Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

To Simon

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Introduction

Part One: The Meaning of Overwork

1 Working All Hours

2 All in a Day’s Work

3 Putting Your Heart and Soul Into it

Part Two The Slavedrivers: Who’s Making us Work so Hard?

4 Missionary Management

5 Government, the Hard Taskmaster

Part Three Why Do We Do it?

6 You’re on Your Own

Part Four The Human Cost

7 Keeping Body and Soul Together

8 The Care Deficit

9 An Unfinished Revolution

Part Five What Can be Done?

10 In Our Own Time

11 The Politics of Well-Being

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

P.S.

About the author

About the Author

Questioning the World

LIFE at a Glance

FAVOURITE BOOKS

A Writing Life

About the book

A New Generation

Read on

Have You Read?

If You Loved This, You Might Like…

Find Out More

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The starting point for this book has been readers of my column in the Guardian. Whenever I touched on the subject of overwork, I would be overwhelmed by the volume and emotion of the emails I received in response. It was like a burst water main – a torrent of anger, bewilderment and sometimes despair. Here was a source of deep frustration beneath the surface which fitted awkwardly into the public space allocated to it in the national conversation. ‘Work-life balance’ was an inadequate label for the set of issues which stirred these passionate emails and letters. When I started researching the book, one of the first things I did was to set up a column on the Guardian’s website called ‘Working Lives’. I appealed to readers for their experiences, opinions and ideas on how things could change. The response was astonishing, as the emails poured in on every aspect of their work. Few of them, if any, could be put down merely to the sender’s grumbles about his or her job; I made a point of steering clear of individual injustices to focus on the mainstream. The underlying theme was the sheer invasive dominance of work in people’s lives, and the price it exacted on their health and happiness.

‘It’s not that I completely hate my job, it does have its good points. It’s just the amount of my valuable time that it takes up. Employers these days want blood, and if you’re not prepared to give it, you’re not part of the “team”. Our society should learn to relax more and stop working as slaves to the “economy”. It’s time to call a halt to this never-ending pursuit for more and more money. It’s time to reclaim our lives back from the so-called “employers” and it’s time to start living our lives as they should be lived, more life, less work,’ wrote a storeman in Hertfordshire.

His sentiments were echoed by an engineer who compared German and British working practices and concluded that the latter had ‘taught me that left to their own devices, companies will happily take your lifeblood’.

A civil servant from Yorkshire wrote that ‘I enjoy what I do and I work hard. But, and it is a growing but, I feel owned and more so every day. Due to all the mission statements, “values”, imposed ways of behaving and having to be always get-at-able (you must be accessible by mobile phone, must give an address when you are on leave, must leave a number when you are at meetings…) I feel that I have no privacy left.’

A woman in the oil industry in Scotland wrote, ‘Over the past ten years I have seen large companies continuously cut back on staff, whilst still expecting the same quality of work. Being thirty-something, our circle of friends are in a similar age group, starting families and suffering the same strain of long hours and not enough time with their families. Don’t get me wrong, I love my work. However, it takes such a toll on my family life that I have no choice but to seek a different career.’

A redundant banker decided not to try to find another job, because ‘Every week I hear similar stories of friends or friends of friends who, like me, worked sixty- or seventy-hour weeks, arrived home after dark each night, ate dinner and crawled into bed before getting up again the next morning whilst still dark to repeat the whole thing again, but who have now lost their jobs.’

A woman in advertising voiced what became a recurring theme when she wrote: ‘I feel that there is an expectation that work should be treated as a vocation, and that working hard is just not quite enough. But I don’t feel that my job is really that important (to society or to me) to really want to take on the extra and damage my home life. Not all of us have a vocation – what about those of us who want to do a good job, but want time to see partners, friends etc. after work?’

For a woman who had suffered a nervous breakdown because of the pressures of her job in television, ‘It is high time we re-evaluated our work ethic in this country – we are damaging ourselves and our children by not having the time or energy for caring, and trying to enrich our lives by buying more consumer goods only perpetuates the cycle…Where is it written that life should be endured, not enjoyed?’

The point is not that people don’t like their work; they often do. They appreciate the sense of fulfilment and usefulness it brings. They often find it stimulating, exciting and rewarding. This book is not a diatribe against work; it would be foolish not to acknowledge all the evidence that work is a crucial source of self-respect – and that the lack of work saps the confidence of individuals and communities. But as work gains an ever tighter grip on certain sections of the population, we have to face a new set of questions about the place it occupies in our lives.

