There’s a new mantra in the gym, and in the workplace .. and that mantra is:

“Work through the Pain”

At the corporate level of managing employees, this mantra is 100% about greed, and maximizing the amount of work that can be extracted per employee. In the gym it keeps type A people going, until they finally break.

But like all mantras, there is truth behind the lies, and lies behind the truth.

For many types of injuries, it is indeed the case that moderate activity that is appropriate to the injury is the best way to get back to normal. It is indeed the case that laying around doing nothing can make an injury worse.

For both, it’s a happy medium, and the happy medium is the most unstable state, both physically and socially.

What actually happened with respect to this mantra, was that our employing elites observed that paid time off even with physio doesn’t really solve the problem for many people, no matter what the problem is. So they took this as a justification for the new mantra: “Work through the Pain”.

This maximizes extraction from employees, and minimizes payouts for health insurance claims and premiums.

But why do people have so much trouble healing up on the job?

There are just so many reasons, and probably the most obvious, is that many workers are forced to work 12-hour shifts 6 days a week, (or 8 or 10 hours), under conditions that are mentally and physically stressful, and in a polluted toxic environment both socially and physically. There is no chance for the body to regenerate, and this is the elephant in the room that our socioeconomic elites completely omit in a lie of omission. I have done this personally, and it came very close to permanently destroying my health and wellbeing. Our employing elites couldn’t care less about that.

Another reason is that employees are often forced to stand into one spot and do repetitive activities that stress specific points in the arms, legs, joints and back and neck. This specialization increases productivity but is detrimental to employee health and well-being.

Many jobs are so physically, mentally and socially toxic, that the employees retreat into some kind of physical substance abuse, and this affects every single system in the body.

Lastly, the default lifestyle for non-elite North Americans is toxic and sedentary, and dietarily deficient, and this is by design and sets the stage for everything else.

And the best part, is that employees do indeed “work through the pain” and employers feel justified and victorious about this. But employees have absolutely no choice other than to work through the pain, because the other choice is homelessness and death for both them and their families. Like all good liars, our employing elites, trumpet, victory when an employee works through the pain and recovers, but conveniently ignores the other 100 that do not, despite working through the pain. A similar covert dynamic happens with employees who get transmissible disease, and employers pretend to care about that, while at the same time implementing human resource practices that dictate that they work despite the fact they are infectious and sick.

“Work through the pain” is just another deep discount strategy to leverage employees to the maximum.

( Image courtesy of Rebalance Sports Medicine)