The Stress of Higher Status

How many jobs are there left, decent jobs that is, for which a high-school education alone will qualify you? Working in the post office here in Canada, for instance, is not a high status job. Never has been. It used to be a job, however, that you could pretty much just walk into without even having completed high school. Not so today. Applicants for Canada Post positions must have a high school diploma or equivalent.
On the flip side of that coin is the age-old admonition delivered by parents and teachers alike to stay in school until you've completed post-secondary education, thereby facilitating the search for a better job and salary.
University of Toronto sociology professor Scott Schieman has just completed research, however, that suggests all is not sunshine and roses when one lands that higher status job. In fact, finds Schieman, those who do so should be warned about "the stress of higher status" that will come along with that job. Using data gathered from a survey of 1,800 American workers, Schieman and his research co-authors found that as many as 50per cent of the 1,800 brought their work home with them and reported that it interfered with their home and/or family life. The people more likely to report this were those with university or postgraduate degrees, rather than those with only high school. People who had higher personal earnings were also more likely to report that their work interfered with their home life.
In 2008/09, for instance, an estimated 415,000 workers surveyed in Britain, believed that they were experiencing work-related stress at a level that was making them ill, according to a Labour Force Survey.
Here in Canada, e-mail and the Blackberry are regarded as having "permanently wired employees to their jobs" contributing to heavy workloads and long hours that intrude upon time spent away from the workplace. (MacBride-King, Judith. and Kimberley Bachmann. 1999. Solutions for the stressed-out worker. Ottawa: The Conference Board of Canada.)
Stats can be dug up from any number of sources to support the negative health impact of workplace stress that intrudes upon life at home, but the question is, what can be done about it? Separation between one's job and one's home life needs to be clearly delineated, or the 50% will rise inexorably until the hospital wards are overpopulated by the well-educated and the only ones left walking the streets in good health are the posties.