Burnout Is a Workplace Injury. Start Treating It Like One.

There was a discussion online recently about burnout and who should foot the bill for it. The comments were, as you’d expect, a mix of exhausted workers comparing war stories and the occasional person who still genuinely believes that “reasonable overtime” is a reasonable concept.

One comment stuck with me. Someone pointed out that if you strip the word “burnout” away and describe it plainly, what you’re often talking about is an employer causing lasting physical and psychological harm through negligence or cost-cutting. Put it that way and the question of responsibility becomes a lot less murky. We already have a principle for this in most shops: if you break it, you pay for it. Apparently that principle dissolves the moment the thing being broken is a person.

The “just leave and find another job” argument got a solid response too. A paramedic in the thread made the point well: if your employer is routinely asking you to work through meals, miss time with your family, and absorb what is clearly a structural staffing shortfall rather than an occasional spike, then at what point does “unexpected demand” just become expected demand that the employer has chosen not to resource properly? You can’t keep calling something unforeseen when it happens every single shift.

Victoria has actually done something here. New legislation covering psychosocial hazards at work came into effect on 1 December 2025, and it explicitly includes excessive workloads. There are penalties for non-compliance. On paper, that’s meaningful. In practice, the scepticism in those comments is well-founded. Workplace rights in this country tend to fall on the worker to enforce, which is a particular kind of cruelty when the worker in question is already burnt out. One person described spending all their energy fighting just to have a WHS representative at their workplace, an American-owned company that apparently found the concept of worker rights genuinely confusing. By the time they’d won that fight, they had nothing left. That’s not an accident. That’s the plan.

The R U OK Day cupcake thing got a few mentions, and look, I get why people are cynical about it. There’s something almost insulting about a morning tea and a laminated poster when the actual problem is that your team is two people short and has been for eight months. The psychological safety initiatives that cost nothing and change nothing have become a way for organisations to perform wellness while the systems that cause the harm stay exactly as they are.

I’ll be honest: I’ve been lucky in my current role. Hybrid work, reasonable expectations, a manager who doesn’t send emails at 11pm hoping you’ll answer them. Not everyone has that, and I know it. The gap between a good employer and a bad one isn’t minor variation, it’s the difference between a sustainable working life and one that quietly takes years off you.

The four-day work week came up too, which it always does in these conversations. I’m not opposed to it in principle. The technology argument is sound enough: productivity per hour has increased substantially over the past few decades and wages have not kept pace with that, let alone working hours. Where exactly did the efficiency dividend go. I don’t need to answer that.

What I keep coming back to is that the legislation is there, or getting there. What’s been chronically missing is the enforcement and the culture that makes enforcement feel like a realistic option for a tired person who just wants to get through the week. That’s a harder thing to legislate. I don’t know how you solve it quickly, and I’m suspicious of anyone who says they do.