Every summer, at the university I attended a million years ago, one of the buildings (and I won’t say which) used to close off the top floor because it had a track record of ‘jumpers’ – students who were so afraid of failing their exams that they preferred to commit suicide first.
Psychologists have been warning for ages about the danger of letting work get you down. Now, with soaring unemployment, vicious job cuts in just about every sector (including at Jobcentres, themselves), and businesses operating on knife-edge profit margins, the pressure to keep one’s job has probably never been higher. It’s very easy to let it all get to you.
Sometimes it can all seem too much.
We sometimes make light of ‘overdoing it’ and ‘taking work home’ (literally or metaphorically) but could the situation ever get so bad for workers (en-masse) that there seems ‘only one way out’, forcing companies to act? It would seem to be what has happened in China where techno-company, Foxconn, has inserted a ‘no suicide’ clause into its contracts of employment.
You can read the full story here but this is what Foxconn workers allegedly endure:
- Back-to-back shifts
- Sleeping in company dormitories
- Poor living conditions
- Double the legal amount of overtime
- Impossibly low basic wages
- Overbearing and bullying managers
- Humiliating public reprimands
- No breaks
OK, British workers don’t generally live in H-block type dormitories nor do they have to write down their breaches of company rules and read their admission out to their peers, but how many of the above points did you nod in agreement to? You don’t have to score 8 out of 8 to see that there is all the potential for a similar problem.
There's no solution here.
I don’t have a solution for coping with the need to earn more money than the company will, or can afford to, pay you, nor can I solve the paradox of needing to be in two or more places at once. I wish I could help. All I can say is that giving it all up for work is plain wrong – it just ain’t worth it.
But, could Foxconn legally insert a ‘no suicide’ clause into the contracts of British workers?
The very act of aiding and abetting a suicide is illegal and, since you cannot contract to commit an illegal act, it is ‘understood’ that the company would not wish to encourage you to take your own life. Employers also have a duty of care towards their staff. Under the Health and Safety At Work laws, it would not be unreasonable to ask you not to deliberately cause harm to yourself in work hours.
Your employer has no right to tell you what to do outside of work (save for some exceptions) unless your outside interest risks bringing the company into disrepute (and that’s a sticky one) or compromises your position.
For the record, under the Suicide Act of 1961, it is not illegal to kill oneself nor attempt to do so however the act of abetting is punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment.
While I don’t see suicide nets going up on British office blocks nor monks being called in to cleanse factories from spectral devils, there is an amber alert to be sounded. None of us have the power to change the ‘big picture’ but we do have the ability to help one another through the numerous trials and tribulations of this recession.
Reach out to someone
As a final anecdote, I repeat how our structures lecturer explained stability in terms of drunks stumbling down the road. Two drunks acting alone will stagger and fall down but two drunks leaning on each other can walk a good approximation to a straight line.
If you are struggling with depression caused by your work, seek help – it’s both free and confidential.
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