In the U.S. alone the multiple job-holding percentage of workers who held more than one job at the same time was 4.9 percent in 2017.

“Canada’s millennials working harder, working more than previous generations”, that was the title of a newshub.co.nz article about how millennials are working harder, but for a lower income in Canada.

“Despite making up the most highly educated generation in history, and participating heavily in the labor force, millennials are struggling in the arms-race for a well paying job.

In 1997, 640,000 Canadians were making minimum wage or less. In 2017, Statistics Canada showed that number had almost doubled.

As many as 300,000 Canadian millennials were working in unpaid internships in 2016 in an attempt to claw their way into higher paid jobs, reports the Canadian Federation of Students.”, the article mentioned.

“Karoshi” is the word that Japaneses use to describe death from overwork, a very real and growing reality for many, in Japan, it’s getting more and more common for employees to work themselves to death.

“In Japan, corporate life is so intense there’s actually a word to refer to people dying from overworking: Karoshi, which literally translates to “death by overwork.”, an article on businessinsider.com mentioned.

Work-related stress causes cortisol levels to rise, which can damage our body, mostly the immune system. That can cause early death to many people, especial those already dealing with health issues.

A Universal Basic Income (UBI) can reduce work-related stress, “In the context of a research on UBI that took place through an international, interdisciplinary, participatory study entitled ‘A Cross-cultural Working Group on “Good Culture” and Precariousness’, it was found that UBI can reduce work-related stress.”

There are many factors that make us work to death, economic inequality and our outdated welfare system is one of them, while most Americans can barely feed their family, even working 2 jobs simultaneously.

Most of us aren’t working at factories anymore, this 9-5 job stereotype needs to end, we need to adapt to the new reality of automated workforce and accept the fact that the industrial age is over.

The 9-5 work model was created in the industrial age, those jobs were mostly consisted of recurrent movements, today Automation has replaced most of these factory jobs, trying to implement the 9-5 factory model to new jobs and tasks that require more creativity and advanced skills is killing us.

Many of us are working ourselves to death and we don’t even realize it, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) seems to be the only solution to the overwork problem. The #UBI2020 hashtag is already being used by people globally in an effort to make 2020 the year of Universal Basic Income’s global starting point.

Sources includes: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics