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Bad job worse than no job?

Eggs Mayonnaise

Eggs Mayonnaise

All In With The Nuts
For mental health, bad job worse than no job
Research shows that being out of work is associated with a greater risk of mental health problems.

By Matt McMillen, Health.com
March 14, 2011 5:59 p.m. EDT

(Health.com) -- With unemployment still high, job seekers who have been discouraged by a lack of work might be inclined to take the first opportunity they're offered. That will help pay the bills, but it could cause other problems: A new study suggests that some jobs are so demoralizing they're actually worse for mental health than not working at all.

The findings add a new wrinkle to the large body of research showing that being out of work is associated with a greater risk of mental health problems. In the study, which followed more than 7,000 Australians over a seven-year period, unemployed people generally reported feeling calmer, happier, less depressed, and less anxious after finding work, but only if their new jobs were rewarding and manageable.

"Moving from unemployment to a poor-quality job offered no mental health benefit, and in fact was more detrimental to mental health than remaining unemployed," says the lead author of the study, Peter Butterworth, Ph.D., a senior research fellow at the Centre for Mental Health Research at the Australian National University, in Canberra.

The study was published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Butterworth and his colleagues analyzed data from an annual survey in which participants described their mental state, their employment status, and -- or those with a job -- details of the working conditions that they enjoyed (or didn't enjoy, as the case may be). The survey respondents were asked how strongly they agreed with statements such as "My job is complex and difficult" and "I worry about the future of my job."

The researchers focused on four job characteristics that are closely linked with mental health: the complexity and demands of the work, job security, compensation, and job control (i.e., the freedom to decide how best to do the job, rather than being ordered around).

Unemployed people who found a job that rated well in these areas reported a substantial improvement in their mental health. By contrast, newly employed people who felt overwhelmed, insecure about their employment, underpaid, and micromanaged reported a sharp decline in their mental health, including increased symptoms of depression and anxiety. Even those who couldn't find a job fared better.

This last finding was "striking," Butterworth says. "This runs counter to a common belief that any job offers psychological benefits for individuals over the demoralizing effects of unemployment."

Although certain types of jobs -- such as working in a customer-service call center -- are more likely to be downers, the working environment tends to have a greater impact on mental health than the job description itself, Butterworth adds.

Managers are especially important to employee well-being, says Robert Hogan, Ph.D., an expert on personality in the workplace and a former chair of the department of psychology at the University of Tulsa. "Bad bosses will make anybody unhappy," Hogan says. "Stress comes from bad managers."

Policy-makers should address the impact that the workplace has on mental -- and not just physical -- health, Butterworth says. "In the same way that we no longer accept workplaces that are physically unsafe or in which employees are exposed to dangerous or toxic substances, there could be a greater focus on ensuring a more positive psychosocial environment at work."
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Hmm...
 
^I agree, although I've never been in that situation so my opinion is based on pure imagination.

I guess the question if no job is better than a bad job also depends on what being jobless really means in the society/country you live in.
Germany is a 'good' place to be jobless in, at least as long as the social security Germans fought hard to get won't be stripped from us by our government. The cases where being jobless also means having no food and no home are the minority, the single fact of having no job won't kick you out of society like that, so that's not that fundamental a concern as in other countries. You won't be able to buy healthy food, but you won't starve, either.

With those basic necessities taken care of, it also depends on the priorities you have and how important social status, material wealth, and other people's appreciation of your work are to you.
Being jobless doesn't necessarily mean that one has to feel bad (of course, it also doesn't mean one doesn't). Being able to structure your day the way you want, to do stuff you want (within the limits of your monetary situation, of course), to only meet people you like does have its perks, after all. ;)

I've quit my last job without the safety of having a new one waiting in line, and I've never felt any regret. Would I have done that if there had been any risk of falling below the poverty line? No way.
 
Well, if all you have to go on is imagination, girl, then imagine this:

Your stomach hurts from having gone so long without eating. In addition, it's 5 below zero (Fahrenheit) outside, and you are outside. You have no place to get indoors for sleep. Additionally, you will be arrested if you're found sleeping outside. Your best bet for sleeping outside undetected is next to a railroad track. Fortunately for you, trains only pass by your optimal "spot" once or twice per night, waking you with their whistles and headlamps. There is frost on the grass and you haven't even a sleeping bag for warmth. And that is where you have to sleep.

Now if you had even a minimum-wage burger joint job that would at most allow you to give one or two hundred dollars to a seedy-ass drug dealer for an indoor sleeping spot on a floor with half a dozen others, most of whom snore so loudly that you couldn't sleep but could at least enjoy warmth and freedom from the risk of arrest...

...now your imagination has something to work from.
 
??
I may be wrong, but your post reads as if I have somehow disputed or played the extent of horror of being homeless down. Uh, how did you get that impression?

Oh, and trust me, while I haven't been there personally, I really don't need help in imagining situations like that. But thanks anyway.
 
