Work Is Burning Us Out. We Need To Push Back

Workers are humans not commodities.

Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

It has been surprising how many conversations I have had with friends recently about how they are burnt out from work. Deep, chronic work-related stress has been something I have experienced a couple of times. My wife has also recently gone through similar trials, causing her to leave her corporate law job to take a career break before starting her own firm.

The most recent data I could find from Stats Can found that in 2023 over 4.1 million people were experiencing high or very-high levels of work-related stress, representing 21.2% of the working population. Based on my conversations, these figures seem low for the state of play today.

These levels of burnout are a massive problem — for us as individuals of course, but also for society more broadly.

It is easy to blame bad managers for work-related burnout, and there are certainly a lot of them in our workplaces. However, we should not lose sight of some of the systemic factors driving this phenomenon.

A crucial part of the explanation is the commodification of labour, and the resulting dehumanization of workers. Instead of being a full human being, you become a replaceable cog in the machine. Managers and executives are incentivized to care very little about your well-being beyond your immediate ability to deliver for the organization.

While this is obviously the case in the private sector, where profits, growth, and resulting bonuses often encourage the chewing up of junior staff, it is by no means limited to there. Many of the people I know experiencing similar things are in nonprofit organizations and even in government. Instead of revenue growth, it might be attracting new funding, delivering programs, or some other metric that drives this behaviour. Either way, the result is the same for frontline staff.

The burnout does not stop at work though. Every day we face the overwhelming stress triggered by a world on fire. Live streamed genocides and massacres, hate marches, climate breakdowns, gender-based violence, and on and on, from all over the world, are constantly being beamed straight to our phones. It is too much. Our neurological systems cannot cope with this much horror.

Yet our workplaces on the whole do not give any allowance for this reality. They often ignore it, if they are not actively suppressing discussions of it. There is an extra cognitive dissonance required if your workplace is led by people doing that.

As a result, we are left feeling even more isolated, even more overwhelmed, and with even less energy to invest in values-aligned activities. These trends are being supercharged by AI, with exhausted and burnt out people being encouraged to offload their thinking and creativity to chatbots, with declines in critical thinking skills and increased dependence on AI tools the result.

These trends all further lock us into those stressful jobs. Isolated individually, or within isolated nuclear families, we end up lacking the communities and networks of care that in past decades were so essential. We become dependent on our wages to provide for every necessity, resort to consumption as a balm to the stress, and turn away from the horror of the world, lest one more outrage be the straw that breaks our backs.

We all lose if we go further down that path.

Could the answer be in nurturing care, connection, and friendship?

Laura C. Forster and Joel White argue that friendship is “a political act in itself – a commitment to forming intimacies despite the individualizing and apathy-inducing capitalist machine.” The care and compassion that genuine friendships provide are essential to sustaining us with our humanity intact. These are the kind of friendships where you do chores together and feel no qualms letting them into your messy home, as opposed to the kind where you only go for expensive brunches, for example (though my wife would like me to point out there is a time and place for bottomless mimosas).

The road map to getting to this place is not obvious. But it seems impossible to move forward sustainably without fighting back against the commodification of labour (inside and outside of our workplaces), and ensuring that we are all recognized for our inherent humanity.

Fighting back involves workplace organizing through unions of course, but it also means giving far more attention and support to alternative business models, such as employee ownership or cooperatives. It is no surprise to me that cooperatives are more innovative than SMEs as a whole and they adopt more technology and are more likely to have an online presence.

When we have a stake in our workplaces, when we have agency and autonomy, when we are treated as humans not commodities, then the benefits ripple outwards. That is what we need to fight for in every way we can.