Pretrus, Teodor and Kleiner, Brian H. "New developments concerning workplace safety training: Managing stress arising from work." Management Research News 26:6, pp. 68-76.

The authors of this paper have taken a very real problem -- work-related stress-- but have made claims without explaining how they came to them. For instance, they claim that every week about 95 million people suffer a stress-related problem and "take medication for their aches and pains." This seems markedly high; it would help to know where they got the numbers from. In addition, it appears that they count every instance of a person taking some medication as stress-related. They go on to claim that 80% of all illness is related to stress, but again do not back the claim up, and then attribute 85% of work accidents to "personal worker behavior" including "adaptation to stress." It's hard to know what any of that means.

The authors identify things that cause job stress, such as high demands of employees who have little or no control over how a job is carried out. They also include a lot of suggestions for creating a work environment that will minimize work-related stress.

Then they acknowledge that events in a person's life can also contribute to stress, describing it as "magnifying workplace stress." By this point, the article reads more like propaganda than rigorous study of the very real problem of workplace stress. Could some of those many pills for "aches and pains" be caused by stressors from personal life? How many of those employees are going through a divorce, or go home to take care of a parent whose health is failing?

The suggestions in this article, such as including employees in the process as major changes are made, are good, but would be just as valid if the writers had either given more credible statistics or provided clear sources for them.