that’s a short-term view, and that the customer will choose the company they like, and that it’s the fat cats who are the ones who get the benefits.’ Then he added, ‘My labour budget is very tight – I manage that, I don’t complain – the key is to get people trained. Two people could have managed that situation [the bar and the restaurant] if they had been trained. The cost saving was forced on me, and in the end we under-recruited so that there was no slack in the system, no allowance for any of the team leaving. We used to over-recruit by 25 per cent to allow for some slack. Training has been cut from six weeks to four weeks.’
When there was a staff shortage, managers had to help out. Mahon called over one of his deputies, Martin, to find out why he was working on his day off. ‘I’m working seventy to eighty hours a week at the moment,’ said Martin, ‘but we’re well paid – I’m on £22,000 with a bonus of perhaps another £5,000. In a few weeks it will be down to forty-five hours, but if I did that now, the hotel wouldn’t gel. It’s one to two months of being there, being very available, then the whole team comes together. I don’t get paid for today.’
Twenty-four-year-old Keri, the head of housekeeping, is also in on her day off to cover for shortages of housekeeping staff. She has a two-year-old child, and looks exhausted. ‘Today I’m cleaning rooms because we’re short of staff and I don’t want to put more work on my team – they’re all working overtime already. I need another ten part-time staff. It’s my day off today, and I’m supposed to finish at 2 p.m. At the moment I’m working six days a week because I want it to be right. Opening a hotel is very hard work. I’m enjoying it so much – it’s a new challenge for me, even though I’m cleaning rooms. I don’t get paid overtime, it’s for my personal goal; we have audits to achieve and I don’t want to let my team or the manager down by not giving 100 per cent. I get paid £18,000 plus another 25 per cent bonus.’ She jokes, ‘It probably works out at about £1 an hour.’
As Martin and Keri appeared at our table on their days off even Mahon seemed somewhat taken aback by their hard work, but he admitted he was not very different: ‘What frightens me,’ he said, ‘is that I don’t do anything else except work – I’ve no hobbies.’ He said things were about to change; now they’d launched he’d have the freedom to recruit more staff, and the management team would get proper time off, but he had a keen sense of the competitive pressure on the company; ‘For a short-term profit, you don’t invest in hotels. If we don’t get the investment we won’t succeed as a company. The return on capital employed on new build is 17 per cent over three years, and there are more attractive investment options, so we have to keep up that profitability. By 2007, supply will outstrip demand for budget hotels, and we will be fighting in the most difficult marketplace – and we will be fighting with a product which is three to four years old.’
My most striking impression as I left the Travel Inn in a dusty back street of Liverpool’s city centre, its new paint still gleaming, was that the brunt of the hard work fell on junior and middle management. As Les Worrall and Cary Cooper conclude in their four-year study of managers, ‘The prime driver to the creation of the long working hours culture is the cumulative impact of years of cost cutting where managers are just “plain overloaded” as they pick up the tasks left behind from delayered and redundant posts.’ They ask: ‘In an economy where competitive pressures can only get more intense, what can we really do to combat these forces?’19 The staff in Liverpool were putting in the long unpaid hours of overtime to compensate for the company’s cuts on labour costs, but that didn’t diminish their commitment; the company’s bonus schemes, incentives and career progression programmes had reconciled them to the enormous effort required of them. What legitimised the company’s claim on them was their understanding of the competitiveness of the market; they even seemed to find the toughness of their position exhilarating – something that the company seems to know works to its advantage: Travel Inn’s induction programme is called ‘Mission Innpossible’.
Hard 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
