Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting
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.
In the seventies, commentators and policy-makers worried that the work ethic was in terminal decline. They needn’t have: it was reformulated, and is now stronger than ever, particularly amongst the most educated. It is through work that we seek to satisfy our craving for a sense of control, of mastery, of security and autonomy in a chaotic, insecure world: this is the gold at the end of the rainbow. The craving is never satiated, we are always promised more if we work that bit harder.
A work ethic has evolved that promotes a particular sense of self and identity which meshes neatly with the needs of market capitalism, through consumption and through work. Put at its simplest, narcissism and capitalism are mutually reinforcing. What is pushed to the margin are the time-consuming, labour-intensive human relationships, and doing nothing – simply being. Clever organisations exploit this cultural context, this craving for control, self-assertion and self-affirmation, and design corporate cultures which meet the emotional needs of their employees. This is where corporate power aims to reach into the interstices of our characters and even our souls, and manipulate them to its own interests. A chart on the wall of Microsoft’s Reading office shows a large ‘S’ curve which begins by identifying individual character strengths, and through a number of stages translates them into a share price increase. Human beings are instrumentalised as the means to an end – the share price.
We have become familiar with the debate about corporate power extending into political life and subverting the power of the state, and we are aware of the way in which corporate power has infiltrated every aspect of civic life; but we also need to recognise how corporations attempt to mould and manipulate our inner lives through new styles of invasive management which sponsor our ‘personal growth’. The ‘absorptive corporation’ is a well-known phenomenon in American business life. The British are sceptical, but who knows whether corporate formulations of community, mentoring and teamwork will prove a powerful seduction for an increasingly lonely nation?
Throughout my research for this book I encountered a powerful sense of restlessness. We have reached a tipping point, a pervasive, inarticulate feeling that there must be another way, that enough is enough. Wealth should bring leisure, not hard work. Our rising GDP should have some payoff in increasing well-being – or what’s the point? Surveys show that a growing number of people want to trade pay for time. Interestingly, the anger and frustration seems to be increasing even though the deterioration in the quality of our working lives has eased slightly since 1997-98; for example, the implementation of the European Union’s Working Time Regulations, which limit the working week to forty-eight hours, has halted the increase in the average number of hours worked, although the incidence of stress has continued to soar. But on this plateau, the exhaustion has accumulated; the extra effort and time was not for a short sprint, but for an endless marathon – it has become institutionalised.
What gives me hope is that the point of revolution is not when things are at their worst, but when they’re beginning to get better. But we are crippled by one of the strongest illusions of our age, namely that we seek ‘biographic solutions to structural contradictions’, as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck puts it. We look for personal, private solutions to our problems, rather than identifying with others and achieving reform. Many of those ‘biographic solutions’ are only available to a small minority (how many people can downshift to a cheaper housing market?) or act as an opiate, a fantasy which is endlessly postponed.
There are many points of hope: the eighteen to twenty-four age group view the working culture of their parents with horror. Sociologists have charted a shift to post-modern values, with people in Western industrialised nations growing disenchanted with materialism and looking for self-expression and fulfilment. The growing preoccupation with well-being and health may also spur a challenge to the overwork culture. On the other hand, the re-envisaging of success and achievement needed is no mean task in a culture intoxicated by public recognition and celebrity. We have little place in our pantheon of admirable attributes for what Wordsworth described as ‘those little unremembered acts of kindness which are the best part of humankind’. Nor is sufficient value placed upon those times of reflection and idleness which are so often the wellspring of human creativity, wisdom and well-being. Bertrand Russell, in his essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’ (1932), lamented how the ‘cult of efficiency’ had inhibited the capacity for ‘light-heartedness and play’; how horrified he would be at the extent to which that cult of efficiency has now been rolled out across much of our national life.
It is this cultural debate about success, achievement, the limits of efficiency and what it is to be human which needs to be linked to a political debate. The work-life balance agenda is where philosophical questions about what is the good life and what is the common good intersect with the political. We need to challenge the centrality of work in our lives, and reconsider the price we pay for our wages. We need to question the way work is organised: why shouldn’t we have a three-day weekend, or Wednesdays off? Time is both a personal and a political issue. This book argues that we need to find again the space to imagine social transformation – and what better place to start than in work, where we spend so many of our waking hours? We need to see more clearly the ‘structural contradictions’ – of long hours, work intensification – which determine our lives, and to find again ways to express our desire for freedom in our working lives. The employment agenda should not be ruled by the dictates of business needs, but by human needs – such as rest, leisure, caring for dependants, the welfare of children and giving individuals the opportunity to reach their full human worth; the economy should be the servant of our needs, not our master. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes that we have shifted our aspirations for freedom from work to consumption. It’s time to shift them back. It’s time to break through the conundrum which Bauman expresses as ‘Never have we been so free, and so unable to change things.’
You spelt out how drab our lives are. Now, what about tomorrow? Do we don our seventies lapels, stir the masses, and stage a walk-out? I work in a part of the private sector that is cut-throat, our number has been pared down to a point that hardly sustains its own weight. Stirring these masses would result in a very feeble affair – and provide a sure route to joblessness to boot. This job is the only security I have. My parental responsibility doesn’t allow for jacking it all in to go off and massage whales or whatever’s hip these days. I’ve got to get two kids through puberty and university yet. And where will they live? What percentage of new graduates can raise the money to buy a garden shed, let alone a house of any description?
And better this depth of shit than the one that comes with skiving off. You only take a sicky here knowing that tomorrow’s deadlines are the day after’s heart