By
Daphne Liddle
A RECENT stay in hospital made me aware
that working 12-hour shifts is now the norm for ward nurses in the NHS – and
that this is leaving them totally exhausted and undermining their long-term
health. It came as a surprise to see the same nurses who brought round the
early morning medications still around up to 8pm in the evening and when I
spoke to them about it they all said they found the long shifts were “killers”.
Most of them were
young women and many of them mothers so they could not go home and collapse in
a chair – there were children to be fed and put to bed and other household
chores before they could snatch a brief night’s sleep, and then get up and do
it all over again.
Nursing is a
strenuous job, entailing being on one’s feet for most of the shift and
involving a lot of lifting. Most of the nurses I spoke to had bad backs,
shoulders, knees or hips.
One nurse told me
she had tried everything to improve her bad back from Pilates, various
exercises, pills and herbs – everything except rest, that is. “We’ve got to pay
the bills” she said.
She told me she
had applied for a transfer to outpatient working, which is not so strenuous and
more like normal ‘office hours’; but those hours did not fit with her schedule
for picking up her children from school. She had four young children aged
between four and 11, and could not contemplate leaving them to bring themselves
home from school until the youngest was at least 11, so another seven years
before she could transfer to work that would be easier on her back.
I asked her if it
would make any difference if the hospital provided childcare for her children.
She said it would make it would be great and make it possible for her to
transfer immediately to outpatient working and a normal seven or eight-hour
day.
That hospital
employs hundreds of women, many of whom are mothers, yet there is no provision
for childcare. They spoke of another hospital a few miles away that did once
provide childcare – “but that was cut due to efficiency savings”.
I asked one or
two, did they realise these long hours will undermine their long-term health.
They were well aware but the problems of meeting this month’s bills loomed
closer.
By middle age
these young workers will be permanently damaged. The bad backs and the stress
will take their toll and many will have to be signed off sick long before they
reach retirement age. Then they will be forced to join the growing army of
former health workers trying to claim disability benefits whilst the Department
for Work and Pensions (DWP) will treat them like undeserving scroungers. How
will they pay their bills then?
The Government is
their employer and is imposing working conditions that will wreck these
workers’ health long before old age. It cannot plead ignorance; the evidence
that excessive long hours cause serious long-term damage and shorten life is
overwhelming. The Tory government is using these workers up, working them until
their health breaks and then throwing them on the scrap heap. Perhaps they
think it will save money on elderly care if these young people do not survive
to old age.
I did ask these
nurses if they were in a union. They are all in Unison. How on earth did Unison
acquiesce to these working conditions?
Later I realised
that 12-hour shifts are rapidly becoming the norm throughout the whole world of
work in Britain. It began with zero-hours contracts and in the notorious ‘gig
economy’, where workers are deemed to be self-employed, denied holiday and sickness
pay and given so much work to do that it cannot be done in less than 12 hours –
but that is their responsibility because they are supposed to organise their
own working hours. They agree to it because the thing they fear most is not
having enough work and falling deeper into debt than they already are because
their wages are so low.
But how is it that
workers who employed by the Government and are members of trade unions are
falling into the same trap? We all know that the European Union ‘working time
directive’ has been a joke from the beginning but workers in trade unions
should be doing better than this.
Looking into it
more closely most of them are, in theory, only supposed to do three, or at the
most four, of these killer 12-hour shifts per week. Even so, work arranged in
this way would still undermine their health. But cuts to staffing throughout
the whole public sector mean that most work places are seriously under-staffed.
This means the supervisors, or low-level management, are forever asking workers
to volunteer to cover extra shifts. And the workers are eager to volunteer for
this because they are all in debt, or at risk of getting into debt, because
their wages will not cover the basic essentials of survival for them and their
children.
The unions comply
because they know the workers are desperate to get these extra shifts – even if
it means literally working themselves into an early grave. And how can union
reps complain to bosses about the excess hours when the workers have eagerly
volunteered for all the hours they can get?
The root of the
problem is the shockingly low wages but the long hours solve a lot of the
bosses’ problems. In the NHS it means they have to employ far fewer very
expensive agency nurses to cover gaps in staffing. It means they can cut staff
to two-thirds of what was previously considered a full complement of staff
because they have only two shifts a day to cover instead of three. And it
leaves workers too tired to think much about their long-term health, to
complain or agitate or become active in their union. When these workers have
done their shifts, finally got home, got the children fed and into bed, all
they want to do is grab as much sleep as they can before the next shift.
There have been
many studies around the world into the physical and mental effects of long-term
long-hours working. Some studies have reported numerous adverse health effects,
including increased alcohol and tobacco usage, decreased birthweight in
offspring and decreased cognitive functioning.
One
Australian study of 18,420 workers over a 12-year period revealed poorer mental
health in workers with long working hours. The researchers noted a 48 per cent
increased probability regarding mental health decline in those workers working
49–59 hours per week, compared with those under standard working hours (that
is, 35–40 hours per week). The probability increased by 53 per cent in those
working more than 60 hours per week. They also found a difference by gender;
amongst those working 49–59 hours per week, the SF-36 scores are lower amongst
female than male, indicating worse mental health amongst female workers.
A
different survey followed 2,960 middle-age full-time workers consisting of
2,248 men and 712 women. The results revealed a 267 per cent increase in depression
symptoms and a 284 per cent increase in anxiety
symptoms amongst those female workers working more than 55 hours per week
compared with those under standard working hours (35–40 hours per week).
They
also indicated a trend that for every 10-hour increase in weekly working hours,
an associated 40 per cent increase in depression symptoms and 31 per cent
increase in anxiety symptoms were noted.
Long
working hours also result in an increase in suicidal thoughts. Research
conducted in South Korea recruited 67,471 participants, and the results
revealed 30 per cent higher suicidal ideation amongst workers having working
hours more than 60 hours (31 per cent increase in male workers and 33 per cent
increase in female workers).
In
summary, mental effects related to long shift working include lower working
satisfaction, depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Amongst these, depression
and anxiety are more predominant amongst female workers. Some research has
proposed probable reasons for the gender difference. Female workers tend to
have more household responsibilities after work, which contributes to their
mental stress.
So, the proposals
put forward by TUC general Secretary Francis O’Grady at the recent TUC
conference to allow workers to enjoy the fruits of technical advances in
production by reducing the working week to just four days will seem like a
cruel joke to millions of workers in the real world, who would be glad to have
the same working hours as their own grandparents in the 1950s and ‘60s.
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