Chronic stress of unemployment: a licence to kill?

Enlightened despots and “socially oriented” governments preach about sustainable development, corporate social responsibility, prevention of work-related stress. Employers have a legal obligation to ensure that health and safety of their employees is not being endangered. The tragic irony is that the governments punishing for corporate social irresponsibility are the same ones who generate unemployment and turn entire countries into factories of psychosocial risks. What about their accountability?

Millions of unemployed people are living in a state of chronic stress, on the brink of financial ruin, unable to protect their health. We are constantly made aware that stress at work has power to kill but it seems that the chronic stress of unemployment has a licence to kill.

If life of an unemployed person should be somehow less valuable than life of an employed person then, it’s the most disgusting form of discrimination. And why should we forget about human rights? According to Article 23.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” Since false advertising is punishable by law, politicians who failed to deliver their electoral promises concerning employment should be found guilty of deceptive conduct resulting in violation of human rights.

It is high time world health and human rights organizations addressed abuse in “civilized countries” where veterans and the elderly sleep on the streets, young people are just “a lost generation” and people over 50 should conveniently die. Wasting professional and scientific potential is a great shame for the entire humanity, throwing down millions of people from the “self-actualisation” peak of Maslow’s pyramid to” physiological needs” is a crime. If wrongdoing and precarity is somehow less noticeable in seemingly rich countries, it’s because their leaders’ phoney generosity on the international scene. The “benefactors” invest in “fighting poverty” (abroad…), foreign armies, and flood their territories with unfinanceable immigration, while further impoverishing their own.

For the sake of humanity (and their own credibility)the authorities awarding world’s most prestigious prizes such as Nobel Peace Prize, should verify if a ”well deserving” politician who calls for sanctions abroad is not a domestic tyrant depriving his own people of basic human rights.

There is a disturbing co-relation between unemployment and the most ruthless political regimes. If incompetent leadership and a socially exposed position of the target are identified as the causes of bullying in workplace, then the unemployment and underemployment facilitate harassment on a larger scale. A boss will face charges for failing to protect his employees from harassment; an unpunished politician will continue to persecute victims of his own pathetic leadership by taxing them until homelessness, jailing them for unpaid debts and blacklisting all his opponents.

Until governmental social irresponsibility is not condemned, throwing the book at the corporate one is purely hypocritical. Meanwhile, many companies found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy, not because of their own director’s mismanagement but because of disastrous policies of government.

 Politicians owe us results and accountability they demand from corporate directors. Until an adequate punishment for leadership failure is truly administered, we have no guarantee that the power we give to our leaders won’t be used against us. We have learned the hard way that duty to serve and protect can turn into a licence to kill.