| Poche Pictures |
| e-mail: rich@pochepictures.com |
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| ..Excuse me, I need to drop dead... |
| ...I give this guy another ten years...No, maybe five at best... |
| "Karoshi" is a Japanese word translated quite literally as "death from overwork." Here at the hospital that I work at, three people have died in this year alone. And it is only eleven days into the new year. Three people in eleven days? Two of the employees worked in housekeeping (or the politically correct term is "environmental services") while the other worked in the cafeteria ("dietary services"). I was barely an acquaintance of one of the employees but had seen the other two around the hospital quite regularly. Their ages were 58, 67, and 68 respectively. I cannot make the assumption as to why the eldest two were not yet retired. My guess is that they had not accumulated enough working years in the U.S. to qualify for adequate social security payments. Upon their deaths, every employee received an e-mail containing an announcement of the employee's death. Attached to the e-mail were photos of the deceased and a stock photo of a Bible and a cross. Okay. Fine. The hospital acknowledges the dead. But it got me thinking. Are these folks being worked to death? Or are they working themselves to death. Three people in eleven days with each of them working in a job where there is hard manual labor. Jobs of drudgery. |
| The cafeteria workers here are a tired and miserable lot. It is like watching people move about in the gallows. A friend of mine who transferred from being a security officer to the dietary department shed thirty pounds while working there. How? He worked scrubbing the pots and pans in their very hot sweat shop of a back room. The housekeepers have different job tasks obviously but share the same bottom of the totem pole status with the cafeteria workers. They are, for the most part, treated like shit. Once upon a time there was this bull dyke of an emergency room nursing supervisor who took every opportunity to bully the housekeeper assigned to the E.R. around. The E.R. has over 30 rooms and gurneys. They each need to be sterilized before and after every patient (at least that's what the rumor is.) But the housekeeper in question was in her early 60s, obese, slow and basically not in the condition to keep up with the pace of a high volume emergency room...So the questions are (1) why the hell was she assigned to the emergency room in the first place? (2) why isn't there more people assisting her? (3) why is this housekeeper given a position that provides enough work for one or two more people? The answer to question one is that hospitals are a union shop. Unions are good and bad. They are bad in all capital letters when it comes to assigning the proper individuals to appropriate work assignments. An aged overweight woman does not belong in a high paced emergency room. Stevie Wonder can see that. Problem is that she most likely lacked the seniority to bid on a more suitable, slower paced department in the hospital. So she got "stuck" doing the grunt work and just hoped to stay on long enough until someone with a cushier assignment moved on and she would be able to bid on the position. But the answers to questions two and three are the point of this rant. Hospitals, like other corporations, are desirous upon cutting corners and saving as much money as possible. The employees mentioned above are paid at wages that are way above the market thanks to our friendly neighborhood union reps. The hospital responds in kind by being stingy in doling out payroll budgets for their department managers to abide by. The result? Employees are expected to complete tasks that require two or more people to do adequately. If the work isn't up to snuff, they are derided and "written up." If the work is completed there is no pat on the back or good word. In fact, it may even encourage the manager to add more to the work load. So the days go by and another pound of flesh is taken out. Little by little, it accumulates. Working hard, day in, day out, year in, year out...Until... Splat! The employee drops face first on the pristine hospital floor. Dead. Now, going back to the employees that have "expired" ("expired" is yet another annoying PC label we use around the hospital when someone croaks.) From what I've gathered, only one of the recently deceased had medical problems. The other two deaths came as a "surprise." There are pictures of the departed co-workers around the hospital. Someone posted pictures of how one of the deceased looked when they were young. I looked and wondered how that young person transformed into the old and tired person I used to see walking down the hospital hallway. But it happened, they transformed, little by little, day by day, year after year... And the same thing is happening to me. |
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| ...The typical hospital employee after a few years on the job... |