Many Australian employers, managers and executives take inspiration from counterparts in the United States. When it comes to occupational mental health, they are looking in the wrong direction and could benefit from looking more locally. But there is merit in evaluating the US perspectives.
Below are responses provided by several Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents on my own PC to the question in this article’s title. There is considerable overlap in many, but I start off with the most confronting response, provided by the World Socialist Web Site‘s Socialism AI:
WSWS
The question’s premise contains a hidden assumption worth exposing: that psychosocial hazards are an oversight—a failure of attention or regulation that employers could be persuaded to correct. From a Marxist standpoint, the opposite is true. The stress, insecurity, speedup, and surveillance that constitute “psychosocial hazards” are not accidental byproducts of production that employers neglect to clean up. They are, in large measure, the mechanism of production itself.
The employer’s interest is profit, not wellbeing
The capitalist purchases labour-power in order to extract surplus value. The worker’s health enters the employer’s calculation only insofar as it affects the rate of profit — and only to the extent that a sick, injured, or demoralised worker cannot be cheaply replaced by another from the reserve army of labour. This is why the employer’s “concern” for worker wellbeing is always conditional and instrumental. A machine is maintained because it is expensive fixed capital; a worker is a variable cost, and under conditions of mass unemployment, an expendable one.
Psychosocial hazards are different in kind from, say, a missing machine guard. A guard can be installed without threatening the logic of accumulation. But the central psychosocial hazards — work intensification, job insecurity, electronic monitoring, arbitrary discipline, the constant threat of dismissal — are the logic of accumulation. They are the means by which the employer squeezes more labour out of the worker without paying for it.
Intensification is a method of surplus-value extraction
Marx distinguished between absolute surplus value (lengthening the working day) and relative surplus value (raising productivity so that the worker reproduces the value of their wages in less time). The intensification of labour — speed-up — is a form of this. When an employer raises production quotas, eliminates “idle” time, or monitors every keystroke, they are not creating a “hazard” that could be mitigated; they are directly increasing the rate of exploitation. The stress is the point.
The WSWS has documented this repeatedly. The UAW-company productivity plan was explicitly a recipe for speedup and injuries — the “productivity” gains were achieved precisely by intensifying the pace of work. At Amazon, the suicide crisis inside its facilities was traced directly to the brutal exploitation of the workforce: the surveillance, the rate, the dehumanising discipline. These are not failures of corporate wellness policy. They are the business model.
Job insecurity is a weapon, not a hazard to be “prevented”
The same applies to job insecurity. A 1999 report on job insecurity and work intensification in Britain found that these factors damaged workers’ health—but the report’s own framing treated them as regrettable side effects of “restructuring.” In reality, insecurity is deliberately cultivated. The threat of layoff is the employer’s most powerful disciplinary tool. It compels workers to speed up, skip breaks, work through illness, and refrain from organising. An employer who “prevented” job insecurity would be disarming themselves in the class struggle.
This is why the entire discourse of “psychosocial risk management” — the wellness programs, the mindfulness apps, the “mental health days” — is a fraud. It individualises a social condition. It treats the stress produced by exploitation as a personal coping problem to be managed by the worker, while leaving the exploitation itself untouched. The employer will happily fund a meditation app; they will not reduce the rate, end the surveillance, or guarantee employment, because those are the very instruments of profit.
The answer is not regulation but the abolition of the system
The question “why don’t employers focus on preventing psychosocial hazards” ultimately has the same answer as “why don’t employers prevent any hazard”: because the employer’s interest opposes the worker’s. The working class cannot expect the class that exploits it to voluntarily curtail its own exploitation. The only force that has ever compelled capital to limit the destruction of workers’ lives is the organised, independent struggle of the working class itself — and even then, only partially and provisionally, within a system whose fundamental drive is to extract the maximum labour for the minimum cost.
The genuine solution to psychosocial hazards is not better corporate policy or more sympathetic regulation. It is the abolition of the conditions that produce them: transforming production from a means of private profit into a means of satisfying social need, under the democratic control of the working class. So long as production is organised for profit, stress, speed-up, and insecurity will remain—not as hazards to be prevented, but as the daily reality of wage labour.
[Throughout this article, spelling has been Anglicised, and the hyperlinks were those of the AI]
GROK
US employers prioritise reactive support (wellness apps, EAPs, resilience training) over preventing psychosocial hazards mainly due to weak regulation, cultural and economic incentives, and the relative ease of individual-focused interventions compared with systemic changes.
