Why working for Tesco will shorten your life.

According to a study just released by the financial firm Pension Capital Strategies, you should avoid working for British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Mitchells & Butlers or the retail divisions of Whitbread. They will all kill you off early. They occupy four of the bottom five positions in a league table of FTSE-100 companies, showing employees' life expectancies. A 65-year-old man can expect to live to less than 82 if he is retiring from Whitbread, but to nearly 90 if he is retiring from the property investment company British Land, which tops the table. The gap for women is similar.

The obvious explanation is that the four killer companies are all in the drink or tobacco industries and their loyal employees presumably overindulge in the products they make. But is that the whole story? The identity of the fifth company in the bottom five, Tesco - which, compared with Whitbread, gives a mere one extra year of life to male employees but nearly three to women - suggests it isn't.

Life expectancy is an immensely complex area with enormous implications for public policy. Most of us know three things. First, UK average life expectancy is improving sharply - at the rate of two years every decade, or five hours every day, according to the latest calculations. Second, the rich live longer. Poor blacks in downtown Washington, for example, live on average 20 years less than affluent whites in nearby Montgomery County, Maryland. Third, now that developed countries have conquered such diseases as typhoid and cholera, and eradicated extreme poverty (in the sense of people literally suffering starvation), bad habits, particularly drinking, smoking and poor diet, are the biggest causes of early death.

We tend to ignore an important rider to the first: that the rise in longevity is much greater for the affluent than for the poor. We tend also to link the last two: booze and fags, we deduce, drive the poor into early graves. In fact, lifestyle is only a partial explanation.

A classic study of British civil servants found that, with each step down the hierarchy, average age of death fell. Smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol, obesity and lack of exercise accounted for at most a third of the differences between the civil service grades.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot, author of the study, found further significant differences between the grades in their experience of the workplace: how much control they had, how fairly they were treated, how interesting the work was, and so on. Such findings have been replicated across the world, and not just in humans. Whether in the wild or in captivity, dominant monkeys and baboons contract fewer diseases than their subordinates.

In other words, low social, economic and occupational status is a killer, not only through making people more likely to abuse their bodies through bad habits, but through some more direct mechanism. As Marmot told the Royal College of Physicians last year, that failure "to meet the fundamental needs of autonomy, empowerment and human freedom is a potent cause of ill-health". If he is right, the entire western world has got it wrong. It is true that economic growth generally leads to better health and higher life expectancy. But only up to a point.

According to Richard Wilkinson, professor of social epidemiology at Nottingham University (The Impact of Inequality, Routledge, 2005), average income levels aren't the main explanation for differences in death rates between US cities. The extent of inequality in each city fits the mortality data much better. The differences between the most unequal cities and the most equal ones is equivalent to the combined loss of life in a single year from lung cancer, diabetes, road deaths, Aids, suicide and homicide.

It took policymakers 50 years to absorb fully the importance of tobacco in premature death and, though smoking has fallen dramatically among the affluent, the poor remain stubbornly addicted. It may take as long to absorb the research on the role of economic and social status, most of which is barely a decade old. Governments may then conclude that nagging people to change their lifestyles - for example, the recent proposal to weigh schoolchildren and send letters to their parents warning of obesity - isn't cost-effective. The link between low status and a self-destructive lifestyle may prove too powerful to overcome. And stress, lack of autonomy and other psychological factors may have physiological effects that are more important causes of premature death.

The implications for Tesco and Whitbread? I don't, as the social scientists say, have enough data to advise them. But perhaps they should look, not only at their overall pay rates, but also at the differentials, the work routines, and the quality of relationships between managers and workers. Not that they have any incentive to do so: they'd just have to pay out the pensions for longer.

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