Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting
Work is Not Enough
If globalisation and its rhetoric of competition and efficiency convinces many of the need to increase their effort, what part is played by the much-quoted theme of job insecurity? What contribution does the P45 play in keeping people’s noses to the grindstone? The theory runs that the unpredictable and sharp fluctuations in the global market lead to companies needing a flexible labour force – one which they can downsize without too great a cost, which they can shift to new tasks easily, and which they can increase through the use of agency, temporary and contract labour at short notice for short periods. Loyalty and hard work for a company no longer count for anything, and redundancies are an unavoidable fact of life, part of the restructuring companies continually have to implement if they are to remain competitive. The agile company has to delayer and downsize. These themes were pervasive in the media throughout the nineties: Francis Green has calculated that by the middle of that decade the phrases ‘job security’ or ‘job insecurity’ occurred on average one and a half times every day in the British press. But the media coverage didn’t reflect reality: the average length of time spent in a job in Britain actually increased significantly for all types of work between 1992 and 2000, and the UK’s proportion of temporary work is well below the EU average.20
The intense media interest reflected two trends. Firstly, British workers’ remarkably high level of fear of losing their jobs. According to OECD figures, in 2001 Britain was second only to South Korea for the proportion (41 per cent) of workers ‘unsure of a job even if they perform well’. Interestingly, British workers’ sense of insecurity concerned their own personal position, not that of their company: the percentage saying they were worried about their company’s future was well below the OECD average. What makes this such a disturbing statistic is that even if the company was successful, and they themselves were doing a good job, many British workers did not feel secure.21
Another international survey found that the drop in job security between 1985 and 1995 was sharper in Britain than in any other European country, falling from 70 per cent to 48 per cent.22 There is no sign of this anxiety easing. In a 2003 study Britain topped the international insecurity league, well ahead of the US and the rest of Europe.23 In the same year, a survey by the trade union Unifi (it represents many clerical workers, particularly in the banking sector) found that over half its members expected job cuts in the next year. There is a strong correlation between levels of insecurity and long hours: the highest rate of insecurity is found among full-time workers in the prime of their careers; managers are among the least secure.24 This level of fear plays a considerable role in influencing Britain’s overwork culture, yet its causes are far from clear. Is it the legacy of the mass unemployment in the eighties, or is it related to wider issues about Britain’s sense of decline in world status, and of falling behind in the economic race?
The second trend which clearly influenced the media interest in job insecurity in the nineties was that professional and managerial jobs experienced it for the first time. The middle classes were catching up with some of the experience of the working classes in the eighties – though the levels of unemployment were not comparable. Francis Green found a decline in levels of job insecurity over the period 1986 to 2001 in the British workforce, with the exception of white-collar workers; they were the most secure in 1986 and the least secure in 1997 – bringing them into line with blue-collar workers. At the same time, workers who had been in their jobs for a long time showed an increase in insecurity which brought them into line with those who had been in their jobs a very short time. Questions about the likelihood of getting another job also improved for most workers, but not for those in professional and managerial categories.25
The encroachment of job flexibility into the middle classes is evident in the growth of temporary work; for example, the use of short-term contracts is now common in higher education, information technology and the media. In particular, self-employment used to be dominated by construction and distribution workers, but by 1999 the proportion of the self-employed who were in business, education or the health services had nearly doubled to 29 per cent; and the self-employed have a tendency to work longer hours than average. The reality of life for the famous ‘portfolio worker’ juggling several work commitments (a concept which generated more media interest than actual exemplars) is usually insecurity and long hours.
These measures of job insecurity starkly reveal people’s fears of losing their jobs, and the consequences if they do – such as the difficulty of finding another job, the risk of defaulting on mortgage payments and the problem of caring for dependants. But they don’t tap into the range of insecurities around ‘doing the job well’, promotion and the increasingly precarious path of upward mobility which in managerial and professional groups can be a major motivational issue. It is this form of insecurity and uncertainty which often lies behind the syndrome of ‘presenteeism’ – being seen to be working late – which has grown stronger in the last fifteen years.
It is driven by several factors. Firstly, there is a much greater assessment of performance, with over 80 per cent of British workplaces now implementing some form of appraisal system, and for a third of workers pay is now linked to performance.26 There has also been a big increase in pay assessed on team performance, which now covers more than one worker in five; peer pressure becomes a major driver of overwork as employees don’t want to let their colleagues down. Secondly, flat, fluid organisations make promotion harder to achieve – the pyramid sharpens to a smaller point, the concept of the middle-class career is less clear-cut, there is no smooth progression up the corporate hierarchy, and chance plays a bigger part – being in the right place at the right time can be critical. Long hours can become a crucial determinant of success, either because they are a way of demonstrating superior commitment over rivals or because they simply increase the chances of being in the right place. Thirdly, 70 per cent of British managers are affected by major organisational restructuring every year,27 which increases the stakes – the right office politics and you’re in charge of a major project or department, play it badly and you’re restructured out of a job altogether. As one banker reflected ruefully, he took his eye off the ball for a few months because he was getting married, and in the departmental restructuring he lost his job. Nearly 60 per cent of managers say they are spending far more time on organisational politics: overwork involves not just doing your job well, but making sure you still have the job. Eighty per cent of employees didn’t feel they were involved in the decisions around restructuring, and nearly 50 per cent didn’t feel the reasons for it were adequately explained. Its impact is destructive, with nearly half of managers reporting less loyalty and motivation as a result, and over 60 per cent reporting lower morale.28 Restructuring may seem necessary to adapt to changing market conditions, but the fallout is devastating on the level of trust within the organisation: only one British worker in three trusts his or her boss ‘a lot’.
Insecurity can become a crucial ingredient of how work is organised – for example how meetings are run, who insists on being at them, and how people use technology, particularly email. People insist on being copied into material so they stay in the know, and they get hooked on checking their email. Insecurity intensifies the desire for control, points out Yiannis Gabriel, Professor of Organisational Theory at Imperial College, London: ‘It is not accidental that faith in control rises with feelings of insecurity, uncertainty and impending chaos. Among managers today such feelings are generated by volatile economies, global markets and technologies revolutionising information systems and government policies…Under such conditions, managers’ needs for reassurance and comfort become exacerbated as insecurity becomes chronic…Reading popular management texts, one has the impression that the manuals are advising drivers to grip their steering wheels ever more tightly as their vehicles run out of control.’29