Psychosocial hazards include factors like excessive job demands/workloads, low job control, poor organisational justice, job insecurity, bullying/harassment, inadequate support, unclear roles, and poor change management. These are structural features of how work is designed, organised, and managed. They drive stress, burnout, depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal issues, and substantial economic costs (one analysis estimated direct US medical costs from exposure to 10 such hazards at about $187 billion in 2014 dollars; broader productivity, presenteeism, and turnover losses run into the tens or hundreds of billions annually).
Regulatory and Legal Gaps
Unlike Australia (where model WHS laws and codes require employers to identify, assess, and control psychosocial hazards as a legal duty, covering ~17 specific hazards) or many European countries (under the EU Framework Directive and national rules mandating risk assessments that include psychosocial factors), the US has no dedicated OSHA standard.
The 1970 OSH Act and General Duty Clause focus on hazards likely to cause death or serious *physical* harm. OSHA can sometimes address extreme cases (e.g., severe workplace violence or harassment linked to physical harm) under the General Duty Clause, but enforcement is case-by-case, resource-intensive, and limited. Recordkeeping rules for mental illnesses have faced pushback; a 2026 Fifth Circuit ruling vacated the requirement to record work-related mental illnesses (at least in that circuit, covering TX/LA/MS), interpreting the statute as covering physical conditions.
NIOSH has explicitly called for a national regulatory or consensus standard as one of six key actions, noting psychosocial hazards are on track to surpass many traditional hazards in health and cost impacts.
Preference for Easy, Reactive Measures
Prevention means redesigning jobs, managing workloads, improving leadership/organizational justice, clarifying roles, and changing systems—actions that can conflict with short-term productivity metrics, require leadership buy-in, and challenge power dynamics. These are harder, slower, and less immediately measurable than buying perks.
Organisations often default to individual-level interventions (mindfulness apps, counselling access, resilience training, wellness webinars) because they are scalable, purchasable, countable for “initiatives,” and place responsibility on the worker rather than the organisation. Research and expert commentary consistently show these “paper over cracks” and fail to address root causes, with limited impact on outcomes despite heavy spending.
Cultural, Measurement, and Capacity Factors
- US workplace culture often normalises high stress (“suck it up,” “be resilient”) and frames mental health as an individual issue rather than a safety/hazard control problem. Psychosocial risks are frequently treated as HR/benefits topics rather than core OHS issues.
- Employers measure engagement, satisfaction, or “psychological safety” (perceptions of belonging/speaking up) more than actual exposure to hazards. Surveys can mask problems due to adaptation, stigma, fear of retaliation, and social desirability. Power imbalances suppress reporting.
- Traditional OHS expertise centres on physical/chemical/biological risks. Many managers and safety professionals lack training or authority to address organisational design issues. National surveillance of psychosocial exposures is limited compared with chemical exposures.
Economic Incentives
Short-term cost pressures and competitive dynamics favour high workloads and lean staffing. While prevention has a strong business case (reduced absenteeism/presenteeism, turnover, healthcare costs, and higher productivity—often with positive ROI), the benefits are longer-term and harder to attribute directly than the immediate costs of redesign or staffing changes. Profit-focused systems and under-resourced enforcement reduce external pressure to act.
Some larger employers or those adopting Total Worker Health approaches do invest in prevention, and awareness is rising with ILO emphasis, ISO 45003 guidance, and NIOSH advocacy. However, without stronger regulatory mandates, surveillance, professional capacity, and cultural shifts toward treating these as core safety issues (like noise or chemicals), most US employers continue to favour support over systemic prevention. The gap is structural, not primarily a lack of awareness that stress exists.
Copilot (Smart)
The short answer is that many US employers still do not see psychosocial hazards as a core safety issue. They tend to treat them as HR, wellness, benefits, or individual resilience problems rather than hazards arising from work design.
Several factors drive this.
1. The US safety system was built around physical hazards
The American occupational health and safety framework developed around machinery, chemicals, falls, confined spaces, and similar physical risks. Although OSHA now explicitly recognises workplace stress and mental health as important issues, it generally provides guidance rather than a comprehensive regulatory framework for psychosocial hazards.
As a result, many employers are far more accustomed to measuring noise levels or guarding machinery than examining workload, job insecurity, bullying, fatigue, or poor organisational justice.
2. There is no broad psychosocial hazard regulation comparable to some other countries
Countries such as Australia have increasingly embedded psychosocial hazards into work health and safety duties through regulations, codes of practice, and enforcement activity. The US has not developed an equivalent national regulatory regime.
