Hillary Clinton was wrong to keep working: presenteeism is damaging | Peter Cheese

Is coming into work when you’re so sick that you’re on the verge of collapse really something we should be praising, or encouraging? When Hillary Clinton announced last week that she was trying to work through a pneumonia diagnosis and continue her campaign schedule, her supporters were quick to use this as an opportunity to praise her strength of character. She was described as tough, determined, strong, gritty and other adjectives that suggest working through serious illness is to be admired.

It may well be viewed as heroic by some, but in reality it’s a sign of an increasingly pervasive culture that sets up work as more important than our wellbeing.

Clinton certainly isn’t the only person who has turned up sick for work recently. I suspect at one time or another we’ve all uttered the words “don’t worry, it’s nothing serious”, or struggled in only to be greeted by a concerned colleague who politely asked us to go home and stop sneezing on them.

Whether it’s guilt about letting down the team, concern your tasks won’t get covered or more likely some fear that it might be counted against you, the trend for employees to come into work or to work longer hours when they should be taking time off has been growing.

Research by Simplyhealth and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), where I work as chief executive, shows “presenteeism” is on the rise. Our 2015 survey showed that in the preceding 12 months, a third of firms reported a rise in employees working when they’re sick, and this has some pretty clear negative effects on employee wellbeing. Organisations that have noticed an increase in presenteeism are nearly twice as likely to report an increase in stress-related absence and more than twice as likely to report an increase in mental health problems among their staff too.

Hillary Clinton, back on the campaign trail: ‘I’m doing great’ – video

Greater uncertainty in the economy and regarding jobs in recent years, together with an increasingly “always on” working environment and the pressure to perform are all factors driving this trend. Many of the companies and employees we talk to cite job insecurity as a reason for increased presenteeism, with employees fearing that a competitive job market, and the growth of automation, will make them more replaceable.

But leaders and managers set the tone, and have a responsibility not just to their organisation but also to the wellbeing of their employees. As our research shows, increasing presenteeism leads to increased prevalence of stress, and there is a wealth of evidence, such as the Towers Watson 2014 Global Benefits Attitudes survey, which clearly shows that workplace stress leads to less productive employees.

So why, then, do more than half of all organisations admit that they aren’t doing anything to combat this growing problem? It may well be that they believe that promoting long-term employee wellbeing might come at the expense of the short-term success of an organisation, but it can also be a lack of awareness of the growth of a corporate culture that accepts or even encourages presenteeism.

To perform at our best, people need to be well both physically and mentally. If businesses want employees who are engaged and motivated, then employees need to feel that their organisation, their managers and bosses are supporting them, and not pressuring them to work when they are not properly fit.

How do we change this culture? It has to come from the top down. Employees won’t feel empowered to take time off when they’re sick if their manager’s behaviour runs counter to that. The second action businesses can take is to build a culture that emphasises healthy living.

Health should be promoted in the workplace, with people given the opportunity to learn more about their own health, to exercise and eat well within the workplace and beyond. At the CIPD, we host discounted zumba and yoga classes each week. TransferWise takes all its staff on annual company holidays, while the law firm Allen & Overy has GPs and dentists on site. Those are at the more expensive end of the scale, but even simple things like free fruit for staff, a perk offered by just 15% of employers, can help instil a healthier work culture.

Mental health and particularly the understanding of stress is equally important and is perhaps even more challenging. Much more needs to be done to educate managers in how to show understanding and ask the right questions, and how and where to find the right support. Leaders in this field, such as Google, have built good mental health into their culture by offering mindfulness classes to staff, while many large employers in the City, such as KPMG and Deloitte, have launched the City Mental Health Alliance, working with charities to end the stigma attached to mental health problems.

The message to business is clear; a workforce that is well, works well. Clinton may have wanted to preserve her image of strength, but she wasn’t being honest with herself. We need our leaders – in the workplace and beyond – to take responsibility for their own health and wellbeing first, to set the right example.

