Neoliberalism,toxic work and the shadow of death: hidden suicidality among Australia's finance sector workers

Abstract

Addressing work-related suicide requires new perspectives and methods such as the industrial relations of the union–university partnership basic to this study. Nineteenth-century business priorities on sustaining profitability and ameliorating dehumanising industrialisation hid work-related suicide. Workers compensation systems contracted out determining work-related harm to medical science, which attributed suicidality to individual pathology. When researchers began uncovering statistical associations between work stress, bullying, work strain, mental health and suicidality, it fell to the courts to address links between work-related harm and suicide. Though this approach provided a greater understanding of suicidality, it did not impact the normative medical priority of individual pathology. This article follows the stories of 10 finance sector workers. The prime cause of suicidality for each rested in the processes created by their employers’ framing toxic corporate governance and culture. Unjust management was justified by the rubric of corporate profitability, workers’ psychological distress was silenced, and the threat of suicidality was ignored. Suicidality prevention demands models of work health and safety which transcend the violations justified by the state's incorporation of neoliberal ideology and include ethical perspectives that address unjust power relations, enable a commitment to enhancing worker solidarity, and facilitate openness to respecting the spectre of death.