Excerpt
HETHER prophetic or not, Ivancevich's statement is underscored by experts' increasing recognition that more and more disability is being paid by organizations to individuals who no longer can handle the increasing and unending pressures of their workplace.
Many large corporations spend more than $200 million a year on medical benefits for employees. A recent surgeon general's report indicates that two-thirds of all illnesses before the age of 65 are preventable. Compared with treating stress, attempting to prevent it would be “relatively speaking, low cost,” according to Dr. Kenneth Pelletier, a specialist in executive health at the University of California, San Francisco.
Americans filed a record number of stress-related workers' compensation claims in 1987, citing everything from surly supervisors to unsafe offices. In looking at “Stress on the Job,” Newsweek (April 25, 1988) summed up the problem like this: “Stress is eroding the bottom line. The toll on corporations runs from hobbled productivity to absenteeism and spiraling medical costs. While exact figures are hard to come by, some experts put the overall cost to the economy as high as $150 billion a year—almost the …
Footnotes
C. Paul Barlow is president of MetaComSystems, 6842 Elm Street, Suite 212, Box 1133, McLean, Virginia 22101.
- Copyright 1989 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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