Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting
the extra labour needed from their core workforce – for free.
Where the crunching of the gears comes is in the lives of individuals trying to live simultaneously in two different time frames: the timelessness required by their employer and the ‘timeliness’ required by intimate human relationships – most markedly, the routine of children’s daily lives – and how that connects to a wider network of family and friends and social activities. The knock-on effect of the 24/7 society is to deliver the final blow to those regular rituals which framed most people’s lives, such as a family tea or Sunday lunch. These regular rituals originated in the early Industrial Revolution, as a way of giving the family a role in the daily routine after it lost its pre-eminence in the organisation of economic life, with the shift from family workshop to factory. No longer the source of livelihood, the family took on tasks of structuring time, of ritual and emotional support. That is what is now being eroded by the timelessness of a ‘flexible’ labour market which brings our working lives into direct conflict with our private family lives.
A recent study found that 21 per cent of mothers and 41 per cent of fathers started work between 6.30 and 8.30 a.m. several times a week.19 A quarter of mothers and nearly half of fathers regularly worked between 5.30 and 8.30 p.m., and one in seven mothers and one in six fathers worked night shifts. Four out of ten mothers worked at weekends and more than half of fathers worked at least one Saturday a month, while a quarter of mothers and just under a third of fathers worked on Sundays at least once a month. Of those, 18 per cent of mothers and 22 per cent of fathers worked both Saturdays and Sundays. What suffered most, the study found, was time spent together as a family and as a couple, particularly in lower-income families where the parents arranged their shifts to operate a relay childcare system and avoid childcare costs.
It is not just the lengthening hours and the atypical hours which put the rhythms of family life under stress, it is also the fact that the family’s exposure to this requirement for ‘timelessness’ has been significantly increased by the flow of women into the labour market over the last two decades. Time frames used to be split along gender roles: the women kept family time, the men adhered to employment time, and the conflict between the two was submerged in the marital relationship. Now, in dual-earner households, both partners are dealing with the conflict in a complex mosaic of employment and caring, and both are spending more time in paid employment. What that has meant for the average household (where at least one adult is employed) is that 7.6 weeks more a year was spent in paid work in 1998 than in 1981;20 this is made up partly by increasing numbers of women going out to work, and partly by men working longer hours. For most households that transfer of time is probably even higher, because people are travelling further to get to their work (the average distance between home and work increased by a third between 1985 and 199821), spending up to an hour a day commuting on average, and there has also been a decrease in the take-up of holiday. That lost eight weeks could be closer to twelve.
How did this happen? Where did the time go? How were the predictions throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century that technological advance would bring greater leisure so comprehensively proved wrong in the last quarter of the century? Now many people are working harder than their grandparents did, and a significant minority of the highest-status jobs require the kind of hours which would have been familiar to Victorian millhands.
What makes this development all the more baffling is that it is not true of other countries in Europe. The British work 8.7 hours a day, compared to the Germans’ eight and the French 7.9,22 but that’s only half the story. Even more marked is the difference in holidays between Britain and continental Europe: the UK scrapes in with a mere twenty-eight days on average a year, a long way behind France on forty-seven, Italy on forty-four and Germany on forty-one.23 A significant part of the difference is the continued observation in Europe of religious holidays and feast days, still widely celebrated even in increasingly secular countries such as France and Italy. When you add up the difference in hours per week and holidays between the UK and Europe, it amounts to the British working almost eight weeks more a year than their European counterparts.24
In the debate over Britain’s overwork culture, we often forget the issue’s long historical roots. The negotiation over working time was central to the emergence and development of the trade union movement in industrial capitalism. Karl Marx saw clearly in the mid-nineteenth century how the politics of time was essential to freedom: ‘The shortening of the working day [is the] basic prerequisite [for] that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom.’25 Time and pay were the two variables over which unions struggled with bosses, and arguably they were more successful on the former than the latter. In 1923 the TUC concluded that reduced working hours was ‘the principal advantage secured by over sixty years of trade union effort and sacrifice – the most important achievement of industrial organisation’. Historian James Arrowsmith calculates that from 1856 to 1981 the average total of hours spent at work over the course of a forty-year working life in Britain dropped from 124,000 to 69,000. That historic decline was halted in the early nineties at an average of 68,440. But this figure masks the increasing polarisation of work into the work-rich, time-poor and the work-poor, time-rich. While one-fifth of all households have no one in paid employment, as many as two-fifths are working harder than ever, and suffer from the big squeeze.
The trade union battle to reduce working hours lasted intermittently for nearly two centuries. Children’s labour was the first battleground which established the principle of the state intervening to regulate working hours. (It was the moral and child welfare agenda which in the end overrode arguments of economic freedom in the first half of the nineteenth century and ensured legislation on working hours. The question must be whether those agendas are capable of exerting similar power two hundred years later.) There were successive parliamentary Acts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reduce working hours. The final gasp was the engineering workers’ campaign for a thirty-five-hour basic week in 1989-90, in the last big conflict in the UK over working hours. Employers were finally persuaded to come to settlements of a thirty-eight- or thirty-nine-hour week, just short of the unions’ goal; the unions’ £15 million strike fund still remains, to be used for any future ‘Drive for Thirty-Five’. But the battle had lost impetus long before the eighties, argues Arrowsmith, who points to the fifties, when the trade union commitment to shorter hours was reduced to no more than a paper promise. The real push of union power in the next two decades was to trade time for more pay, which led to the institutionalisation of overtime. That became the ‘Trojan horse’ which enabled managers to renegotiate working practices through the eighties and nineties, forcing unions to accept flexibility and productivity deals in return for reductions in overtime and pay increases.
The chapter of history in which the struggle over working hours shaped the trade union movement, and vice versa, is largely over. Apart from some notable exceptions such as the teaching unions in their battle over workloads, and the civil service union bid for better work-life balance policies, it is not trade unions which will fight for those worst affected by the long-hours culture, such as managers and professionals, most of whom do not belong to any union. The European Union’s Working Time Regulations, implemented in 1998, have been the only attempt to curb long hours in the last decade and a half, and according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) 60 per cent of those working over forty-eight hours before the Regulations were implemented are still doing so, while 21 per cent are working more hours than before, and only 2 per cent have seen their working week reduced below forty-eight hours.26
One of the Regulations’ biggest weaknesses is that it exempted workers with ‘genuine autonomy’, which covered anyone who could claim a degree of control over their hours, such as those in managerial or professional work – so the unpaid overtime put in by the likes of Pete does