Time and again, email contributors circled round the same point – it shouldn’t have to be like this; why hasn’t wealth and technological development brought us the leisure it was predicted to? Why, instead, has it brought even harder work? From John Maynard Keynes to Alvin Toffler, thinkers predicted that the twenty-first century would be an Age of Leisure, while in the seventies increasing automation even led policy-makers and politicians to worry how people would usefully fill their time. For some, this dawning era promised abundant opportunities for human beings in industrialised countries to reach their full potential. It would be the fulfilment of a long-cherished dream that we would finally be freed from the oppressive toil of long hours at work. The realisation of Aristotle’s belief that it is only in leisure that we are most human would be within reach of us all. Marx dreamt of society reaching a point where people could spend the morning thinking and the afternoon fishing.

It never happened. Quite the contrary: the historic decline in working hours has gone into reverse in the last two decades. Such are the demands of many jobs that leisure has been reduced to simply a time to recuperate before the gruelling demands of the next week’s work. British workers have a roughly one in three chance of finding at some time in the course of their working lives that those demands exceed their capacity to cope; the odds are even higher if you’re a woman. Ours has become a more work-centred society than ever; it demands more of us than ever, and it also purports to fulfil more of our needs than ever. One sociologist has identified five categories of experience as vital for well-being: time structure, social contact; collective effort or purpose, social identity or status and regular activity.1 With the decline in community, political parties and faith institutions, and the fragmentation of family, employment has become the main, often the sole, provider of all five. We look to work for a sense of integration and connection to society, while our grandparents would have been able also to look to their neighbourhood, their church, their political party, perhaps also an extended family nearby. This gives employers unprecedented purchase over our lives: how they are organised, how we perceive ourselves, and how we shape our relationships with others – both colleagues at work and personal relationships outside it.

The nature of work is changing, and its demands are increasing. These two trends have coincided over the last two decades with the move of women into paid employment. Family life no longer revolves around one breadwinner and one carer, but typically around one full-time and one part-time earner; in a generation we have seen a dramatic shift of time and energy from the unpaid caring economy into the paid labour market. The disinvestment of women in the caring economy has not been accompanied by sufficient compensating investment by men. The result is a care deficit – a shortage of time and energy to invest in relationships. It begins with a deficit of care towards ourselves, in which our work culture makes us ill, and at its worst can kill. There is also a deficit in the care of children, and across the myriad of interdependent relationships which sustain us in families, friendships and neighbourhoods. The result is an emotional impoverishment of all our lives: the office is now where the heart is, not the home, as the complexities of the workplace demand an ever larger share of our emotional resources. Women’s participation in the labour market did not need to exact such a steep price.

The emails I received echoed some of my experience as one of the generation of Thatcher’s teenagers, whose understanding of public affairs developed in the shadow of the severe recession of the early eighties, soaring unemployment and the miners’ strike. The harsh rhetoric of public debate in those years dismantled the post-war consensus – the role of the welfare state was challenged, old institutions such as trade unions emasculated. Dependency became a term of abuse, independence the ultimate aspiration; individualism was to be forged by work and upward mobility; these ideas seduced many, particularly women, determined not to be caught as their mothers had been in the confines of the home and child-rearing. ‘The only way is up,’ as the hit single went. The fact that many were left behind only underscored the ‘survive or die’ mentality. So we worked hard, very hard.

And then…we had children, and the whole game-plan had to be redrawn. None of the operating principles on which we had built our careers was of any use; we learnt for the first time the satisfactions and fulfilment of dependence and interdependence. But we also ran smack into the traditional separation between work and family, and found ourselves uncomfortably trying to straddle the two. ‘We were betrayed by feminism,’ said one contemporary of mine recently. In fact, it was more a case of our generation betraying feminism: we turned our backs on the feminists of the seventies, ignoring their warnings that the entire way we worked had to be revolutionised.

We cobbled unhappy compromises together – went part-time, gave up the career, put the children into nurseries. We were bemused by the lack of respect for raising children, we grumbled about the exhaustion, and about the re-emergence of old gender stereotypes as our male counterparts’ careers surged ahead while we were left, just as our mothers had been, amongst the nappies. So one very personal explanation for writing this book is that my generation are the offspring of an unfinished revolution. ‘Work-life balance’ is the weaselly term for where feminism – the historic development of women’s equality – has now got to.

