. ... when they ask CEOs and top managers at companies around the world who they think the best employees are, more than three-fourths have said: the worker without any family or caregiving responsibilities."
It takes the interviewee a while -- but eventually she gets to the heart of it: it's the economy.  For most young couples, to simply tread water economically, they both need to work full time jobs, those jobs routinely demand more than 40 hours a week, the costs of key middle-class amenities and needs, everything as mundane as utility bills to college education for the kids has rocketed up even as wages have remained flat.  And if that wasn't enough, the Great Recession has showcased for most people that falling out of the middle class can happen really fast.  

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