hard work will kill you

The demand for the abolition of night work has a long histoiry within reformists lists of demands for a more humane capitalism. "Prohibition of night work, except for those branches of industry which from their nature, owing to technical reasons or reasons of public welfare, require night work."- from the 1891 Erfurt Programme of the German Social-Democrats.

Once more we read the health risks of shift-work has been reported yet little is done to remedy the problem. Working more than 11 hours a day rather than the usual 9am to 5pm markedly increases heart disease risk, say UK experts. The magnitude of risk goes up by 67% for people who work long hours, they say in Annals of Internal Medicine. People who worked 11 hours or more a day were more than half as likely again to have a heart attack than those who worked shorter hours. And adding working hours to well-established heart risk factors, such as high blood pressure, made the researchers' predictions far more accurate.

Professor Stephen Holgate of the Medical Research Council, which part-funded the investigation, said: "This study might make us think twice about the old adage 'hard work won't kill you'.

The National Sleep Foundation estimates 15-million Americans doing "shift work" struggle with fatigue and sleep problems. One study suggests nurses working the graveyard shift are twice as likely to nod off while driving home.

The effect of shift work is so well known that in 2007, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the cancer arm of the World Health Organization, added overnight shift work to its list of "probable" carcinogens . And in several countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, people who have worked the night shift for 20 years or longer are compensated better in retirement than other shift workers.

Shift work disrupts the body's natural circadian rhythm, which plays an important role in regulating levels of hormones. That affects not only how long or well people sleep in the short term, but it can also lead to health problems down the line, including cancer. A 2010 study of female shift workers found that those who worked overnight were 50% more likely to receive a breast cancer diagnosis than those who worked during the day.

"There is very solid evidence showing that shift work disrupts circadian rhythms, and that has an effect on tumor genesis, heart disease and other conditions," says Dr. Yong Zhu, an endocrinologist at Yale University who is studying the health impact of long-term shift work., who led the breast cancer study and is now researching whether long-term shift work cause changes in the expression of genes that control circadian rhythm. "Rotating shift work is the worst case scenario," saysZhu, "But fixed shift work, where it's the same time every day is still disruptive."

Women who work rotating shifts may be more likely to experience irregular menstrual cycles. As menstrual irregularities make it harder for a woman to become pregnant, the study has raised the possibility that the disruption may affect fertility.

Recently, senior Democrats are pressing the Obama administration to probe whether longer work-shift schedules demanded by Transocean — the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico last year — may have contributed to the accident.

“We have learned that Transocean extended its worker shift schedule, also called a hitch schedule, in the months prior to the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. In September 2009, Transocean moved its Gulf of Mexico rig workers from a 14-day-on-the-rig/14-day-off-the-rig hitch pattern to a 21-day-on-the-rig/21-day-off-the-rig hitch pattern,” states the letter to Michael Bromwich, the director of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. The letter quotes a 2010 survey of Deepwater Horizon workers by the assessment company Lloyd’s Register Group, which found that the shift policy change was having a negative effect on workers and that fatigue was most pronounced during the third week of the three-week shifts. One manager aboard the Deepwater Horizon reported a “big difference in their attitudes on the third week…it’s mentally draining and I’ve got to watch my guys closer.” Another manager complained that the new 21-on/21-off policy was “definitely increasing the risk of an incident.”

According to Transocean’s lawyers, "the company’s decision to extend worker hitches was partially a cost-saving measure,” the letter adds, noting that longer shifts means fewer trips to fly workers on and off rigs.

When a firm has a choice between two two methods of production, one cheaper and the other safer , it has to chose the first. Otherwise its production costs would be higher and it would lose out in the battle of competition. Its profits would be less and it would eventually risk being driven out of business altogether. The health and welfare of the workforce take second place. That's what minimising costs means. This why at work we suffer speed-up, pain, stress, boredom, overwork and accidents. This is why we have to work long hours, shiftwork and nightwork. Socialism will lead to different, in many cases quite different, productive methods being adopted than now under capitalism. Night work would be reduced to the strict minimum.