childcare between them in a relay, rather than one parent working long hours and the other caring; amongst Maev and Joshua’s colleagues, at least, that was the pattern. So the link between low pay and long hours is probably not as strong as it was when a whole family was often dependent on the one breadwinner. Where it is still strong is where overtime pay leverages a worker up into a higher income level, as happens in manufacturing and in skilled trades such as plumbing. It is also strong in some parts of the service sector – hotels and restaurants, for example – in London particularly in the ‘black economy’, where there are immigrants of uncertain status willing to take the work.
Pete and Sarah, Maev and Joshua may appear to have little in common at first glance, but they all have a powerful sense of being trapped. Pete would be the first to acknowledge that he has considerable advantages and negotiating power in the labour market, but Joshua and Maev have a clearer vision of what needs to change and how. Central to the dilemma of all of them is how their time is not their own. Sarah has gone ahead and made her choice, at the high price of abandoning her career. But for Pete, it isn’t clear how he can use his skills and talents to claim back his time. They are all caught up in the politics of time. What their lives reflect is how, over the last decade or so, time has become the battleground for a power conflict between employer and employee, arguably the battleground – and we didn’t notice.
The Big Squeeze
The traditional patterns of working time and individuals’ private lives which provided boundaries between work and rest have been erased. This ‘timelessness’ is one of the characteristics required of a flexible labour force. It takes on different characteristics in different jobs: shift systems which start early or finish late; on-call requirements; weekend working; an increase in night shifts. Work intrudes into a million bedrooms with pagers, Weepers, alarms to interrupt your rest – to check on financial markets, to make calls to another time zone. As in the television advertisement, you can phone up your bank at 2 a.m. and find someone on the line who is ‘perky’ and ready to answer your call; they could themselves be in another time zone, such as India. This timelessness is about the employee’s availability; instead of extra staffing, employers cut labour costs to the bone, and when there’s a surge in work, rely on motivating 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
