Could Late-stage Capitalism have a Negative Consequence on your sleep? By: Sydney Steinforth

Could Late-stage Capitalism have a Negative Consequence on your Health?

Do you ever feel like you're constantly working and don’t have time for basic day-to-day activities and routines? You and other lower-class Americans would agree with you. With retail and food services seeing an increase in employees, we must ask whether or not this will affect their overall health. Considering the food and retail industry consists of mainly lower-class citizens, we must look at the implications of high work demands on people's health to protect workers and their day-to-day living. Harknett, Schneider, and Wolfe highlight the importance of regulating sleep, their study found many impairments in sleep regulation in association with high work demands and scheduling conflicts. These results provided insight into how poor sleep quality is affected by the nature of work, although it needs to be analyzed further since there are few resources directly studying the effect of late-stage capitalist work demands on lower-class individuals. This article provides a strong association between lower wages and people in lower socioeconomic positions to increases in sleep disruptions, globally and across the United States, however (Harknett et al., 2020).

Over the past 50 years, work in America has shifted from a drastically lower demand to a higher one. Job scarcity is on the rise and has everlasting effects on the nation's health. Fluctuating work schedules for employees have been shown to negatively impact their body’s synchronization of circadian rhythms. Shift workers more specifically, notice the most drastic changes regarding their sleep health. People within the field of retail and food production often experience fluctuating work schedules and are at risk of altering their internal circadian clocks. Research on working-class individual's sleep health is slim, a study done on nurses showed that however, “Similar results were found in a study of nurses' aides for whom strain (high demands and low control) were associated with poor sleep quality (Eriksen et al., 2008)” (Harknett et al., 2020).  A similar study was performed on retail workers of GAP, this study demonstrated how on-call shifts negatively impact people's sleep. The employees experienced about a 6-8% increase in their sleep patterns when GAP had regulated notice to their employee's work schedules (Harknett et al., 2020). Phyliss C. Zee highlights in Circadian Disruption and Human Health, that the consequences of disturbed sleep have drastic effects on an individual's total health and increase their susceptibility to disease (Fishbein et al., 2021). Zee also emphasizes that the dysregulation of sleep and the dysfunction of circadian rhythms can associate with Alzheimer's disease later in life, a debilitating disease common among the older U.S. population. We should discuss the potential this may have on lower-class workers in the USA to prevent disease, and to protect the welfare of U.S workers.

  Zee emphasizes that circadian sleep models are regulated by modes of environmental and behavioral factors. Concerning Losing Sleep Over Work Scheduling? The Relationship between Work Schedules and Sleep Quality for Service Sector Workers (Harknett, K., Schneider, D., & Wolfe, R.) Zee Harknett, Schneider, and Wolfe see patterns of sleep disruption in individuals who work indoors across America. Zee claims that about 70% of the U.S. population works indoors and is thus at risk for circadian sleep dysfunction (Fishbein et al., 2021). When we take a look at the majority of workers in the retail and food industry, we can see that the majority are those of lower socioeconomic status, which may put them at a higher risk for these sleep and circadian dysfunctions. Harknett, Schneider, and Wolfe claim that Shift workers are at the highest risk for circadian sleep disruption as the result of fluctuating job inequality and precarious work scheduling, Zee would argue that they have a high risk for circadian disruption due to the likelihood of these professions being indoors (Fishbein et al., 2021). Shift workers are most affected by this because their bodies adjust to new patterns of sleep. It would be necessary to test whether changing the westernized work schedule to become less demanding and wearing on the individual, would have an effect on shift worker's circadian rhythms.

References

Harknett, K., Schneider, D., & Wolfe, R. (2020). Losing sleep over work scheduling? The relationship between work schedules and sleep quality for service sector workers. Europepmc.org. https://europepmc.org/article/med/33195791#free-full-text

‌‌Fishbein, A. B., Knutson, K. L., & Zee, P. C. (2021). Circadian disruption and human health. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 131(19). https://doi.org/10.1172/jci148286

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