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
The compulsion to stay in contact can become almost obsessive, leading employees to phone in on their mobile or log on to their PCs at the weekend, anxious not to miss anything; as one person pertinently emailed, W.H. Auden said that it was only bearable to be a member of an organisation if you were indispensable. Or at least felt yourself to be indispensable.
Hard Work for Little Gain
Perhaps this insecurity can shed some light on one of the most bizarre paradoxes of Britain’s overwork culture – one which has consumed hours and hours of the time of economists, business theorists and government. Britain may be working more intensively, its labour force putting in unprecedented hours, yet this hard work is not paying off: British productivity measured as GDP per hour worked is embarrassingly far behind that of other countries. Germany is 27 per cent ahead, France and the United States 29 per cent.30 Are we wasting all that hard work in pointless meetings, phone calls and endless emails all devoted to office politics, rather than actually getting the job done? Are we spending long hours making low-value products with antiquated equipment? Are we fiddling with the paperclips, surfing the net and gossiping around the coffee machine rather than being properly managed to get on with the job? All these have been suggested in recent years to explain the paradox of Britain’s overwork and its economic underperformance. The Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt has said that poor management has a lot to answer for, while the government’s training body, learndirect, found in a study that office staff spend almost three hours a day unproductively – chasing information from colleagues, surfing the net or in unnecessary meetings.31
Britain’s productivity lag has generated more theories than any other of its economic indicators. Some argue that the cause lies in the labour force’s long ‘tail’ of low-skilled, low-productivity labour, which in other European economies might be in the dole queue rather than employed. Other theories focus on the spatial advantages of countries such as the United States, where huge economies of scale are possible on green-field sites. Another set of theorists focuses on the importance of capital density – how much is being invested in enterprises – and Britain’s low levels of capital investment. But one thing is clear, said Professor Michael Porter in his 2003 report for the Department of Trade and Industry, there are no further productivity gains to be had from employees working longer hours, or from getting more people into employment. ‘Labour force utilisation’ is already at a high level. The answers he suggested were a higher-skilled labour force, higher capital intensity and more effective use of technology.
There is a direct link between Britain’s overwork culture and our low productivity; it can be summed up as rather than working smarter, we’ve ended up working harder. This has been a concern of British policy-makers for many decades; as long ago as 1968 it was pointed out in government reports that long hours through overtime had become institutionalised in British industry, and were used to compensate for low productivity and to manage the peaks and troughs of manufacturing cycles. Trade unions became complicit in a bid to boost their members’ overtime earnings. Instead of investing in skills, technology and product innovation to boost productivity, companies simply push their low-skilled workforce to put more effort into a low-value process, argue economists Ewart Keep and Jonathan Payne.32 Government policy, they believe, has only reinforced this ‘low road’ approach, with a weakly regulated labour market which makes it so easy to hire and fire workers that it reduces the incentive to invest in skills and technology as a strategy to reduce labour costs. This is allied to ‘long-standing and persistent cultural beliefs, linked to the English class culture, that there exists a limited pool of intelligence or talent in the population to fulfil the most demanding jobs, whilst the majority are capable of little more than menial employment’. Thus both ends
