Jobs taken by school leavers and graduates today are worlds away from those available to our parents and grandparents. Most of us will spend 20 per cent of our lives in work. What happens in the workplace has a notable effect on our health and wellbeing – as Alan Johnson emphasised in a recent speech launching the ‘well at work’ pilots.
From 1870 to 1956 there was an asbestos mattress and boiler-lining factory in Armley (part of the Leeds West constituency that I hope to represent after the next election). For twenty years MP John Battle has been campaigning for justice for people who died as a result of inhaling asbestos fibres from the factory.
Of course, people do die today on construction sites where health and safety are disregarded. Still, with fewer jobs in mining and heavy industry, today’s workplaces have different problems and issues. But for those people who develop stress, depression or back-pain from work, the consequences can be serious. The government have made huge strides towards improving work-life balance with increased maternity and paternity leave, and the right to request flexible working. But the battle for work-health balance is only just beginning.
Improving health and wellbeing in the workplace makes sense for business as well as wider society. In the team I manage, we had absence of just over three-and-a-half per cent last year. Around a third of that reflected stress, back-pain and other work-related conditions. This reality has made us sit up.
We will shortly be doing a survey of 600 colleagues looking at their ‘well-q’, made up of factors like diet, exercise and job satisfaction. Using the results we want to do more to make work a healthy place. We invest huge amounts in on-the-job training and technical knowledge. No business wants to squander that through absence, attrition and lower productivity associated with work-related illness.
If employers can be more flexible with working hours, to allow people to get their work-health balance right, then periods of long absence and illness reduce. Do we honestly need people travelling for two hours a day, five days a week, if with a laptop they could work one day at home? Those two hours could be spent at the gym or cooking a family meal. A definite win for the individual, but also for business and society.
The role of government is two-fold: to work with business to identify ways to improve work-health-life balance and to help people back to work. The departments of health, work and pensions, business, and the Treasury should all study closely what can be done to improve our well-q. And if we do then we might ensure that the work-place injuries of the 21st century do not destroy lives in the way the Armley asbestos factory was able to do in the last century.
Rachel Reeves is Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Leeds West