Canadians stressed out by bloated work hours, runaway technology and mounting elder-care challenges are looking to retirement for relief -- on-the-job retirement.

Fifty per cent of baby boomers have effectively retired on the job, Carleton University business professor Linda Duxbury said in Vancouver yesterday.

"Retiring on the job is how employees are dealing with health and safety and mental health," Duxbury told a conference on changing workplaces. "This is a huge issue for employers."

Overloaded employees who feel forsaken by their bosses have decided to look after their own mental health by putting job commitment out to pasture, Duxbury said.

The flip side of this is that younger workers 45 and under are unhappier on the job than their older counterparts because they have yet to opt out mentally, she said.

Duxbury's research shows that people whose workload prevents them from finding a work-life-balance are more vulnerable to stress, depression and burnout.

Many organizations that undergo restructuring cut employees, but dump the same volume of work on the survivors, she said.

It's no wonder public- and private-sector employers face succession planning problems as bright people say "no thanks" to offers of promotion, she said.

"Middle management is absolutely the worst job to have in Canada," Duxbury said.

"Your typical managers work 51 hours a week. Seventy per cent cannot get their work done in those 51 hours and they work another 30 hours of unpaid overtime a month."

Elder care is becoming as big a problem, if not bigger, than child care, she said.

Women's decisions to delay having children means they have young children and older parents in the middle of their careers.

The sandwich generation has given birth to the clubhouse sandwich, in which divorced children move back to the family home with their children, she said.

It has also yielded the open-face sandwich, in which a single working parent is squeezed between child and elder care.

The clubhouse sandwichers comprise about eight per cent of Canada's workforce and the open-facers about 12 per cent….

Duxbury has just finished a study of 50 people that found people worked 47 hours a week before getting a BlackBerry.

Seven months after getting one, that rose to 71 hours.

Duxbury said her 16-year-old daughter, who teaches swimming, recently heard a three-year-old student accuse her work-obsessed mother of loving her BlackBerry more than she loved her.

"Technology is out of control," she said. "There is no etiquette on how to use it.

"There are no acceptable limits."