Are You Working Yourself to Death?

COVID-19 has been ravaging the health and wellbeing of people around the globe, and it has also shone a harsh spotlight on just how many systems that impact health and wellbeing in America don’t work. That includes the way we work itself. Americans spend more than one-third of their waking hours at work, and work among the longest, most extreme, and irregular hours of any advanced economy, with among the fewest worker- and family-supportive public policies.

In recent decades, corporations have been driven by shareholder profit to the exclusion of the wellbeing of workers. Stakeholders and communities, outdated public policies, laws, and regulatory regimes focused on giving corporations and markets free reign have failed workers, causing worker power to dissipate. The social contract between workers and employers has frayed and inequality has grown to grotesque proportions. Workers now shoulder more of the risks and precarity of an unpredictable market and must cover more of the rising health and wellbeing costs out of pocket, even as worker wages have stagnated and executive compensation and corporate profit skyrocketed.

Now, the American way of work, the way it’s organized and structured, has become a critical social determinant of health that shapes the lives and ability of individuals and families across race and class to survive and thrive. That was true before the pandemic, and it is certainly true during the pandemic.

We’re now at a critical inflection point to design a new way for the future of work that centers on the value of care and the health and wellbeing of humans, of workers and their families, in the 21st century.

In Japan, another country with notorious long work hours coupled with rising precarity, there is a word for dying from overwork: Karoshi. This podcast, American Karoshi, a joint production from New America’s Better Life Lab and Slate, comes at a time when burnout rates are soaring, white and blue collar employees are overworked, work-related stress and anxiety are alarmingly high, and workers strike or quit their jobs to find better ones at unprecedented rates in what’s being called "The Great Reshuffle." No one knows with any certainty how work will change in the future. Yet already, there are systems in place that center on worker health and wellbeing that could serve as models regardless of how the future of work unfolds. This 10-part podcast series centers the voices and experiences of diverse workers in a variety of sectors across the socio-economic spectrum, honing in on low-wage, hourly, and gig workers who, through scheduling software, automation, and the erosion of middle class jobs, are already on the frontlines of future of work trends.

Inequality and power imbalances are what drives work stress, and they’re the real challenge we must address in any future of work conversations.

Each podcast episode will focus on how workers experience some of the 10 well-documented work psychosocial stressors like work-life conflict, long work hours, unemployment, and others that have made work itself a key social determinant of health. Subject matter experts will help put those narratives into perspective and explore where we are now, how we got here, how things are changing in the pandemic, what it could mean for the future of work, and how to find a better way forward. New America’s Better Life Lab is at the forefront of finding a better, fairer way to work, so we all have time for a full and healthy life.

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