Every day there is worrying data on the growing deterioration of workers’ mental health. Since 2016, the number of temporary disability processes linked to mental health problems has doubled: from around 280,000 sick leave then to 643,000 in 2024. In addition, sick leave due to mental disorders is more serious. While ordinary temporary disability lasts about 45 days, in mental disorders the average sick leave is 116 days, according to the Socioeconomic study of the evolution of temporary disability and accident rates in Spain directed by researchers José María Peiró and Lorenzo Serrano, from the University of Valencia (IVIE).
Evidence abounds connecting work overload and mental health. Josh Dizieza in How Hard Robots Will Make Us Work, in The Verge, notes the physical and mental consequences of work overload in Amazon employees who at the end of the day fall asleep in their car in the warehouse parking lot before returning home.
Based on these studies and his research, Adrián Todolí, professor of Labor Law at the University of Valencia, has delved deeper into the causes of this phenomenon from a legal perspective. Its purpose was to discern whether the increase in sick leave was a problem of absenteeism or the intensity of the work that “is making those who perform it sick.”
In The Escape from Work: Work Overload, Mental Health and Fundamental Rights (Aranzadi), Professor Todolí assures that “the scientific evidence is conclusive. Excessive work demands decisively condition the mental health of workers in Spain.”
Among the causes of this deterioration are the introduction of technological and organizational changes, the loss of strength of unions and the deregulation of the labor market. Considers that these elements “have favored an increase in the unilateral power of the employer to demand levels of effort and speed, taking advantage of situations of contractual insecurity such as layoffs, temporary employment or generalized precariousness.”
Todolí dismantles myths. “A greater workload does not equal greater productivity. Work overload harms both productivity and health.” He also believes that reducing the working day does not resolve the issue. “The government proposes reducing the working day, which seems very good to me. But if they reduce your working hours and make you work more, you end up just as exhausted and when you get home you have no energy for your children.”
It confirms the phenomenon of “the flight from work that occurs when young people abandon employment because they think that it is not worth working for what they are paid and the elderly prefer early retirement because they cannot tolerate certain conditions.”
Consider protective legislation that measures overload a priority. He gives the example of Poland, which has established “a maximum consumption of kilojoules of energy per hour (unit of measurement of energy, work or heat) in physical work: exceeding that amount is understood to endanger the person’s health.” Another field in which it is necessary to strengthen the role of unions.
