• Robert Harness, a 20-year Navy man and a management trainee for the Rite Aid company, told Work to Live how he was worked 6 days a week, up to 18 hours a day during the holiday season, 45 days straight at one point, until after two years, he had a massive combined heart attack and seizure, an episode that left him clinically dead for 32 minutes. "You're always told when you're in a high-stress job, you've got to relax and take it easy. But you're so used to doing it, you don't even think of the problems stress can cause. When something happens, it's hard to believe it happened to you. I didn't have any health problems at all before that."


• A salaried employee subjected to unlimited overtime at Cadbury Schweppes wrote: "We were told not to plan vacations until the end of June. Cadbury had a deal with Coca-Cola to sell its international business, but they royally screwed it up. So we were expected to stay late to make up for it. By the end of June I went out on disability. There is only so much your brain and body can take. I ended up having a complete mental breakdown."


• Overwork isn't an invisible problem for Marlen Conrad, a psychologist in Portland. "As a mental health professional, I see how stressed people are on a daily basis. Many illnesses, including depression, the growing number of anxiety and panic disorders, domestic violence and impulse control problems are related to people not having enough time to ever really unwind."

Real Family Values
The no-limits workplace shreds our professed ideals of family life. Penn State work-family expert Robert Drago maintains that parents with full-time careers "can't have any sort of family life." The real family values issue is overwork. Hollywood gets the rap, when the average family today can't even get a quorum for dinner. The research tells us that the divorce rate is much higher among shift workers and spouses who work long hours. The tragic result of divorce is that 40% of the children wind up in poverty, according to Williams.

One working mother who puts in 90-hour weeks says her kids ask her all the time if she could work less. "It breaks your heart, but what can you do?" she admits. Some women are precluded from having children at all, being forced to choose between kids and a well-paying job. As Ann Crittenden has put it, Let's stop obsessing about the biological clock and start focusing on the real problem: workplace rules that are out of sync with the rhythms of human reproduction.

It's not just kids and parents who pay when work destroys families. We all do, in the form of the dysfunctional society we can see all around us.


[Job stress] "is just as much a risk factor for heart attacks, strokes, and cancer as other known carcinogens."
–Dr. Steven Lamm, New York University Mount Sinai Medical School, commentator on "The View"

"A workaholic will die before an alcoholic."
–Diane Fassel, author, "Working Ourselves to Death"