Only then does this damaging culture of presenteeism have any chance of changing.

Hillary Clinton was wrong to keep working: presenteeism is damaging | Peter Cheese

Clinton campaign admits "we could have done better" handling pneumonia news

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has acknowledged mishandling news of her pneumonia, as Donald Trump sought to capitalize on growing questions over his opponent’s trustworthiness at a critical moment in their race for the White House.

“We could have done better yesterday,” wrote Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri on Monday, after some Democrats began questioning whether the campaign had been fully transparent in its weekend accounts of her health.

“In retrospect, we could have handled it better in providing more information. That’s on us. We regret that,” added press secretary Brian Fallon.

Clinton was filmed losing her footing and being assisted into a waiting van after leaving early from a memorial for 9/11 victims in New York on Sunday.

Initially, campaign aides said she had “overheated”, though Clinton later insisted “I’m feeling great, it’s a beautiful day in New York,” after she left her daughter’s apartment, where she was taken to rest.

But once the video footage emerged – which appeared to support eyewitness accounts of a more serious incident – the campaign issued a short statement from a doctor revealing she was being treated for pneumonia.

A sign along a road near Hillary Clinton’s home on Monday in Chappaqua, New York. Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Clinton had been diagnosed on Friday but the condition went undisclosed despite the campaign chastising reporters who had questioned bouts of coughing at recent public events.

The campaign now says Clinton will release “additional medical information” from her doctor in the next few days “to further put to rest any lingering concerns”, but insists there are “no other underlying conditions, the pneumonia is the extent of it”.

“I expect by the middle or back end of the week she will be back out there on the campaign trail,” Fallon told MSNBC. “If it was up to her she would be travelling to California today but it was her doctor’s advice [to rest at home].”

However, even if Clinton does bounce back quickly, the incident is raising fresh questions over trust which could cause more lingering political complications.

“Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?” wrote Barack Obama’s former adviser David Axelrod.

His tweet prompted Palmieri’s first acknowledgement of regret, in which she added: “But it is a fact that [the] public knows more about HRC than any nominee in history”.

Their public exchange was seized on by the Trump campaign, which said it demonstrated a familiar pattern of secrecy by the Clintons.

“It’s incredibly important to be forthcoming,” said the Republican’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. “If you have a diagnosis of pneumonia, just be honest about it when you’re saying you’re overheating. Just say, ‘by the way, I’m on antibiotics’.”

Trump immediately claimed he would soon be releasing the results of a recent physical examination of his own, telling interviewers: “It’s interesting because they say pneumonia, but she was coughing very, very badly a week ago … It’s very interesting to see what’s going on.”

Clinton’s campaign and its backers nonetheless pushed back against criticism regarding transparency. Trump, they pointed out, had thus far declined to release his tax returns and refused to offer policy specifics on issues ranging from immigration to the fight against Islamic State.

The state of Trump’s own health was also unclear, with a brief statement from his personal doctor of 25 years in December providing few medical details and serving as the only record offered by his campaign.

The doctor’s statement described the Republican nominee in the sort of hyperbolic language typically associated with Trump, declaring him “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” if successful in his pursuit of the White House. Trump’s physician, Dr Harold Bornstein, said last month he put the document together in five minutes while awaiting a limo sent by Trump to collect the letter.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends the ceremony in New York Sunday. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Despite repeatedly criticizing Clinton’s “stamina” in recent weeks, Trump was cautious on the topic of the former secretary of state’s health on Monday, saying in an interview: “I hope she gets well soon.”

The Republican nominee instead focused his fire on Clinton’s comments on Friday about half of Trump’s voters being in “the basket of deplorables”. Although she has since expressed regret for being “grossly generalistic” in saying “half”, she still stood by her characterization of Trump supporters. Clinton has continued to reiterate: “Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices.”

The Trump campaign has seized on these remarks and is now airing a television ad highlighting them in several swing states. The ad includes footage of Clinton grouping “the racists, sexists, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” into the basket of deplorables.