Without a strong regulatory driver, many organisations focus on issues that inspectors can easily measure and enforce.
3. The dominant US management culture often individualises stress
A common assumption is that stress comes from personal weakness, poor coping, or mental health conditions rather than from the way work is organised.
That leads to interventions such as:
- Employee Assistance Programs
- mindfulness training
- resilience workshops
- wellbeing apps
rather than examining:
- excessive workloads
- unrealistic deadlines
- understaffing
- job insecurity
- toxic supervision
Critics often describe this as treating the symptoms rather than the source.
4. Psychosocial hazards challenge management decisions
Controlling a physical hazard might mean installing a machine guard. Controlling a psychosocial hazard might require:
- hiring more staff
- reducing workloads
- redesigning jobs
- changing performance systems
- improving leadership behaviour
These changes can be expensive and can challenge existing power structures. It is often easier to offer wellbeing programs than to alter the organisational conditions creating the harm.
5. Measurement is harder
Employers like metrics. Psychosocial hazards are more difficult to quantify than injury rates or exposure limits.
Questions such as:
- Is workload reasonable?
- Is bullying systemic?
- Are workers experiencing role conflict?
- Is job insecurity causing harm?
require surveys, consultation, qualitative analysis, and judgement. Many organisations are less comfortable with that approach.
6. Fear of legal and reputational consequences
Once an employer formally identifies psychosocial hazards, it may create expectations to act. Some organisations worry that acknowledging issues such as burnout, bullying, or excessive workload could increase legal exposure, employee claims, or reputational risk.
Ironically, the evidence is now difficult to ignore
Even US government agencies are increasingly highlighting psychosocial risks. In 2024, NIOSH described work-related psychosocial hazards as being “on the verge of surpassing many other occupational hazards” in their contribution to poor health, injury, disability, and costs.
So the question is no longer whether psychosocial hazards matter. The real question is whether employers are prepared to treat work organisation itself as a source of harm requiring the same systematic hazard management approach they already apply to physical risks.
From an Australian OHS perspective, the US often appears to be roughly where discussions of workplace mental health were 10 to 15 years ago: strong interest in wellbeing and resilience, but less willingness to regulate and control the organisational causes of harm.
ChatGPT
US employers often do not focus on preventing psychosocial hazards because of regulatory gaps, business incentives, organisational culture, and how workplace health and safety has traditionally been understood.
Psychosocial hazards are aspects of work that can harm psychological or physical health. They include excessive workloads, bullying, harassment, low job control, inadequate support, job insecurity, traumatic exposure, and persistently long working hours.
The central issue is that many of these hazards stem from how work is designed and managed. Preventing them can require changes to staffing, workloads, management practices, performance targets, and power relationships—not simply providing employees with wellbeing resources.
The main reasons
1. Weaker and less specific regulatory pressure
The US has occupational safety laws and protections against certain forms of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. However, it lacks a comprehensive federal occupational safety standard specifically requiring employers to systematically identify and control the full range of psychosocial hazards.
This matters because specific legal requirements can make prevention part of routine risk management, rather than something employers do voluntarily. In a 2024 publication, the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) explicitly called for developing a national regulatory or consensus standard for work-related psychosocial hazards.
2. Commercial incentives can conflict with prevention
Some employers benefit in the short term from staffing leanly, setting demanding performance targets, requiring overtime, and maintaining tight managerial control. Reducing these pressures may require additional staff, higher operating costs, or changes to production targets.
Meanwhile, the costs of psychosocial hazards are often spread across employees, families, healthcare systems, and future periods through sickness, turnover, disability, and lost productivity.
The problem is partly an incentive mismatch: the organisation may receive an immediate benefit from a demanding work system while workers bear much of its longer-term health cost. This is a structural explanation, not a claim that all US employers behave this way.
3. Mental health is often treated as an individual problem
Employers may offer employee assistance programs (EAPs), counselling, mindfulness sessions, resilience training, or mental health benefits. These services can be valuable, but they do not necessarily remove the hazard.
For example, teaching workers to manage stress does not resolve chronic understaffing, an abusive supervisor, unrealistic deadlines, or a lack of control over work.
NIOSH has noted that workplace stress interventions have often focused on increasing individuals’ ability to tolerate stress rather than reducing its organisational sources. It argues for greater emphasis on interventions that change working conditions.
4. Responsibility is fragmented inside organisations
Physical safety may have a dedicated safety team, established inspection processes, and measurable compliance requirements. Psychosocial risks can fall between human resources, occupational health, legal teams, and operational managers.
