Corporate mindfulness and workplace stress

You are not the problem.

Corporate America is harnessing the benefits of mindfulness in the workplace. However it belies an insidious attempt to isolate workers and hide the true cause of workplace stress.

Mindful in America

It seems mindfulness is everywhere in America at the moment. Investors pour millions of dollars into mindfulness phone apps.Professional athletes use mindfulness as part of their training. Firms across the US are embracing mindfulness as part of their talent and leadership strategy .

By now, everyone working in corporate America has seen this email from their HR department:

Tips on How To Beat Stress

Invariably the list recommends:

Healthy eating Sleeping eight hours a night Exercising 30 minutes a day Practicing mindfulness meditation.

Unsurprisingly the list never recommends that you address the root cause of workplace stress — that you are working harder and longer hours to pay for a cost of living that is rising faster than you can afford.

Instead our employers make us feel like we are the problem by recommending that we fix ourselves instead of our employers improving our working conditions.

If we aren’t eating right, getting enough sleep, or finding the time to exercise, it is not because we are lazy. In fact, we are working harder and more productively than ever.

The sorry state of household finances

US workers are more stressed than ever before, and the causes are material.

The modern worker is drowning in debt. Between student loans, mortgages , credit cards and auto loans it is estimated that the average household is USD 130,000 in debt.

The average household income of only $61,000 is precariously close to the US average cost of living of $49,000 . Keep in mind that cost of living is before debt repayments, retirement savings, or your kids college tuition.

Increasing debts, high costs of living, and a meagre household income. Workers are barely holding it together. It doesn’t help that US workers are subject to At Will employment and are always facing the twin threats of outsourcing and automation. All the while, employees are working longer house than they used.

Gas Lit

We are forced to work harder and longer to maintain a standard of living that is increasingly expensive. We face instability and precarity in our work lives.

When this economic pressure manifests in our physical and mental health, our bosses tell us that we are responsible for the problem, not those who have forced these condition on us.

It is gas-lighting on a societal level.

The Benefits of Stress

While our debts increase, our salaries stay flat and our cost of living explodes, profits at US firms have hit record levels. Meanwhile, the accumulation of wealth to the top 0.1% continues unabated.

We work harder and are more productive while sharing less in the rewards of our labor. Since 1979 the rate of productivity has soared while the real wages we receive in return for that productivity has flat lined.

Productivity under pressure

Workplace stress is a drag on worker productivity. It is no wonder that employers have forced mindfulness on their employees given its stress reducing benefits.

Employers emphasise mindfulness and a focus on healthy living as a way to ensure their employees stay productive. But it also redirects the blame for workplace stress away from the employer, and the conditions they impose, onto the shoulders of the employee.

By giving guidance on how to cope with stress, the employer individualises the problem by effectively saying “the working conditions are not the problem, the problem is your inability to cope”.

By individualising the causes of workplace stress, employers seek to alienate us from our peers in the workplace. It also seeks to distract us from the root cause of our stress.

How to beat stress

Deep breathing and healthy eating will never be able to solve the economic precarity we face. We can only attack the root causes of our deep stress by banding together with our work colleagues and taking collective action. Through collective action, we can demand shorter work days, higher wages, and the elimination of at will employment.

1926 Textile works strike

On a broader societal level, collective action can demand compensation for the privatised benefits of automation, outsourcing and higher productivity. In the US this can take the form of demands for universal health care. Universal health care would reduce the financial burdens caused by healthcare costs. It would also removing one of the most powerful sources of leverage that US employers have over their us: employer sponsored health insurance.

By working together we can improve our lives and the lives of our fellow workers.

5 Tips for a workers paradise

So the next time your HR department sends an email asking you to take some deep breaths to cure the stress they’ve heaped upon you, I can recommend the following five tips:

Google your CEO and board of directors annual salary and net worth. Calculate the amount of unpaid overtime you’ve worked this year. Think about how work stress has affected your health. Consider how work stress has impacted your relationships outside of work Wonder out loud to your work colleagues if points 2 through 4 are somehow related to point number 1.

Solidarity Forever.