The stumbles for Clinton come as polls appear to show Trump reducing a previously large gap, to an average of three points.

Even as her campaign sought to rein in any political damage from the past few days, several Democrats argued that the focus on Clinton’s health had been overblown by the media.

“Every candidate I have ever worked for has gotten sick on the trail and worked through it because you can’t take days off in a close race,” wrote Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to Obama.

Bill Burton, who served as Obama’s national press secretary in 2008, said campaign aides would have been “understandably skittish about making announcements about secretary Clinton’s health” while Trump was pushing conspiracy theories about her wellbeing.

“Will it feed a narrative? Sure,” he said in an interview. “But only because the media gets led around by the nose by Donald Trump.”

And while the media was quick to cast the incident as problematic for Clinton, Burton said it could in fact provide her with a small boost in the polls.

“People respond when they think someone’s being treated unfairly,” he said.

“For Hillary Clinton to have pneumonia and even still give a press conference, convene a national security meeting, attend a memorial service in the hot sun for an hour and a half, and then take criticism for having pneumonia all the while … I don’t think the American people are going to punish her for actually performing quite well in the face of what’s an exhausting illness.”

Clinton campaign admits "we could have done better" handling pneumonia news

I cough at all the wrong times. Thank God I"m not Hillary Clinton | David Ferguson

If you are a character in a Victorian novel – which, much to my occasional dismay I am not – you know you’re going to die if, at an otherwise slow plot point, you begin to cough. Within two chapters, your cough will be spraying drops of dark red blood on to your linen kerchief and before long, you’ll be carried off by consumption.

These days we don’t live with the constant threat of tuberculosis and yet, from the way a certain segment of the right wing fever swamp is treating Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, you’d think she was Fantine from Hugo’s Les Miserables.

Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, some ghoul named Steve Malzberg – who probably can’t help it that he’s a dead ringer for 90s make-believe car salesman Joe Isuzu – and even Republican nominee Donald Trump have seized upon Clinton’s seasonal allergies and resulting cough as a sign that she is trembling at death’s door, barely able to function.

“People don’t cough like that,” Malzberg insisted on his Newsmax.com podcast last week. People don’t have coughing fits ‘all the time,’ in public that go on and on and on and on and on and on. Not unless there’s something going on that’s not right.”

Please allow me to disabuse you of that notion, sir. Plenty of people “cough like that,” myself included. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 19.1 adults over 18 were diagnosed with seasonal allergic rhinitis – also known as “hay fever” – in 2014 and 6.1 million children.

I’ve got big sinuses. It’s part of what makes my singing voice able to cut through layers of drums and guitars – a network of large, resonant holes in my skull. My late mother sang opera and had a glorious lyric soprano voice that could fill a whole theater and shake the chandeliers.

Twice a year, for 2 to 4 weeks in the spring and fall, those holes in my head fill up with gunk and it makes my face and forehead feel like a huge throbbing, aching, seriously clogged bottle of rubber cement.

If I don’t get enough sleep, drink quarts of water, eat right and keep my stress levels down, that respiratory distress will move straight down into my chest and I will develop a booming, persistent cough.

For some reason, the fall of 2009 was particularly nasty. I’d quit smoking the year before and thought that would make my seasonal battles with pollen and mold less miserable, but that first year, it seemed to have the opposite effect.

That was when I was a late night classical music DJ. My show went out live to the whole state of Georgia four nights per week. I remember it was Thursday, Sep. 10 because I was queuing up John Adams’ solemn, exquisite symphonic remembrance of the 9/11 victims, On the Transmigration of Souls.

“Our next selection,” I began, “is John Ad–” and I was seized with a violent coughing fit. Most radio consoles have what’s known as a “cough button” for just such an emergency. It mutes your microphone until the cough or sneeze or period of hoarseness passes.

