on working lives. In the context of periods of high unemployment, a lightly regulated labour market, increasing inequality and high levels of perceived insecurity, I seek to disentangle how the dictates of the market, with its cult of rationalism and efficiency, extend into people’s individual lives. How and why do people collude with a system which, they are well aware, often does not have their interests at heart? What kind of trade-offs do they make, and why? What degree of choice do they have? How willing are these wage slaves? And finally, why is it that the choices become individualised, and that many of us have lost virtually all interest in collective reform of our working lives?
It is in the workplace that the pressures of market disciplines such as competitiveness and cost-effective efficiency impinge most directly on people’s daily experience. Those disciplines are often at odds with our intuitive understanding of effectiveness, not to mention our ethics and sense of purpose. They distort and erode the quality of relationships with colleagues, students, pupils and patients. This was a rich source of anger for many working in the public sector, where employees struggle to meet requirements for efficiency while maintaining their own vision of the nature – spontaneous, unpredictable, intuitive – of human relationships.
Paid employment is, for many, their only experience of collaboration with other people – in what other way do they work with others to achieve a common goal? – and it is one increasingly poisoned by competition, insecurity and stress. As the economist E.F. Schumacher argued, ‘What people actually do is normally more important, for understanding them, than what they say, or what they spend their money on, or what they own, or how they vote.’2 Intense competition is everywhere in our culture, and is used for our entertainment in hugely popular television programmes such as Big Brother and The Weakest Link. This reflects our fears about how our workplaces are organised, the laws they operate under and our total failure to imagine a process of reform, let alone transformation. ‘It’s the way of the world, and there’s no alternative,’ is the refrain. The eighties in Britain saw mass redundancies, high unemployment and savage industrial restructuring which hit manufacturing and the lowest-skilled hardest. The 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century were no less destructive, although the process was quieter and more insidious, hitting white-collar managerial and professional jobs and leading to a steady intensification of work as people were required to do more with fewer staff. The pressures hit particularly hard in the public sector, undermined by a crisis in the legitimacy of the principle of public provision. Between 40 and 60 per cent of the entire labour force found their workloads increasing, the hours got longer and the stress levels soared.
It is this experience which is the main focus of this book: the burnout of white-collar Britain. I wanted to see not the worst examples of British employment (of which there are many, as Polly Toynbee brilliantly describes in her book Hard Work), but to find out why 46 per cent – nearly half – of those working in even the best companies in the UK say they are exhausted at the end of a day’s work. I chose to interview companies that were not the worst employers but the best, and were recognised as such in the Sunday Times Best Companies list.
Just what is making work so hard? Technology has played a crucial role: firstly by increasing the mechanisms for accountability for one’s work and thus depriving many of autonomy; and secondly by eroding the boundaries around work – the routines of set working hours, the spatial separation between work and home – which for the entire industrial era had given people privacy and rest. The arrival in the nineties of the mass use of mobile phones, email, the internet and home PCs has made workers more available than ever to the pressures that their employers can bring to bear on them. We haven’t even started to think how to put in place new boundaries, either legislative or cultural, and instead have been seduced by the rhetoric of the liberation and autonomy brought by technology, when in fact it can bring the reverse of both.
The policies of the eighties and nineties (Tony Blair’s Labour government has done little more than modify the Thatcherite model) were based, John Gray argued in his book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), on ‘the theory that market freedoms are natural and political restraints on markets are artificial. The truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.’ The speeding-up of communication, trade and capital flows generates unpredictable and constant change: all that filters down to daily lives, where individuals struggle to adjust – to speed up their pace of work, to stretch their working hours to get the job done, to adapt family routines to the 24/7 service economy, to find new jobs and acquire new skills – and to make sense of those constant necessary adjustments. As Gray puts it, ‘The imperatives of flexibility and mobility imposed by deregulated labour markets put particular strain on traditional modes of family life. How can families meet for meals when both parents work on shifts? What becomes of families when the job market pulls parents apart?’ Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown proudly point to the present low unemployment rate as the product of the UK’s lightly regulated labour market, but they overlook the price we pay in long working hours, exhaustion and rising stress.
The great failure of market economies is that they take no measure of externalities: if something doesn’t have a market value, it doesn’t exist; this is what economists call ‘the tragedy of the commons’. The emergence and development of the environmental movement pioneered the understanding of how markets, in a bid to drive down costs, ‘externalise’ them – or, to put it more crudely, get someone else (usually the taxpayer) to pay for them; for example, polluting a river is cheaper than processing the waste product and recycling it. In just the same way, markets externalise the social costs of their ways of working; it is left to individuals – and their overworked NHS doctors – to deal with the exhaustion, work-related depression, stress and the care deficit.
Just as the late twentieth century grasped the fact that there was a crisis of environmental sustainability, the twenty-first century is beginning to grasp the dimensions of a comparable crisis, this time of human sustainability – a scarcity of the conditions which nurture resilient, secure individuals, families, friendships and communities. Who has time to care for whom in the overwork culture? The price is paid not just by children, but by their exhausted parents, the lost friends and the lonely elderly. The consequences of this crisis can be traced in the rising incidence of depression – by 2020, it is predicted, it will be the world’s most prevalent disease – as well as in family breakdown and the rise in loneliness. This crisis of human sustainability is not just an affliction of Western developed nations, but a consequence of neo-liberal economic development, and is evident in the fast-growing cities of developing countries, where rapid urbanisation is coinciding with the rise of female employment.3 At its most dangerous, the crisis triggers the defensive coping mechanisms of finding substitute security in rigid, clear-cut ways of thinking which spill over into fundamentalism. This crisis cannot entirely be placed at the door of work, but employment is one of the prime causes; it is driving a stress epidemic as more and more is expected of employees, and it is depriving people of both the time and the energy to lead lives with a rich diversity of experience. Lives in which they have time to fulfil their responsibilities to others, be they children, the elderly, friends, neighbours or fellow citizens, and to develop interests and hobbies.
Job satisfaction fell sharply in the nineties. Yet there has been little protest: both trade union membership and the number of days lost to strike action are sharply down since the eighties. There has been no great effort to question why work is getting tougher – we accepted that it was the competitive pressures of the market, or the drive for public sector reform. The result is this undercurrent of frustration, and at its worst quiet despair. Instead of joining a trade union, people sought private solutions, treating themselves to aromatherapy or a nice holiday in the sun instead. The response of the trade union movement, beleaguered by the loss of members and of jobs in its manufacturing heartland, still battling to re-establish its legitimacy in national life, has often been piecemeal and ineffective.
