Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting
to work at high speeds, and how often they had to work to deadlines. Those reporting working at very high speed ‘all’ or ‘almost all’ of the time rose from 17 per cent to 25 per cent between 1991 and 1996. When Green used these figures to create an index of work intensity for western Europe he found that Britain outstripped all other European countries for the fastest rise in work intensity. Some countries, such as Germany, Denmark and Greece, showed almost no increase at all.
Green’s analysis is borne out by the European Working Conditions Surveys (EWCS), which asked respondents in all EU countries whether they had to work to speed or to tight deadlines.6 The general trend in most countries has been up, but the UK is well ahead. More recent findings from the same survey indicate that the rate of intensification may have eased in the late nineties – a sharp push in the first five years of the decade may have subsequently stabilised.7
Green’s analysis of the situation in Britain is echoed in the findings of the Job Insecurity and Work Intensification Report of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which asked whether employees had experienced an increase in the speed of work and the effort they put into their jobs over the previous five years (1992-97), and found that 64 per cent reported the former and 61 per cent the latter. This was a dramatic increase on a study a decade earlier, in 1986, which reported 55.6 per cent and 38.1 per cent respectively.8 Intensification began in manufacturing in the eighties, and accelerated in the nineties when it hit professionals and white-collar workers in particular, found the European Working Conditions Surveys for 1995-96 and 2000. The evidence of white-collar blues is underpinned by a 1999 survey for the Institute of Management which found that 69 per cent of its members reported an increased workload in the previous year.
Marx argued that there were three main characteristics of labour under capitalism: it was progressively deskilled as part of the mechanisation process; the surplus value accrued in production was appropriated by the owner of capital; and the latter sought always to reduce the ‘porosity’ of the working day. By porosity, Marx meant those moments of downtime which were interspersed in the routine of the day – the minutes spent waiting for supplies to arrive on the assembly line, for a machine to be mended or prepared, or for someone to arrive for a meeting. On the first characteristic Marx was plain wrong, but on the third he foresaw one of the central characteristics of the late-twentieth-century labour market – reducing porosity, or intensification, has become a crucial component of efficiency and performance. What managers have sought to do over the last two decades is to whittle away all ‘unproductive time’. Shifts have been rescheduled to eliminate breaks, and the organisation of work has been refined to ensure a steady flow of work.
One of the ways in which this last is achieved is through ‘functional flexibility’; employees have been trained to do more than one job, so that if a machine breaks down or there is a delay in stocks arriving, they can do something else and then turn back to the original job. Francis Green found a strong link between this kind of flexibility and agreement with the statement ‘My job requires that I work very hard.’ Companies instituted multi-tasking – giving someone several jobs to do, and leaving them to co-ordinate the different tasks in the most time-efficient way. The aim is to ensure a continuous workflow, so there will be no time wasted waiting at the employer’s expense. The conclusion of one study of six organisations was that the whole ‘wage-effort’ relationship is being restructured in several different ways, by reducing non-working time and by increasing the effort required.9 The study quotes a machine operative from one of the organisations it looked at: ‘We’re running the presses with four men, five if you’re lucky…stress and fatigue are beginning to creep in. Young men in their twenties are tired. I hear of people coming in at six and I say, what are you going to do with the afternoon? “I’m going to bed.”…There used to be a lot of activity, there used to be football and God knows what else after, they haven’t got the time.’
The study described the same process in the public sector, and quoted a local authority employee: ‘It’s run more like a business…whereas before you’d go in and it was like a more friendly basis. You’d go in and you’d do what was required of you and then [the patients] want the company, cup of tea, sit down and have a chat, whereas you can’t do that now because time’s money.’
Green cites two influential management techniques as important in speeding up workflow: total quality management and just-in-time working: ‘The imperative of total quality management is that many more individuals have to take continued responsibility for quality checks and improvements and so on. Rather than wait for someone to tell them what to do, they have to get on and do it.’ Just-in-time aims to perfect the logistical flow of materials so that whatever is needed for a task arrives – just in time.
In an attempt to understand the process of work intensification and how it came about, I went to an industrial estate on the outskirts of an old coalmining town in the Midlands. This is the home of Saltfillas – the name has been changed – a small family company. From the windows of its offices could be seen the old coalmining slagheaps and the even older canals which run on either side of the estate. It’s an area which has experienced the vicissitudes of industrial change for nearly three hundred years, and the legacy of some of those changes – the bankruptcies and the works closures – is evident in the vacant lots and boarded-up buildings in nearby towns.
The predominantly female workforce of Saltfillas have lived through some of this change, with husbands, fathers, brothers and neighbours who once worked down the pits or at the steelworks. The global economy has ripped out the economic entrails of these towns in the last two decades, and unemployment is above the national average. Survival is a precarious business. That’s certainly true of Saltfillas; it’s had few spare resources to buffer itself from the pace of globalisation – deregulation, increasing competition and the rapid expansion of European trade – so it’s some achievement for Dick and his father, who founded the business in the early sixties, that it’s still thriving on a modest but secure footing.
The reason I went to visit Saltfillas is not because they work long hours – on the contrary, the company instituted a 7 a.m.-3.30 p.m. shift pattern because the workforce wanted to get off early, and by 5 p.m. it’s empty bar a few evening-shift workers. They can’t afford to pay overtime, and they’ve even managed to stop a long tradition of management coming in on a Saturday morning by reorganising rotas. I went to Saltfillas because the company offered to explain to me how competition drives the intensification of work, how and why they have exacted more work from fewer people, and to give me some insight into why the workforce has gone along with it.
This is not bleeding-edge new economy, and this is not a cut-throat company trying to work its labour force into the ground; on the contrary, it’s an old-fashioned firm in many respects, which still holds to a sense of loyalty, and a relationship in which the management will treat employees fairly if they do a fair day’s work. Staff turnover is low, and Dick joked that he was buying gold watches for twenty-five years’ service in bulk this year.
Saltfillas started out packing salt, and now packs other dry products such as washing powder. It’s high-volume, low-margin packing. On the factory floor the noise is deafening, with the clatter of machinery which fills, labels and packs in a mesmerising Heath Robinson-style series of movements. The factory workers’ job is to keep the lines moving, sorting out any glitches, ensuring supplies are ready and removing the finished product. It’s ceaseless, repetitive hard work. A radio blares out over the noise of the machines, everyone is in hats and overalls and no jewellery is allowed, in order to meet exacting hygiene regulations.
Next door in the office, Tracey has been with the company since she started work at fifteen; in twenty-five years she’s risen from the factory floor to being production and quality control manager. She is responsible for making sure the company is always using the available labour to its full potential. It’s a constant, complex juggling act as she moves from factory floor to her computer terminal and back. There’s no doubt in her mind that the workforce have to work harder now than they did when she first started: