The government has announced that it wants to reduce the level of ill-health due to workplace stress. Ministers could learn a lot from a recent study of 8000 white-collar workers in America which found that men who had a high level of control over the way they carried out their jobs had a low rate of heart disease, a stress-related disease. Clearly, therefore, the most stressful jobs are those in which employees have little control over the pace of their work and how it is organised. If the government is serious about wanting to reduce the level of stress-related disease, then it needs to encourage employers to give their workers greater control over their work.