But this coughing fit didn’t pass, it just kept going on and on. I killed my mic and started the music because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I was mortally embarrassed and for an awful moment felt sure I was disgracing the memory of all those people who were killed in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

The control room phone rang. I gulped down two swallows of tepid coffee and answered, still weak-voiced and froggy.

“You okay in there?” it was my boss calling from home.

“I’m fine,” I sputtered. “Just fighting for breath.”

He asked if I needed someone to come take over. I said no, I’m fine, it’s already passing. I hung up the phone and it immediately rang again. I picked it up and it was my twin brother calling from his car.

“Boy, that sounded terrible,” he said, laughing. “You’ve really got to quit smoking crack rocks at work.”

“It went out live to the whole state,” I said. “Our listeners probably think I’m dying.”

I wasn’t, though, any more than Hillary Clinton is. The fact is, even an able-bodied, healthy, athletic person like myself can get a cough that sounds like the end of the world. A week later I was back to running four miles a day and breathing like normal.

Sometimes, oh ye right-wing vultures, a cough is just a cough and the woman candidate whose health you’ve never cared one iota about before now is probably just fine, suffering from – as her personal physician disclosed in detail – a round of seasonal allergies.

So, if you’re expecting Hillary Clinton to keel over dead like Mimi, the consumptive heroine of Puccini’s La Boheme, or Hugo’s Fantine, I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I think she’s got a couple of arias to sing first.

I cough at all the wrong times. Thank God I"m not Hillary Clinton | David Ferguson

Clinton leads way on abortion rights as Democrats seek end to decades-old rule

On a biting day in January, Hillary Clinton climbed the stage at a New Hampshire rally and accepted an endorsement from Planned Parenthood.

It was a day of unusual events. The country’s largest reproductive healthcare provider had never before made an endorsement in a presidential primary. But it was the Democratic presidential candidate who made the truly surprising announcement: a call for the repeal of the Hyde amendment, which bans the use of federal Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions.

Related: Abortion access still strained even after landmark US supreme court ruling

“Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access it is no right at all,” Clinton said. “And not as long as we have laws on the book like the Hyde amendment making it harder for low-income women to exercise their full rights.” She supported repealing the amendment, she said the next day, “and actually I have for a very long time”.

The announcement made Clinton one of the only modern presidential candidates to oppose the nearly 40-year-old ban on federal abortion coverage. And this week, the rest of her party will follow suit. In what is the first significant shift to the party line on abortion in decades, Democrats will approve a platform at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia that explicitly calls for elected officials to overturn Hyde.

But in a sharp departure from how abortion issues normally percolate, the loudest calls for the repeal of Hyde did not originate with groups such as Planned Parenthood or Naral Pro-Choice America – groups that have set the agenda for abortion rights supporters for decades. Instead, the calls originated with groups such as the National Asian Pacific Women’s Forum, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and SisterSong.

“Women of color leaders have been calling for the repeal of Hyde for decades when most mainstream reproductive rights groups did not prioritize this issue,” said Jessica González-Rojas, director of the National Latina Institute and an All Above All co-chair.

The result is a movement that overtly fuses one of the modern Democratic party’s most established positions – support for abortion rights – with the interests of the activists who increasingly represent the demographic future of the party.

Hyde is one of the biggest barriers to abortion left standing, after the supreme court in June struck down health restrictions with no basis in evidence.

It is not a law, but a rider that has been attached to every one of Congress’ annual appropriations bills since 1976, when it was first introduced by the congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois. Today, the amendment prevents abortion coverage for some seven million women, about half of whom live below the federal poverty line. The only exceptions to the ban are when a woman’s health or life is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape.

“I would argue that it’s the harshest abortion restriction still on the books today,” said Destiny Lopez, who is co-director of All Above All, a network of reproductive rights advocates that is leading the first serious push to repeal the Hyde amendment in decades.

An All Above All letter addressed to the Democratic platform drafting committee read, “Coverage bans represent a deeply entrenched injustice, where issues of economic injustice, racism, and gender inequity come together.”

