Why modern jobs hurt our health in new and insidious ways

Put labor back into Labor Day.

Post summary

• Labor Day celebrates the American Labor Movement, which made our jobs much safer and fairer.

• But today, our jobs pose new dangers—they hurt our health in many ways. There is a simple solution.

• You’ll learn:

  • The surprising numbers around how our new style of work has impacted our metabolic health and weight.

  • Why “exercise” has failed us in some ways.

  • Nine things you can do to fight back against the downsides of modern jobs.

  • A call to action for this Labor Day.

Housekeeping

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• ICYMI:

  • Last Friday we ran The best d*mn leg exercise on earth, which I did to prepare for 33 days in the Arctic for The Comfort Crisis. I’m now doing it again for a backcountry hunt I have coming up.

  • Last Wednesday we published 14 best comments on Two Percent—powerful health and mindset advice from readers of Two Percent.

  • My book Scarcity Brain is on Super Sale over at Amazon right now.

Audio/podcast version

The post

Today is Labor Day and I’m thinking about how our jobs have changed: What work was like, what happened, what work is like now—and how that’s impacted us.

Labor Day isn’t just a day set aside to send out summer with one final barbecue. It celebrates the American Labor Movement.¹

Why we have Labor Day

• Section summary: The American Labor Movement organized to secure workers fair pay and hours, and safer work conditions.

The details

In the late 1800s, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. It shifted American workers from agricultural field work into factories, mills, and mines.

These jobs were physically demanding. The conditions were unsafe and unsanitary. Our workers put in 12-hour days six to seven days a week and weren’t paid fairly.

Meanwhile, factory owners were getting rich. So the American Labor Movement organized workers to protest and change this.

Over time, their efforts started working—our laborers’ jobs were still physically demanding. Slowly, however, the movement helped to make jobs much safer.

For example, consider the first survey of on-the-job deaths in the United States, which occurred in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, from July 1906 to June 1907.

• In just that one year in one county, 195 steelworkers died.

• In 1997, for comparison, 17 steelworkers died in the entire United States.

• The overall industrial death rate in 1913 in the U.S. was 61 deaths per 100,000 workers.

• In 1997, it was 4 per 100,000.

Some industries still have relatively high fatal work injury rates.

For example, “agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting” had a death rate of 19.5 per 100,000 workers in 2021. But the numbers are still multiples lower than they were around the turn of the century.

Here’s the data:

Other benefits of the American Labor Movement:

• Pay increased.

• We established the eight-hour workday and overtime pay.

• We stopped employing kids!

  • In 1900, 1 in 5 American children worked. Today, employing kids gets you jail time.

Boys working as “breaker boys” in Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. Their job was to use a coal breaker to separate slate and other impurities from coal before it was shipped. At times, the dust from the passing coal was so dense that the view would become obscured.

Labor Day celebrates the American Labor Movement and the sweat and grit of the American workers who built this country—our skyscrapers, railroads, cars, and everything in between.

It became a federal holiday in 1894, even as we were still struggling to make jobs safer.

The new dangers of work

• Section summary: The amount of physical activity we do at work has dropped significantly since 1960. This correlates with the sharp increase in chronic disease.

The details

Today, modern workers face new dangers. But these dangers aren’t so overt, like dangerous mines and machines. They’re unseen and insidious. They stem from how inactive our jobs have become.

The cubicle is the new coal mine:

• Just 13 percent of jobs now require heavy labor.

• The shift to desk work has led Americans to sit 50 percent more than in 1965.

• Compared to the average desk job, work that requires hard labor (e.g., carpentry or millwork) burns between 3 and 5.5 times more calories across a day.

The loss of at-work physical activity impacts our health and waistlines.

In 2011, scientists at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, a top health research facilities, wondered how changes in work since the 1960s have impacted weight changes.

• They pulled 50 years of data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

• Each month, that department surveys businesses to get a sense of what jobs employees are doing—for example, pecking at keys or chopping at trees—their wages, hours, and more.

• From there, the scientists compared the activity of our past jobs to our new ones (measured in METs).

The result:

In the early 1960s, almost half of private industry occupations in the U.S. required at least moderate intensity physical activity and now less than 20% demand this level of activity.

We estimate that daily occupation-related energy expenditure has decreased by more than 100 calories in both women and men, and further, this reduction in occupational energy expenditure accounts for a large portion of the observed increase in mean U.S. weight over the last 5 decades.

The scientists determined that American men today burn an average of 142 fewer calories per day at work compared to the early 1960s. The results were similar for women.

They believe this adds to rising obesity and chronic disease. The average American man in the early 1960s weighed 166.3 pounds². Now he weighs 198 pounds. That equates to a BMI of 25.3 versus 29.2.

Here’s the data visualized:

This graph shows how “sedentary” and “light” work have increased. Meanwhile, we’ve experienced a sharp decrease in work requiring a moderate level of physical activity.

This graph shows how on-the-job effort and calorie burn has decreased since 1960

This shows changes in the weight of the average American man and woman since 1960.

The white bar shows our actual weight change, the black bar shows our predicted weight change based on how many fewer calories we’re burning at work. The point is that the two correlate nicely. Note that the weights are in kilograms, not pounds.

These changes have hurt our health in many ways.

Being “overweight” or “obese” by BMI standards doesn’t guarantee you’ll experience chronic disease. Everything from where you store the weight to what you eat to your life stress alters your risk profile.

But being overweight or (especially) obese does, on average, increase your risk—I like to compare it to gambling with dice. Obesity loads the dice in favor of disease.

Exercise helps. But it doesn’t fix the issue.

• Section summary: People who exercise but sit the rest of the day have a significantly higher risk of disease than those who exercise and are lightly active throughout the day.

The details

Here’s a surprising finding: Exercise alone may not be enough to counter an inactive job.

One study found that people who worked out were far less likely to have heart disease and diabetes than sedentary people. Obviously!

But among the people who worked out, the ones who sat the rest of the day had a 65 percent higher risk of disease. Those who were generally active at other times of the day were the best off.

The fix is simple: Break up your bouts of sitting by being a 2-Percenter. Find little opportunities to move more.

• When you get the mail, do a lap around the block. Or two or three.

• Walk while taking work calls instead of sitting.

• Park in the farthest spot always.

• Take the stairs.

• Toss on a ruck when you do chores around the house or when you walk your dog.

• Use a standing desk for a couple of hours a day. Standing alone doesn’t burn many calories. But fidgeting can—and people who stand tend to shift around and fidget more.

• Have exercise snacks. Set a timer and every 30 or 60 minutes run in place, walk around, or do bodyweight exercises like squats.

• Do walking meetings at your office. It also leads to better conversations and ideas.

• Take breaks from work by going for a short walk rather than looking up stuff on your phone or computer (I’m guilty of grabbing my phone when I need a break!).

Today, put labor back into Labor Day

So here’s a proposal to celebrate the American workers who built this country. Let’s put the labor back into Labor Day.

Before you barbecue this weekend, do some hard labor. It could be a workout or a task you’ve been putting off.

But do it for 75 minutes. That’s the total amount of daily activity one large study found most offsets being sedentary.

I’m planning to do a long mountain bike ride in the desert; then I’m doing yard work, which will require moving some heavy gear around and getting into different positions.

What are you doing? Tell us in the comments.

Have fun, don’t die, and enjoy your laborious Labor Day.

-Michael

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1. We ran a version of this post last Labor Day and plan to run it every Labor Day (with updated data).

2. Note that we’re also about an inch taller on average, mostly due to better access to nutrition. But this better access to nutrition has also led to overnutrition.