the public and the private sectors to function. Nearly 46 per cent of men and 32 per cent of women work more hours than they are contracted for.2 The problem is worst at the upper levels of the labour market, where in 2002 nearly 40 per cent of managers and senior officials were working more than fifty hours a week; over 30 per cent of professionals were doing likewise.3 But long hours also badly affect blue-collar workers in fields such as construction, manufacturing and transport: between a quarter and a third of plumbers, electricians, lorry drivers and security guards are working over forty-eight hours a week. It’s worse in the private sector than the public sector (17 per cent compared with 12 per cent work over forty-eight hours). Long hours are not an occasional blip in working life – they are structural, and they affect four million British workers. For about 2.4 million there’s no overtime pay; their organisations depend on motivating the free labour they need because it is one of their cheapest resources. Don’t employ more people, just devise an organisational culture which will ensure that people will give you their free time for free. And thousands like Pete do.
At least Tony is paid for his overtime. As a team leader on a car-plant assembly line in the Midlands, Tony often ends up doing a sixty-hour week. He’s well paid for it, he admits, but he’s increasingly resentful of how the company expects him to be totally available. Overtime can be called as late as 2.44 p.m. in the day, so it’s impossible to make any plans to pick up his daughter from school. Nor is there any choice about doing the overtime. Although the contractual hours are only thirty-nine per week, the overtime is compulsory, and the company can ask for as many as four and a half hours’ overtime a day. The company accommodates the usual peaks and troughs of manufacturing by demanding overtime from the slimmed-down workforce. If demand is particularly high, ‘production Saturdays’ 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
