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‘It’s killing us all slowly’: how the night shift is taking a toll on US workers

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11 months ago

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Source image: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/18/us-workers-night-shift-takes-toll

Roger Reinhardt works the third shift at a beer production facility in Michigan from 10pm-8am, four days a week. He started working nights because it was the only shift available when he was hired, but he has continued doing it for the extra pay.

But is not not easy.

“It all comes down to sleep. Blackout curtains, white noise and melatonin supplements only do so much. The body rebels. When I’m not going great, I wake up every 90 minutes to two hours and might go through most days of the week with only four hours of sleep,” said Reinhardt. “The shift is killing us all slowly.”

He noted the shift has a lot of employee turnover because people are either not capable or not willing to sacrifice daylight hours for the sleep they need, and because needing to sleep during the day makes social events, chores, and errands a lot more difficult.

“Almost universally across the board, the job is taken because the worker either didn’t have another job available to them or they needed the money, or both,” Reinhardt said.

Millions of people in the US work throughout the night, from workers in emergency services, such as paramedics, nurses, police officers, to late night hospitality, retail and food service workers, transportation and utility workers, and workers in factories and warehouses producing or distributing goods 24 hours a day.

The majority of US workers are on the job during the day, on 9am-5pm schedules or a few hours before or after, But about 5 to 10% are on their job through late night hours, with some regularly working night shifts and others with rotating night shift schedules.

The impacts of these late night schedules can be profound on the health of workers and their ability to balance a life outside of their jobs.

An Amazon employee in Washington who requested to remain anonymous has been working part-time on the overnight shift, Monday through Friday, from 9.45pm to around 2 to 2.30am. She has done it for about a year, because it enables her to avoid the cost of childcare and she gets time to spend with her children.

“It can get very exhausting since you’re not getting the adequate amount of sleep you need as a healthy adult. I only get four hours of sleep every night and try to sneak in a nap during the day. Some days I feel like I’m in a daze,” she said. “I do get paid $1.50 extra an hour so basically you’ll only make six dollars extra for that shift.”

Humans have a 24-hour circadian timing system, a biological clock, affecting physiological processes such as sleep patterns, eating habits and digestion, hormones, blood pressure and body temperature.

“It evolved to help organisms cope with the daily changes in their environment. Our body is exposed to very different conditions during the day and the night: during the day we normally eat, we move, and we’re alert, while during the night we sleep, we rest, and we recover,” said Dr Laura Kervezee, a chronobiologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

“Night shift work turns it upside down. It leads people to be awake and consume food at times that their physiology is primed for sleep and rest. This leads to what we call circadian misalignment, where behavior becomes uncoupled with the circadian rhythms in the body.”

Numerous studies have demonstrated increased health risks for night shift workers in the long term, as their work schedules misalign their circadian timing systems, including higher risks of cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer, depression, and short term impacts such as decreased cognitive performance, fatigue, and sleep deprivation.

“As a society, we should really think about whether that’s really where we want to go, to expose people to an extra health risk just because we want our package to arrive faster,” Kervezee added, noting more research needed to be done to pinpoint the link between the short-term acute effects and the long-term health problems that night shift workers experience.

A warehouse worker on the third shift at UPS in Kentucky who requested to remain anonymous explained the mental and physical drain the shift has had on them. They work from 10pm to 4am or later, receiving a higher hourly wage for working the third shift.

“Working third shift is really hard. It’s very mentally draining and people around you tend to be grumpier to work around, because everyone would rather be in bed,” they said.

They said getting adequate sleep is difficult because of the noise and light during the day and they rarely have the time or energy to spend time with family or friends on work days.

Kennedy Sparr works the night shift as a 911 emergency dispatcher in Michigan, working from 6pm to 6am, often more than 40 hours a week. It’s not uncommon for her to be up 36 hours at a time before sleeping.

“It’s definitely harder to train your body to work the night shift, because your body is not used to staying up all night,” said Sparr. “I noticed at the times that I work night shifts, you’re more edgy, you have more of an attitude, you’re angry, you’re tired, you’re exhausted, and you feel drained.”

She said that she often doesn’t sleep enough and the night shift schedule makes it difficult to maintain relationships with everyone else on normal schedules. And she said it’s challenging to retrain your body to return to a night schedule after days off and vacations.

“I don’t think there are ever nights that I feel fully refreshed when I come back to work, because I’ve had four hours of sleep and nothing’s done at home. I need to do things like laundry, I need to do the dishes. But I just wanted to sleep.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/18/us-workers-night-shift-takes-toll

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No need to send it back: Netflix posts its final DVDs to customers

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5 mins ago

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September 30, 2023

Most of Netflix’s 238 million streaming customers around the world will be unaware that the company first launched 25 years ago as a DVD mailing service. Even fewer might realise that operation has continued, with under 1 million people still subscribing.

But now the company is finally hitting the stop button, with its five remaining US distribution centres mailing out their final discs to American customers on Friday.

These DVD diehards will be allowed to keep these titles rather than return them, meaning some will get up to 10 as a goodbye present from a business that boasted as many as 16 million subscribers at its peak.

“It is very bittersweet,” Marc Randolph, Netflix’s co-founder and the chief executive when the company shipped its first DVD, told Associated Press. “We knew this day was coming, but the miraculous thing is that it didn’t come 15 years ago.”