Ilyanna said:
??
I may be wrong, but your post reads as if I have somehow disputed or played the extent of horror of being homeless down. Uh, how did you get that impression?
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Not at all; sorry if you took it that way. I was just impressing upon you some of the authenticity of that situation, perhaps some of the details that your imagination couldn't fill in.

Oh, and trust me, while I haven't been there personally, I really don't need help in imagining situations like that. But thanks anyway.
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Most people would need help imagining it. If you've never been there yourself, there really are a million and one details that you just can't be expected to fill in from imagination alone. For example, have you ever had to wear the same outfit until your clothes are not only dirty, but sticky? Most people can't even imagine the absolutely awful physical sensations that circumstance entails.
 
Bear in mind this study appears to come out of my own country of Australia, which has a pretty decent welfare system and thus actually being homeless and hungry takes a greater degree of fuckup. It takes extremes to end up that way here, rather than the stark nature of the America system in which you'll either end up in your parents basement or on the streets quick smart with no job.
 
TS, thanks for the clarification. I'm just in constant paranoia that my posts don't convey what I actually try to say, so I rather ask before I get completely misunderstood. No biggy ;)

As for the imagination - you're right, of course.
There are so many things we just take for granted in everyday life that it just isn't possible to see the whole extent of what it means having to exist without them like that. In fact, even if we're being told - if we've never, for example, felt bone-shattering coldness without the prospect of getting warm eventually, I doubt we can really grasp the desparation in its entirety. That's, imo, one reason why people so often lack compassion.


Yub, that's what I thought - I've heard somewhere that Australia has a similarly high degree of providing social security for the citizens as Germany has, and that really does make a whole of a difference when it comes to the question at hand.
 
Yes, it's a federal system that provides rather well for the unemployed/aged/mentally ill/misc.

Of course, there are unemployed that seem to think welfare is a right and not a privilege. I'm grateful we have such a system.
 
The welfare system will always have its share of people who abuse it - on both sides. there are cases where the giving party is being exploited, and those where the receiving party is unjustly being denied their rights and/or subjected to unneccessary humiliation.

Doesn't change the fact that the welfare system is necessary and irreplaceable. Because - and that's where we've come full circle - anything is better than being homeless and starving, imo.
 
I know some people who think so, but they spend 7 out of 12 months of the year in crackhouses and the rest of their time shooting up in public by the river.
 
ME NO LIKEE RUNNY EYE-EGGS or being homeless.

(I haven't been homeless per se, but I do know what it's like to take icky living arrangements out of desperate, immediate need, and also living without electricity for a month or two until the neighbors finally offer to run an extension cord to us...)
 
Eggs Mayonnaise said:
ME NO LIKEE RUNNY EYE-EGGS or being homeless.

(I haven't been homeless per se, but I do know what it's like to take icky living arrangements out of desperate, immediate need, and also living without electricity for a month or two until the neighbors finally offer to run an extension cord to us...)
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I hope you are going to make it alright. at least in the country we can grow some veggies and chickens and not starve. this year im turning half my yard into a garden, and will water by hand to save water.

Life is going to get tough, you city folks might be thinking about a garden in every window.
 
bad dog said:
I hope you are going to make it alright. at least in the country we can grow some veggies and chickens and not starve. this year im turning half my yard into a garden, and will water by hand to save water.

Life is going to get tough, you city folks might be thinking about a garden in every window.
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Thanks, but those lean times happened 20 years ago. ;) God willing, they won't happen again. It's funny how the only two times I've been laid off and had financial problems is while a Bush was President...once with Daddy and once with W.

And I wouldn't mind having a yard to grow food -- as long as a bad wind doesn't blow radiation all over it. Canned goods will have to do in my urban hovel.
 
Having been in unfortunate straits more than one occasion, I can agree with TS that a shit job is definitely preferable to no job. The good news is that there are ways out of every situation with ingenuity and a little thinking outside the box. But when your basic needs boil down to "will I starve?" and "will I freeze?" there are some unexpected side effects later: all other considerations, and I mean ALL others, become inconsequential. Loss of cable tv, lack of fancy clothes, inability to afford a fine dinner out, all these things become forever meaningless when you've had a real face to face encounter with your own imminent starvation. A great part of the fear of being homeless and outdoors is in the unknown aspect of it. Once you're there, and survive it, it holds less terror.

One aspect Saint fails to mention is the sheer dehumanization of it all. Welfare workers, people on the street, passersby, even your own former friends and family, look right through you like you're a non-entity. If they see you at all it's to make snap judgments, sneer down their noses, and step around in a wide berth. When you're outdoors they can't see you; you're no longer a real person. And that in itself may be the most demoralizing thing of all. Spirit crusher...
 
Take it from another who has hit rock bottom a couple of times...I'd rather have a bad job, then no job at all.

I've never been out and out homeless, but that's come at a price---rats running over my forehead as I slept, falling in with a crowd that would scare me shitless today, rationing a pack of hot dogs and a pound of spaghetti to last all week....

Presently I have two jobs. I LOVE my day job--the one with benefits. My part time afternoon job is a cause of major stress, and I hate it, but I keep it, to have "fun money".

TS, I really hope things are better for you these days.
 
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