Information about the film
- Original title: Happy Worker – Or How Work Was Sabotaged
- Country: Finland
- Release date: 6 May 202
- Language: English, Korean
- Filming location: Netherlands
- Film director: John Webster
Content
This documentary touches on the theme of inadequacy or even inappropriateness in the design of modern working environments. Features that in fact slow down and limit our work and at the same time (due to their maladaptation to human characteristics) are systemic sources of burnout.
Important messages include:
- A statement by John Maynard Keynes, the political economist whose views underpin the US political economy. For our nowadays he envisaged a 15-hour working week made possible by advances and automatisation of work processes.
- Gallup, Inc. survey data shows that in the working population: 20% are committed workers, 61% are disengaged workers and 19% are workers so deeply dissatisfied that they work against their own company or organisation.
- CEO salaries have increased by 1,322% since 1978, while workers’ salaries have increased by 18%.
- Nowadays working environment is one of pretending and acting, of ignoring and not reacting to the various stressors that put us under pressure at work. The concept of burnout is discussed (including with a group of individuals who have experienced it themselves) and the concept of psycho-social ergonomics (field of creating work environments that are appropriate to human characteristics) is introduced.
- Inadequate, deep-rooted habits that appoint good workers as managers and thus introduce them to a new career for which they are not qualified. Data are available on the economic cost of this inappropriate career upgrading (and lack of managerial competences).
The film features David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics known for his harsh critiques of bureaucracy and capitalism, and Christina Maslach, a professor at Berkeley known for her work on the “epidemic” of professional burnout, as two of its central figures.
Paradim 