In the course of my research another set of questions took shape which forms the central thrust of the argument. This book investigates the consequences of two phenomena: two decades of neo-liberal economic policy, and the impact of information technology on working lives. In the context of periods of high unemployment, a lightly regulated labour market, increasing inequality and high levels of perceived insecurity, I seek to disentangle how the dictates of the market, with its cult of rationalism and efficiency, extend into people’s individual lives. How and why do people collude with a system which, they are well aware, often does not have their interests at heart? What kind of trade-offs do they make, and why? What degree of choice do they have? How willing are these wage slaves? And finally, why is it that the choices become individualised, and that many of us have lost virtually all interest in collective reform of our working lives?

It is in the workplace that the pressures of market disciplines such as competitiveness and cost-effective efficiency impinge most directly on people’s daily experience. Those disciplines are often at odds with our intuitive understanding of effectiveness, not to mention our ethics and sense of purpose. They distort and erode the quality of relationships with colleagues, students, pupils and patients. This was a rich source of anger for many working in the public sector, where employees struggle to meet requirements for efficiency while maintaining their own vision of the nature – spontaneous, unpredictable, intuitive – of human relationships.

Paid employment is, for many, their only experience of collaboration with other people – in what other way do they work with others to achieve a common goal? – and it is one increasingly poisoned by competition, insecurity and stress. As the economist E.F. Schumacher argued, ‘What people actually do is normally more important, for understanding them, than what they say, or what they spend their money on, or what they own, or how they vote.’2 Intense competition is everywhere in our culture, and is used for our entertainment in hugely popular television programmes such as Big Brother and The Weakest Link. This reflects our fears about how our workplaces are organised, the laws they operate under and our total failure to imagine a process of reform, let alone transformation. ‘It’s the way of the world, and there’s no alternative,’ is the refrain. The eighties in Britain saw mass redundancies, high unemployment and savage industrial restructuring which hit manufacturing and the lowest-skilled hardest. The 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century were no less destructive, although the process was quieter and more insidious, hitting white-collar managerial and professional jobs and leading to a steady intensification of work as people were required to do more with fewer staff. The pressures hit particularly hard in the public sector, undermined by a crisis in the legitimacy of the principle of public provision. Between 40 and 60 per cent of the entire labour force found their workloads increasing, the hours got longer and the stress levels soared.

It is this experience which is the main focus of this book: the burnout of white-collar Britain. I wanted to see not the worst examples of British employment (of which there are many, as Polly Toynbee brilliantly describes in her book Hard Work), but to find out why 46 per cent – nearly half – of those working in even the best companies in the UK say they are exhausted at the end of a day’s work. I chose to interview companies that were not the worst employers but the best, and were recognised as such in the Sunday Times Best Companies list.

Just what is making work so hard? Technology has played a crucial role: firstly by increasing the mechanisms for accountability for one’s work and thus depriving many of autonomy; and secondly by eroding the boundaries around work – the routines of set working hours, the spatial separation between work and home – which for the entire industrial era had given people privacy and rest. The arrival in the nineties of the mass use of mobile phones, email, the internet and home PCs has made workers more available than ever to the pressures that their employers can bring to bear on them. We haven’t even started to think how to put in place new boundaries, either legislative or cultural, and instead have been seduced by the rhetoric of the liberation and autonomy brought by technology, when in fact it can bring the reverse of both.

The policies of the eighties and nineties (Tony Blair’s Labour government has done little more than modify the Thatcherite model) were based, John Gray argued in his book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), on ‘the theory that market freedoms are natural and political restraints on markets are artificial. The truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.’ The speeding-up of communication, trade and capital flows generates unpredictable and constant change: all that filters down to daily lives, where individuals struggle to adjust – to speed up their pace of work, to stretch their working hours to get the job done, to adapt family routines to the 24/7 service economy, to find new jobs and acquire new skills – and to make sense of those constant necessary adjustments. As Gray puts it, ‘The imperatives of flexibility and mobility imposed by deregulated labour markets put particular strain on traditional modes of family life. How can families meet for meals when both parents work on shifts? What becomes of families when the job market pulls parents apart?’ Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown proudly point to the present low unemployment rate as the product of the UK’s lightly regulated labour market, but they overlook the price we pay in long working hours, exhaustion and rising stress.

