Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting
who are also resigning from top positions – is not the long hours, but the inability to control them.’29 Many in the most educated, skilled section of the labour market are prepared to trade time for autonomy, or what appears to be autonomy.
While the lack of boundaries creates some kinds of autonomy for those in senior managerial positions, for many it can become what Barbara Adam described in her book Timewatch (1995) as an ‘unbearable, unfathomable burden’ as workers shift between different forms of time, all of which ‘need to be synchronised with lives of significant others and the society’.30 So that, to prolong the above example, when you get home from the child’s play there’s an even larger email inbox, with urgent information for the meeting you have to attend the following day; that evening the child runs a temperature, and your mother calls to discuss a hospital test, and there’s no time to catch up. Inevitably, shifting back and forth between family time and work time is constantly throwing up conflicts between competing demands which sometimes cannot be managed: do you turn up for the meeting with the schoolteacher, or finish off the report for the boss? Robert Reich in The Future of Success (2001) describes his dilemma when a critical business meeting was scheduled to clash with his son’s sports game. In the end he opted for the latter and forwent the chance of a major work assignment – a decision which requires considerable material and emotional security.
A fourth characteristic of our restructured sense of time is the internalisation of efficiency. There’s a reflex by which we calculate a cost/benefit analysis of whether an activity is worth the time we are investing in it. This can apply to doing the shopping, changing a nappy, compiling a report or attending a meeting. Are we doing something in as short a time as possible? It’s as if we have absorbed the ‘time-motion’ studies of the late-nineteenth-century American management theorist Frederick Taylor, and are applying them not just to manufacturing processes but to our entire lives. The American housewife who produced a cookery book on Taylorist principles of time-efficiency in the 1920s was ahead of her time. Closely allied to efficiency is productivity: instead of being asked if we’ve had a good day, we’re now asked if we’ve had a productive one. Nothing contributes more to frustration and impatience than attempting to live life efficiently. It allows no margin of error, no room for the ebb and flow. Listen to anyone talking about a day that has gone wrong and it’s a tale of how their aspirations to efficiency were frustrated by traffic jams, cancelled trains, crashed computers or flight delays. But the aspirations continue, encouraged by the fantasies held out by advertising, which continually promises us more time.
Finally, the fifth characteristic of our restructured time is that we are in the process of shifting back to task-based time rather than the employed time instituted early in the Industrial Revolution. The boss now says, ‘I don’t care when or how you work, I’m just interested in the results.’ All too often, this simply means exacting more work than can feasibly be done in the contracted hours; once again, the burden of resolving the irreconcilable is left to the individual.
Clashing priorities, too much work, and it’s all down to us to manage it. Of course we fail. No wonder we come to hate time so much – it makes us feel inadequate because we can never control its passage: it’s either too fast or too slow. So we blame time and complain that we have too little of it, when in fact time is one of the most democratic of resources. The richer and the more well-educated we are, the more likely we are to be dissatisfied with time. In his book An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) Theodore Zeldin quotes a magazine columnist who concludes: ‘What we lack more than anything else is time.’31
How did we lose control of our time? How did we lose sight of the power relationship which underpins working time – effectively making the bosses’ jobs a lot easier for them, because they don’t need to supervise the hours of unpaid labour offered by Pete and thousands of others. How did we lose sight of Marx’s insight into the essential precondition of human freedom – time and energy? Perhaps by being too busy managing time and trying to cobble together some vestige of shared time with partners, friends or family to understand the freedoms we’ve lost, let alone to find the time to start imagining which of the old-fashioned protections need to be restored and which new freedoms we need to realise. In the ‘extended present’, always brimful of preoccupations, comments sociologist Julia Brannen, there is such a constant state of busyness that the future never arrives, and the past is forgotten: ‘It not only stops us from imagining the future, it stops us from doing anything about it or making it better.’32
Time is only one part of the story. For many people it’s not so much the time they spend at work, as the effort that is required while they are there. They complain of being rushed off their feet, of always having more work to do than time to do it in, and of there never being enough people to get the job done. By the end of the day they’re exhausted: 36 per cent of us are too tired to do anything but slump on the sofa.1 The nineties marked a significant increase in work intensification: workers are required to put in more effort and to work faster. This has been true throughout the economy, affecting most sectors of the labour market. If long hours have particularly hit white-collar Britain, work intensification has been across the board in both the public and the private sector, from school classroom to factory floor. Many of the cost savings attributed to contracting out public sector services have been achieved through work intensification: cleaners have more wards to clean, and catering assistants have more meals to prepare. The killer combination is when both the hours of the job and its intensity have increased, and that is usually the case: surveys show that the single biggest cause of long hours is having too big a workload.2 ‘More for less’ is an old tool used by employers to reduce labour costs and improve competitive advantage, and the fight against it has historically been a large part of the trade union struggle, while the challenge to leverage up work effort has been a central preoccupation for management theorists. But the balance of power has tipped decisively against trade unions in Britain. They have lost members and lost battles, and with a few notable exceptions have failed to combat intensification.
One crude, anecdotal measure of job intensification is that the British used to be famous for what the French called ‘tea-breakism’. Ask managers about teabreaks now, and they laugh with incredulity at how quickly they have become a distant memory. Office workers sip lattes and espressos at their keyboards: perhaps it’s only possible to maintain their workrate with large and regular doses of caffeine. Such is the pace of work that over half the British workforce say they are too busy even to go to the loo.3
Economist Francis Green acknowledges that work intensity is notoriously difficult to measure – how can anyone assess how much someone is putting into their work? – but the best available measure is how people regard their own levels of effort.4 Drawing data from nationally representative samples,5 he compared responses to the statement ‘My job requires that I work very hard.’ In 1992, 32 per cent of workers ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement; by 1997 it had jumped to 40 per cent. Women were slightly more likely to agree than men, and the figures were higher in the public than in the private sector. Top of the intensification league was the education sector, where the proportion strongly agreeing rose by 14 per cent, to well over half of all teachers. These increases are dramatic.
Green also looked at workers’ sense of their ‘discretionary effort’ – how much they choose to put into the job, as opposed to what they feel is asked of them. Again, this showed an increase in the number replying ‘a lot’, from 68.4 per cent in 1992 to 71.8 per cent in 1997; women indicated a