Netflix does not break out the number of DVD subscribers in its figures, but according to an AP estimate fewer than 1 million people now subscribe to the service.

Randolph came up with the idea of a DVD-by-post service in 1997 – in a challenge to then rental market leader Blockbuster – with his friend and fellow entrepreneur, Reed Hastings, who eventually succeeded Randolph as CEO. He only stepped aside from that role this year.

The first disc sent out by Netflix was Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice in March 1998 and since then the company has shipped 5.2bn of them. Its most popular title was the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Blind Side.

However, Randolph said he knew that DVDs would not be the mainstay of the business and would be overtaken by watching films and TV shows through internet connections.

In 2011 Netflix decided to separate the DVD business from the streaming business, one year after Blockbuster went bankrupt – having turned down an opportunity in 2000 to buy Netflix for $50m (£41m) instead of trying to compete against it. The streaming giant is now worth about $166bn.

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“From day one, we knew DVDs would go away, that this was transitory step,” Randolph said. “And the DVD service did that job miraculously well. It was like an unsung booster rocket that got Netflix into orbit and then dropped back to Earth after 25 years. That’s pretty impressive.”

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Evergrande halts share trading as woes mount for China property giant

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24 hours ago

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September 29, 2023

Embattled Chinese property giant Evergrande has suspended share trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange only a month after it resumed trading after a 17-month suspension.

Trading in its two other units – the property services and electric vehicle groups – also stopped at 9am on Thursday, according to notices posted by the stock exchange.

The halt in trading comes a day after reports that the chair of Evergrande had been put under police surveillance. Hui Ka Yan, who founded Evergrande in 1996, was taken away earlier this month and is being monitored at a designated location, according to Bloomberg.

It is not clear why Hui might have been placed under residential surveillance, which falls short of a formal detention or police arrest and does not mean a criminal charge follows.

Evergrande had only resumed trading on 28 August after the company was suspended for 17 months for not publishing its financial results. Earlier this month, several employees of Evergrande’s wealth management unit were arrested in Shenzhen on unspecified charges.

Two former executives were also reportedly detained recently. Pan Darong and Xia Haijun had resigned last year after it emerged that 13.4bn yuan (£1.5bn) of deposits had been used as security for third-party loans.

Earlier this week, Hengda Real Estate, Evergrande’s primary unit in mainland China, missed principal and interest payments on a 4bn yuan bond. Hui resigned from his position as Hengda chair in 2021.

On Sunday, Evergrande said it was unable to issue new debt as Hengda was being investigated.

And on Friday it said meetings planned this week on a key debt restructuring plan would not take place, adding it was “necessary to reassess the terms” of the plan in order to suit the “objective situation and the demand of the creditors”.

China’s property sector is a key pillar of growth – along with construction, it accounts for about a quarter of GDP – and has experienced a dazzling boom in recent decades.

The massive debt accrued by the industry’s biggest players has, however, been seen by Beijing in recent years as an unacceptable risk for the financial system and overall economic health.

Authorities have gradually tightened developers’ access to credit since 2020 and a wave of defaults has followed – notably that of Evergrande.

Another Chinese property giant, Country Garden, narrowly avoided default in recent months, after reporting a record loss and debts of more than $150bn.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

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Musk ditches X’s election integrity team ahead of key votes around world

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24 hours ago

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September 29, 2023

Elon Musk, owner of X, has confirmed he has ditched his team working to prevent disruption to elections, just days after the EU announced the platform, formerly known as Twitter, had the highest proportion of disinformation in three European countries.

Ahead of 70 elections around the globe in the coming year, the controversial businessman confirmed on X: “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

According to reports, several staff working out of the Dublin office including the co-lead of election disinformation team, Aaron Rodericks, have left the company.

Overnight Musk appeared to give his first reaction to EU claims that X had the highest ratio of disinformation of the large social media platforms with a picture of three penguins bearing the logos of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube saluting another penguin bearing the X logo.

Rodericks had recently secured an injunction against the company restraining the company from taking disciplinary action after he had posted information about the company’s recruitment of staff for his team on his personal account.

He claimed the company did nothing after he had been subjected to a barrage of abuse from people who accused him of trying to suppress freedom of speech on X.

Last month he posted an advert on LinkedIn for eight new roles revealing he was seeking people with a “passion for protecting the integrity of elections and civic events, X is certainly at the centre of the conversation”.

Sweeping new laws came into force in August, compelling social media platforms to remove fake accounts, disinformation and hate speech, with X rivals Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Google and Microsoft all taking action and reporting back to the EU.

While Twitter quit the code of practice designed by the EU to help the companies comply with the new laws, Musk promised earlier this year he would comply with the rules.

Concerns over the platform’s approach to content moderation under Musk’s leadership have triggered an advertising boycott of the company, which relies on ads for the majority of its income.

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Musk has admitted that advertising revenues have fallen by about 60% since he bought the business last year and has blamed anti-hate speech campaign groups for the decline. He is suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate over its coverage of X and has also threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, which has raised concerns about antisemitic content on the platform.

Farhad Divecha, managing director of London-based digital marketing agency Accuracast, said: “The fact that Elon Musk seems to have disbanded the team that deals with election integrity sends a clear signal that preventing disinformation or maintaining a level of integrity isn’t a priority for X. This is one more factor adding to the concerns about brand safety, or ensuring brands aren’t associated with objectionable content.”

The company was approached for comment.

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