Can workplace stress get much worse?

As a real-estate and business attorney, John R. Browne III is familiar with stress. But in his 34 years on the job, nothing has compared to what he shoulders now as the economy heads downward.

With five children's college tuition to pay and a portfolio of tanking technology stocks, the 62-year-old attorney worries every day that his retirement nest egg will crack further. His clients, anxious about their own futures, are driving harder bargains now and taking longer to pay their fees. And even the things that were supposed to make his life easier -- like e-mail and his cellphone -- have tethered him to work and usurped his private life.

"I feel more stressed than I've ever been," says Mr. Browne, who sets an alarm clock every evening in an attempt to leave the office at a reasonable hour. And he figures the more the economy slows, the worse the strain will get. "I work hard, and to see your retirement going down the drain ... it's very disconcerting."

Multiply John Browne times millions of other lawyers, doctors, sales executives, factory workers, dot-commers and anxious stockholders, and you've got a picture of stress in early 2001. Whatever their station, all have come to expect more wealth in recent years. Now with the first economic slowdown in a decade, they are facing an unsettling uncertainty. Stock portfolios are shrinking and gluttons for punishment can even constantly monitor the shrinkage online.

Meanwhile, mergers, downsizings and the ability of managers to monitor individuals' job performance add more layers of insecurity. As workers fret about layoffs, they do so knowing that with new information technology, their managers can track performance division by division, employee by employee, with startling precision.

Today's stresses, of course, pale beside the conditions of decades past, when some workers feared for their lives in dangerous factories and bleak sweatshops. Stress was a "hardy perennial in the textile mills and meatpacking yards of the 19th century, and the factories and offices of the 20th century," says Nancy Koehn, a business historian at Harvard Business School. Letters by business tycoons, commodity clerks and assembly workers in the early 20th century are filled with complaints about how "no one has time to stop and give a stranger directions, or time for family or service to community," says Ms. Koehn. "There has always been the omnipresent authority of the clock at work."

Today's stress is, in many ways, about too much information coming from too many sources -- and the loss of control that instills. A survey by Pitney Bowes of some 1,200 workers from receptionists to chief executives at top companies found that employees handle an average of 204 messages a day, counting e-mail, voice mail, snail mail and memos.

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