Democrats’ platform first outlined a position on abortion in 1976, three years after the supreme court case Roe v Wade established a right to the procedure. Acknowledging that some Americans had “religious and ethical concerns” about abortion, the party nevertheless said it was supportive of the justices’ ruling. In 1988, without specifically mentioning abortion, the platform declared, “The right of reproductive choice should be guaranteed regardless of ability to pay.”

But for 28 years, Democratic conventions were silent on how to actually guarantee that poor women had access to abortion. In Congress, even when the party firmly controlled the legislature, Democrats continued to approach the Hyde amendment as a forgone conclusion.

“This was really the third rail of abortion politics for a long time, even for folks who supported access to abortion,” said Destiny Lopez, the co-director of All Above All. “It involved both poor women and government funding, and that made people very nervous to talk about it.”

What changed, said Lopez, was more women of color forming their own reproductive rights groups and Democrats realizing their reliance had increased on nonwhite voters, young voters and women. Such is the makeup of most of the groups All Above All has organized to oppose the Hyde amendment. “It’s not a coincidence,” said Lopez, that this year those groups are succeeding in altering the Democratic platform.

All Above All was forged out of a frustration many activists felt after politics embroiled abortion coverage in the Affordable Care Act. It notched its first victory in 2015 when the California representative Barbara Lee, a longtime abortion rights supporter, led the introduction of a bill to guarantee abortion access for women on Medicaid. The bill also covered women insured by the government through the military, Peace Corps and veterans affairs.

This spring, Lee wrote the demand to repeal Hyde into the Democratic platform, as well as a call to overturn the Helms amendment. Many presidential administrations have interpreted the amendment, named for the former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, as prohibiting US foreign aid from covering abortions. (Clinton has also promised to seek the repeal of Helms.)

It is a sharp reversal from the 90s, when the Democratic platform called for “less necessary, more rare” and “safe, legal, and rare” abortions. The latter was Clinton’s stated position on abortion for years on end.

Hyde still has stalwarts within her party. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has said that for the party to oppose the Hyde amendment is “crazy”.

But the most high-profile supporter within the Democratic party may be Tim Kaine, the Virginia senator Clinton selected last week as her running mate for president.

Related: How Mike Pence wrote the Republican Planned Parenthood attack playbook

Although Kaine has a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood, he has said he opposes public funds for abortion. “I have traditionally been a supporter of the Hyde amendment,” Kaine told the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard in July. He added he wasn’t aware of a call to repeal Hyde in the platform, “but I’ll check it out”. Neither Kaine nor the Clinton campaign has said if he now supports Clinton’s position.

Anti-abortion groups immediately denounced the Democrats’ position when a draft of the platform was released.

“The platform Democrats are expected to ratify in Philadelphia is unrecognizable compared to twenty years ago, when the party claimed to ‘respect the individual conscience of each American’ on the abortion,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B Anthony List, an anti-abortion political action committee. “This is a gross violation of conscience rights.”

But proponents of repealing Hyde cite polls which show that public opinion is creeping in their favor.

“The pressure has been put on us by this electorate, by 18- to 30-year-olds, and women of color,” said Lee, the congresswoman. “I give them credit for insisting on it and holding us to it. It’s long overdue, but there’s finally a critical mass.”

Clinton leads way on abortion rights as Democrats seek end to decades-old rule

Hillary Clinton should reject the stigma that abortion must be legal but "rare" | Jessica Valenti

I support abortion rights. Getting pro-decision implies a lot of diverse items to me – amid them, that abortion ought to be secure, legal, accessible, subsidized and presented with empathy and non-judgement.

You might have noticed a word missing there.

“Safe legal and rare” 1st grew to become a professional-choice rallying cry throughout the Clinton administration, and has been invoked by media-makers and politicians like – even President Obama has named the mantra “the proper formulation” on abortion. It is a “protected” professional-decision answer: to support abortion, but want it was not essential.