Each function may address one part of the problem, while nobody has authority over the underlying causes—for example, a workload that senior management sets but HR is expected to manage through wellbeing programs.
Prevention also requires workers to feel safe reporting bullying, excessive demands, or unfair treatment. Fear of retaliation or career damage can suppress the very information employers need to identify risks.
5. Psychosocial risks are harder to measure and attribute
A faulty machine or an unguarded platform can often be identified directly. Psychosocial hazards are more context-dependent, may accumulate over time, and frequently occur together.
A worker’s psychological injury may reflect several interacting factors: excessive demands, low autonomy, poor supervision, job insecurity, and experiences outside work. Establishing work’s contribution can therefore be complex.
But difficulty measuring a hazard is not a reason to ignore it. Workload data, turnover, absence, employee surveys, incident reports, working hours, and complaint patterns can all help identify organisational risks. NIOSH identifies improved surveillance and intervention research as priorities.
6. Workplace power dynamics can discourage prevention
Employees may have limited influence over workloads, scheduling, staffing, or management decisions. Where workers fear losing income, benefits, promotion opportunities, or employment, they may be reluctant to challenge harmful conditions.
Collective bargaining, worker representation, and effective complaint protections can help counter this imbalance, but access to these mechanisms varies across US workplaces.
This creates a practical difficulty: the people most exposed to a hazard may have the least power to get it removed.
Is this because the US does not recognise the problem?
Not exactly. Federal agencies have recognised the importance of workplace mental health and psychosocial risks.
For example, the US Surgeon General’s 2022 workplace wellbeing framework calls for protection from harm, healthy work-life boundaries, social connection, and meaningful work. OSHA also provides employer guidance on reducing workplace stressors.
The distinction is between recognising a problem and requiring organisations to prevent it. Guidance, voluntary frameworks, and employee benefits do not necessarily create the same organisational accountability as enforceable hazard identification and risk-control requirements.
How does the US approach differ from Australia’s?
Australia provides a useful comparison, although requirements vary between Australian jurisdictions.
| Issue | United States | Victoria, Australia |
| Specific psychosocial hazard requirements | No comprehensive federal standard covering all psychosocial hazards | Specific psychological health regulations took effect on 1 December 2025 |
| Employer approach | General safety obligations, relevant laws, and agency guidance | Explicit duties to identify and control psychosocial hazards and review controls in specified circumstances |
| Prevention emphasis | Varies by employer and applicable legal requirements | More explicit integration of psychosocial hazards into workplace risk management |
Sources: NIOSH’s 2024 recommendations and WorkSafe Victoria’s guidance on the 2025 regulations.
The US does have other legal protections and state-level provisions, so this is not a claim that American employers have no obligations to protect workers’ mental health.
What would make US employers focus more on prevention?
The evidence and policy recommendations point towards several changes:
- Stronger, clearer standards: Require employers to assess psychosocial risks and implement appropriate controls.
- Organisational prevention: Address staffing, workload, working hours, job control, bullying, and supervisory practices rather than relying on resilience training alone.
- Accountability: Make senior management responsible for workplace conditions and the effectiveness of risk controls.
- Worker participation: Give employees safe, meaningful ways to report hazards and participate in prevention decisions.
- Better measurement: Track psychosocial exposures and evaluate whether interventions actually improve working conditions.
These approaches align with NIOSH’s recommendations and the US Surgeon General’s workplace wellbeing framework. Ultimately, the key issue is not simply whether US employers care about mental health. It is whether their regulatory environment, commercial incentives, management systems, and workplace power structures encourage them to eliminate the causes of harm rather than manage the consequences. Some employers do invest in prevention, but voluntary commitment alone will not ensure consistent protection across the workforce.
This whole exercise is largely academic, as most of this blog’s subscribers are outside the US, but I found it useful. It reminded me that US approaches to OHS and mental health remain largely incompatible with the Australian approach. I extend this to the broader pool of business and leadership books that turn up on our bookshelves and are promoted through algorithms. We should always prioritise Australian and European publications, as they are more compatible with our political, structural, and regulatory reality.
I found the Marxist/socialist perspective the most entertaining. It also provides a useful contrast to other broader AI agents. The response is controversial and combative but not without merit. It is highly unlikely to be implemented, but its points about intentional and institutional worker exploitation are hard to dismiss. The reality is that this exploitation will persist for some time, but we should keep poking executives about this immoral practice.