Job Stress Revisited

Introduction 5 Part 1 - The Foundations: clarifying what health and work are 10 Chapter 1. What health is 11 Who decides what’s health: patients or experts? 11 Judging workers’ practices and paternalism 13 Demarcy’s workbench at the Citroën car factory 14 “Workers are not morons!” 16 Losing your job: one of the top occupational risks for workers 17 Lift with your legs, not with your back! 18 Chapter 2. Work and employment: is there a difference? 21 Diverging interests between central banks and workers 21 Defining employment is up to statisticians 23 Human relationships between an employer and an employee are biased and unequal 25 Non-standard and precarious forms of employment 26 The poor social support that MLM workers get from their peers 28 The ILO call to transition from the informal to the formal economy 30 Part 2 – The key concepts to understand job stress 32 Chapter 3. A job that makes sense: understanding the concept of activity 33 John’s return to work plan: a successful failure (or a failed success) 33 Real work goes beyond executing a predetermined list of tasks 34 What can make a worker sick may be in the non-visible part of their work 36 The problems of congratulating workers who rushed through extra work 37 Recognizing yourself in what you do is more important than being recognized by others 38 Should work have such a central place in our lives? 39 Chapter 4. What is Job Stress? 43 The General Adaptation Syndrome from Nobel prize loser, Hans Selye 43 Is measuring cortisol levels necessary to assess job stress? 45 Is divorcing more stressful than getting a mortgage? The fascinating world of psychophysics 47 Coping mechanisms and the transactional model from Lazarus and Folkman 49 The job demands – control model from Karasek 51 The effort-reward imbalance model from Siegrist 54 The limitations of questionnaires and job stress quantification in practice 55 Chapter 5. Is burnout a thing? How does work make you sick? 58 Simone Weil’s work-related suicidal ideas as a can factory worker in the 1930’s 58 Why maids can kill their employers? Louis Le Guillant and the Papin Sisters case 60 Claude Veil and the end of the first wave of French psychopathologists 62 Herbert Freudenberger, the overcommitted psychologist who described his own burnout 63 Christina Maslach, the rise and academicization of the concept of burnout 66 Burnout is still an unclear concept 60 years after it has been coined 69 The MBI has psychometrical issues and should not be used for individual assessment 71 PTSD is not the only work-related mental health diagnosis 73 Workers’ compensation of mental health conditions and deaths 75 Chapter 6. Harassment and bullying at the workplace 79 It’s up to a judge to say whether there is harassment (not a physician) 79 Harassment, mobbing, bullying…: the confusion with so many similar concepts 81 Leymann’s mobbing and Hirigoyen’s moral harassment 82 Josiane, the secretary who has seen the Devil in the eyes of her boss 84 Toxic personalities: a simplistic explanation for work-related mental health issues 84 Enlarging the picture: the oriented activity theory 86 Looking at Josiane’s story from the work rather than the interpersonal standpoint 88 The difference between what we know, what we say, and what we do at work 91 Shifting from general averages to precise events with a precise time and location 93 Wrapping up with Josiane’s story: from a “toxic” boss to bad practices and lack of support 95 An argument between a nurse and a surgeon captured by filmmaker Jérôme Le Maire 96 The difficulty of making sense of population data on harassment 99 Chapter 7. Addictive disorders and work-related doping 100 Substance use and addictive behaviors 100 Can work be responsible for substance use? 102 “Alcohol is responsible for 20% of workplace injuries”: really? 103 Looking at substance use at work beyond potential safety risks 105 The three characteristics of a substance: toxicity, effect intensity and addictiveness 107 Doping: using a substance to improve one’s performance 108 Why are people cheating? The Game Theory 110 Lutz’s four type of reasons to use substances at work 111 What about behavioral addictions and work? Gambling and workaholism 112 Daniel, a workaholic sales representative 114 Chapter 8. Psychosocial factors, hazards, and risks 117 How are psychosocial factors and hazards classified? 118 Exhaustivity, objectivity, and questionnaires assessing psychosocial factors 120 Is facing the public a psychosocial hazard? The case of the French employment agency 121 Are security guards and « zero tolerance policy » posters preventing psychosocial risks? 123 Psychosocial hazards are not like toxic clouds poisoning workers 124 Part 3 – The solutions: how can we put an end to psychosocial risks in workplaces? 126 Chapter 9. Positive Psychology in Workplaces 127 A new trend that’s not new 127 Positive psychology, capitalism, individualism and ableism 128 A systematic review showing underwhelming evidence 131 The problem of researcher allegiance 133 Chapter 10. What should we do to make workplaces less stressful? 135 What’s the evidence behind interventions on psychosocial risks? 135 The problem with non-hierarchized comprehensive approaches 136 No, it’s not okay not to be okay 139 A growing international normative framework to prevent psychosocial risks 140 Reducing job demands or increasing job resources? 141 The warm fuzzies derived from alcoholism programs: Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) 142 The role of labor inspectors and penalties in the prevention of psychosocial risks 143 An attempt to summarize and recap the types of interventions and their interest 145 Can I blame those who use worker-directed approaches? 149 Conclusion 152 Acknowledgements 154