Archive: December, 2010
Jane M. Von Bergen, Inquirer Staff Writer
Words can not express how angry I am over this morning's Labor Department jobs report. There are now 15.1 million unemployed people, up 276,000 from the prior month, and the economy has added a pitiful 39,000 jobs. We see everything expressed in bar charts, graphs and percentage points. These are people and they aren't working! It galls me that people can point to a handful of lazy folks who scam the unemployment system and say that this is the majority. So unlikely. The people I meet who are unemployed are not like that. They are desperate. All of us want to feel as though our skills and abilities are being put to good use, but we're beyond that now. Even normal sustenance is an issue. Look at Camden -- laying off half the police force. Look at Comcast, shutting some of its operations in Oak. Look at Express Scripts, putting 1,000 out of work in Bensalem. I'm not sure what the answers are, but I think that we are killing our country by rendering so many people useless. Where is the creativity? Why such a broad brush? How can some people have so much and others have so little? Why is this right?
Jane M. Von Bergen, Inquirer Staff Writer
Fascinating research at the Focus on Workplace Flexibility conference in Washington that ended Nov. 30: Low workplace flexibility leads to more arguments and physical symptoms on the job, two Penn State researchers reported, basing their research on a sample of hourly hotel employees who had children aged 10 to 18. Workers will low flexibility had twice as many work arguments as workers with high flexibility. Also, when stress occurred, workers with low flexibility experienced more emotional and physical reactivity to them, professor David M. Almeida and researcher Kelly D. Davis found. High flexibility, it seems, may act as a protective factor.
But, the researchers found one puzzling result. Workers with high flexibility tended to have a greater negative affect when the work stress involved co-workers. Perhaps, the researchers guessed, there may be some burden involved in covering for co-workers.
It also looked like workers with low flexibility at work were more likely to transmit work-placed stress to their children, but there needs to be more research there, especially since the jobs with the least flexibility tend to involve low-income, minority, female, less educated and hourly workers. Almeida and Davis point out that flexible work policies have been associated with fewer stress-related health problems and better physical health, but no one is exactly sure why. The Penn State researchers think that perhaps it is because flexibility acts a protective factor, helping to shield individuals from the full brunt of life's inevitable daily stresses. The workers participated in a daily telephone diary study.