And it is a framing that Hillary Clinton – probably the following president of the United States – supports.

But “protected, legal and rare” is not a framework that supports women’s well being wants: it stigmatizes and endangers it.

In a 2010 analysis report, Dr Tracy Weitz, Director of Advancing New Specifications in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) system at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote that “rare suggests that abortion is occurring a lot more than it need to, and that there are some circumstances for which abortions ought to and should not occur”.

“It separates ‘good’ abortions from ‘bad’ abortions”, she additional.

Steph Herold, the deputy director of the Sea Change Program – an organization that seeks to develop a culture alter all around abortion and other stigmatized reproductive experiences like miscarriage and adoption – agrees. “It implies that abortion is by some means different than other elements of healthcare,” she advised me. “We do not say that any other health-related procedure must be unusual.”

“We never say that we want heart bypasses to be unusual. We say we want folks to be healthful,” Herold stated.

The “uncommon” framework adds to the stigmatization all around the procedure – and that has even more-reaching issues for abortion care than just how girls truly feel about it.

Weitz wrote that calling for abortions to be rare has tangible unfavorable consequences for females and women’s well being simply because it legitimizes efforts to legally restrict abortion – i.e., make it far more “rare”. Worse but, it “negates the mandates for program training in abortion”, since college students and teachers wonder why they must get healthcare education for anything that supposedly need to be uncommon.

“We want there to be as numerous abortions as there demands to be”, Herold informed me.

Nonetheless, avowed pro-decision politicians – like Clinton and Obama – persist in employing the decades-old framing. And, last week, when the Guardian livestreamed a video interview with Hillary Clinton, I wished to inquire why.

It is really a question I’d like to see answered even though – not just by Clinton, but by all politicians – so I’ll inquire it again right here:

You have been a longtime supporter of professional-selection policies, but the framework you usually use is that abortions ought to be ‘safe, legal and uncommon.’ But by saying abortion need to be rare, the implication is that there’s something morally incorrect with the process or that the goal need to be eradicating the need to have for abortion. Can you defend your use of the word ‘rare’ beyond the political rhetoric, and speak about how we can end the stigma towards a health care procedure that one-third of all American women will have?

In reality, we all know there will constantly be a need to have for abortion – ladies have been trying to avoid and end undesirable pregnancies for practically as long as they’ve understood what was going on in their bodies. And like pregnancy, contraceptive-use, miscarriage or childbirth, abortion is frequently just 1 component of a regular woman’s greater reproductive life. Sometimes, like my abortion, it will be for wellness motives. Often it will be simply because a female is not prepared to be a mother or father. One particular reason is not better than yet another, but saying the process demands to be uncommon generates a hierarchy of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” abortions that runs counter to the notion that abortion is a legal correct, a individual choice and a matter of bodily integrity.

As Herold mentioned, there is no magic amount of abortions, or abortions-per-woman, on which we could all agree and see an finish to all the picket indications and political battles. The variety of abortions American women have has nothing at all to do with the foundational conflict around reproductive rights – it is just element of the rhetoric that anti-abortion activists use to consider to demonize abortion as a entire.

But, as Aimee Thorne-Thomsen, the vice president for strategic partnerships at Advocates for Youth, wrote in 2010, rather than target on if abortion is uncommon ample to make sufficient folks comfortable, “What if we stopped focusing on the number of abortions and instead centered on the females themselves?”

We can target on keeping abortions risk-free and legal. We should also function more difficult to make certain they are cost-effective, accessible and judgement totally free. But let us not bolster anti-option rhetoric and activism by calling for them to be “rare” – particularly since there are so several functioning to make certain that “rare” is an enforced normal, not just a talking level.

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View the Guardian’s complete interview with Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Clinton sat down with Phoebe Greenwood and answered inquiries from some journalists (and celebrities).

Hillary Clinton should reject the stigma that abortion must be legal but "rare" | Jessica Valenti