Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting
can be imposed, when the entire workforce has to work a Saturday shift. Tony had had three production Saturdays in a row in the weeks before our interview.
‘In the last ten days I’ve done twenty-seven hours overtime, with weekend shifts every weekend. I had to sign the waiver on the Working Time Regulations. I had no choice – if I didn’t they would have given me a rubbish job, one of those nobody wants, and I would still have had to do some overtime anyway. Two men did refuse to sign the waiver on the Working Time Regulations and they got moved. I want a better balance. I don’t mind some overtime, but not as much as this. I don’t want the money. I suppose I’m being bullied.’
There was a period when there was no overtime, and Tony says morale was higher, everyone was more chatty and less tired, the quality of the work improved and productivity rose. The men were happier because their families weren’t getting at them. They’ve tried talking to the manager about it – Tony says he’s a nice guy – but he says there is nothing he can do; he’s working long hours too. ‘They just don’t take into account that people have lives. I can’t get to my daughter’s parents’ evenings or school plays because I can’t book the time off. I changed my job from being a lorry driver to have better hours, and now I’m back doing the same hours again.’
At this point Tony’s wife Linda breaks in. She’s very angry. ‘I’d like to take my daughter into the company so they could explain to us why they’re more important than we are. They say they’re a family firm, but they aren’t. It seems like we come second. If you work at the company, it has to come first. He’s out before seven in the morning and back at about 7.15 in the evening. He has a bath, has his tea and then sits down on the sofa and falls asleep. I can live with that in the week, but not when he gets up at 6 a.m. on Saturday and then spends Sunday sleeping because he’s so tired. It gets to the point that when he’s there, he’s not there because he’s that tired.’
They know of plenty of men at the company whose relationships and marriages have broken up. Tony and Linda can’t arrange to see friends, they can’t arrange to go out as a family. The only thing they all make a point of doing together is the family hobby of kick-boxing on a Sunday evening. ‘I had a day off and I took my daughter to the swimming pool,’ says Tony. ‘I bumped into a mate and we were talking and she interrupts and says, “It’s a rare day off for my dad, so don’t talk to him.”’
Britain’s full-time workers put in the longest hours in Europe at 43.6 a week, well ahead of the EU average of 40.3.4 These figures conceal the increasing polarisation of work between those who have none (16.4 per cent of households have no one in work5) and those who have too much. The figure is rising: between 1998 and 2003 British workers put in an extra 0.7 hours a week on average; but this masks the full scale of the accelerating trend of the overwork culture. The number working more than forty-eight hours has more than doubled since 1998, from 10 per cent to 26 per cent.6 Another survey tracked how the number working more than sixty hours a week is shooting up. Between 2000 and 2002 it leapt by a third, to one in six of all workers,7 so that a fifth of thirty- to thirty-nine-year-olds are working over sixty hours – a critical proportion of those likely to be at a pivotal point in beginning their own families, and well ahead of any other European country.8
Even that dramatic acceleration is outdone by what is happening to women. Here, it’s catch-up time. Since 1992 the number of women working more than forty-eight hours a week has increased by a staggering 52 per cent,9 and the proportion working over sixty hours has more than doubled, from 6 per cent to 13 per cent10 – one in eight of the female workforce. Long hours is no longer solely a male disease. The average number of working hours for women increased by three and a half hours a week in the period 1998 to 2003.11
Add in what is happening to holiday take-up, and the picture looks even worse. According to two surveys, only 44 per cent of workers take all the holiday to which they are entitled – 39 per cent of men and 49 per cent of women.12 The most frequently cited reason for not taking holidays was that there was too much work to do, followed by fear that taking a break might jeopardise the employee’s job. These findings are backed up by another (albeit small-scale) survey which calculated that the average employee loses out on more than three months of holiday over their working life, which was valued at £4 billion-worth of work donated to employers every year. Again, those surveyed said they were simply too busy to get away.13 Meanwhile the average lunch ‘hour’ is now estimated to be twenty-seven minutes long according to one study, and 65 per cent of workers report ‘rarely taking a full hour’s lunch break’.14 Some argue that simply totting up the number of hours spent at work to calculate working time in a knowledge economy is meaningless, because of the additional time spent on the commute with the mobile or laptop, or puzzling out work problems in the bath. That adds up to another eleven hours on average a week, according to research by the Mental Health Foundation.
These long hours are the biggest cause of the dramatic decline in job satisfaction over the nineties, with the number of men reporting that they are ‘very happy’ with their hours dropping from 35 per cent to 20 per cent, and for women from 51 per cent to 29 per cent.15 A quarter of those who work long hours do so reluctantly ‘all or most of the time’.16 The higher the educational qualification, the deeper the unhappiness: commentator Robert Taylor concluded that ‘there is a particular malaise among highly educated males’. So here’s the puzzle: how is it that men and women like Pete, of a generation brought up to prize their entitlement to autonomy, have lost control of that crucial element of the employment contract, their own time? There were never any negotiations over it, let alone barricades or picket lines; it happened by stealth, piecemeal across thousands of offices, in millions of relationships, where that bit extra was demanded of the workforce…and apart from private grumbles, they complied.
There is another side to long hours which is much more straightforward. It is a familiar tale of cheap, low-skill labour which has always relied on long hours of overtime to compensate for low pay. The power relations of the labour contract are more clear-cut and harsh here, but at least the overtime is paid and every extra half-hour is accounted for.
Maev and Joshua work as cleaners in a London hospital. Her average working week is fifty-two hours, twenty-five minutes, because she has chosen to do a double shift. She’s at work by 7.30 a.m., and she finally finishes her second shift at 8 p.m. – with a break of an hour and three-quarters between shifts around tea time. Over at the other end of the hospital, Joshua works about fifty-four hours a week, with a similarly broken day. Both of them have had to sign a waiver on the Working Time Regulations, as requested by ISS, the Danish multinational company which employs them.
Maev has been working at this hospital for less than a year. She had a clerical job with better pay, but she wanted to cut down her travelling costs, so she took what the hospital offered her. As she’s employed by a contractor, she isn’t eligible for the overtime rates, sick pay or pension which NHS staff receive. When I first saw her in the ward she wore the blank, inscrutable expression adopted by those whose presence – let alone their labour – is rarely acknowledged. It was as if she had willed her own absence from her place and her task. But the moment we were introduced, she was transformed. She became human again, with a smile which animated her entire face.
Later, in a small office used by the union she belongs to, Unison, she explained why she works such long hours. She came to Britain in the early nineties; now aged forty-two, she is supporting most of her family