Systemic link between neoliberal work culture and obesity epidemic: OECD study urges policy shift beyond individual blame
Original framing: “Experts call for UK four-day week as study links long work hours to obesity” — The Guardian - World
Black and Latina women in the U.S. face 2x higher obesity rates due to 'time poverty'—juggling multiple jobs, unpaid care work, and food apartheid—yet their labor is invisibilized in policy debates. Garment workers in Bangladesh (80% women) report obesity linked to 14-hour shifts and malnutrition, yet their testimonies are excluded from OECD studies. Disabled communities, who often work 'invisible' overtime (e.g., emotional labor), are erased from health metrics entirely.
The obesity epidemic is not a failure of individual willpower but a designed outcome of neoliberal capitalism’s time regimes, where the OECD’s 'productivity at all costs' doctrine—rooted in Fordist exploitation and racialized labor extraction—has metabolized into chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and metabolic collapse.
This system was globalized through structural adjustment programs (IMF/World Bank) that forced Global South nations into hyper-exploitative labor, while Indigenous time philosophies (e.g., Māori *mauri*, Andean *ayni*) were erased to justify the commodification of time itself. The four-day week is a trickster’s gambit: a partial disruption that risks being co-opted unless paired with land rematriation, worker co-ops, and cultural decolonization of time. Marginalized communities—Black and Latina women, disabled workers, and Global South laborers—bear the brunt of this violence, yet their solutions (communal care, time banks, land trusts) offer the most robust pathways forward. The synthesis demands a triple revolution: economic (worker ownership), ecological (food commons), and epistemological (decolonizing time), lest we mistake managerial tweaks for systemic change.