The great failure of market economies is that they take no measure of externalities: if something doesn’t have a market value, it doesn’t exist; this is what economists call ‘the tragedy of the commons’. The emergence and development of the environmental movement pioneered the understanding of how markets, in a bid to drive down costs, ‘externalise’ them – or, to put it more crudely, get someone else (usually the taxpayer) to pay for them; for example, polluting a river is cheaper than processing the waste product and recycling it. In just the same way, markets externalise the social costs of their ways of working; it is left to individuals – and their overworked NHS doctors – to deal with the exhaustion, work-related depression, stress and the care deficit.

Just as the late twentieth century grasped the fact that there was a crisis of environmental sustainability, the twenty-first century is beginning to grasp the dimensions of a comparable crisis, this time of human sustainability – a scarcity of the conditions which nurture resilient, secure individuals, families, friendships and communities. Who has time to care for whom in the overwork culture? The price is paid not just by children, but by their exhausted parents, the lost friends and the lonely elderly. The consequences of this crisis can be traced in the rising incidence of depression – by 2020, it is predicted, it will be the world’s most prevalent disease – as well as in family breakdown and the rise in loneliness. This crisis of human sustainability is not just an affliction of Western developed nations, but a consequence of neo-liberal economic development, and is evident in the fast-growing cities of developing countries, where rapid urbanisation is coinciding with the rise of female employment.3 At its most dangerous, the crisis triggers the defensive coping mechanisms of finding substitute security in rigid, clear-cut ways of thinking which spill over into fundamentalism. This crisis cannot entirely be placed at the door of work, but employment is one of the prime causes; it is driving a stress epidemic as more and more is expected of employees, and it is depriving people of both the time and the energy to lead lives with a rich diversity of experience. Lives in which they have time to fulfil their responsibilities to others, be they children, the elderly, friends, neighbours or fellow citizens, and to develop interests and hobbies.

Job satisfaction fell sharply in the nineties. Yet there has been little protest: both trade union membership and the number of days lost to strike action are sharply down since the eighties. There has been no great effort to question why work is getting tougher – we accepted that it was the competitive pressures of the market, or the drive for public sector reform. The result is this undercurrent of frustration, and at its worst quiet despair. Instead of joining a trade union, people sought private solutions, treating themselves to aromatherapy or a nice holiday in the sun instead. The response of the trade union movement, beleaguered by the loss of members and of jobs in its manufacturing heartland, still battling to re-establish its legitimacy in national life, has often been piecemeal and ineffective. The unions were slow to push working time, rather than their traditional priority of pay, to the top of their campaigning agenda. They have been slow to revitalise the old struggle over working time which they so successfully championed in the nineteenth century. They are only now reconnecting to that radical agenda first laid out by the International Association of Working Men (later the First International) which commemorated its first meeting over 140 years ago with a specially made watch, the face of which was inscribed: ‘We require eight hours work, eight hours for our own instruction and eight hours for repose.’

It’s a rallying cry as relevant to the twenty-first century as it was to the nineteenth: the dream of a forty-hour week is for many British workers further from being realised than ever. The trade unions have been held back by prejudices in favour of ‘proper’ full-time jobs from pushing for the reorganisation of work which is possible in a flexible economy. The undermining of the unions has left a vacuum in Britain. Who speaks for the working man and woman? Where is the campaign to wrest back control of our time, to demand the right to a day’s work which leaves one with the energy to do more than stagger home and slump onto the sofa?

The answer, I was repeatedly told by those defending the status quo, is that people make their own choices. If they want to work hard, that is up to them. If they want to opt out, to downshift and live the good life, they can do so. It is all up to them. This is a powerful rubric for those defending neo-liberalism, and has successfully debilitated any collective consensus about what is wrong and what needs to be put right. Some people don’t have any choice; they have poorly-paid jobs which require long hours, and even then they don’t make what would be commonly described as a ‘decent living’. But the bulk of this book is focused on the predicament of the broad swathe of what might now constitute the British middle classes, ranging from skilled factory workers to white-collar managers. For the vast majority there is a degree of choice in how hard they work. But the choices we make are not made in isolation: they are the product of the particular organisational culture of our workplaces, which promote concepts of success, of team spirit so that we don’t let colleagues down, and a powerful work ethic. We are also influenced by a culture which reinforces that work ethic and its cycle of continual achievement and consumption as measures of self-worth, and that has developed a tight grip on exactly those workers in white-collar professional and managerial jobs whose conditions deteriorated most significantly in the nineties, yet who have potentially the most bargaining power in the labour market. These are the classes whose grandparents saw leisure as a sign of status. Now, it is overwork that has become a sign of status – the laptop on holiday, the permanently ringing mobile and the bulging inbox.