Willing Slaves

How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

Madeleine Bunting

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780007163724
• eBook ISBN: 9780007405305
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A hard-hitting exposé of the overwork culture and modern management techniques that seduce millions of people to hand over the best part of their lives to their employer.

Work has come to increasingly dominate British national life. ‘Job intensification’ affects every shopfloor, office, classroom and hospital, as a cult of efficiency has driven a missionary magnetism of tighter deadlines and more exacting targets in the most exploitative and manipulative work culture developed since the Industrial Revolution.

What do we get in return for this hard work? Stagnant wages, job insecurity, stress, exhaustion; the British workforce has not been so powerless for over a century. ‘Willing Slaves’ exposes the paradox that, though we’re all being exploited, it’s work that has come to give our lives meaning: religion, political causes, family life have become secondary. This book reveals how this astonishing fraud has been perpetrated, how millions of workers know they face burnout but believe ‘there is no alternative’.

Bunting tells us how to take our lives back – and what will happen if we don’t.

Part One:
The Meaning of Overwork

1
Working All Hours

You spelt out how drab our lives are. Now, what about tomorrow? Do we don our seventies lapels, stir the masses, and stage a walk-out? I work in a part of the private sector that is cut-throat, our number has been pared down to a point that hardly sustains its own weight. Stirring these masses would result in a very feeble affair – and provide a sure route to joblessness to boot. This job is the only security I have. My parental responsibility doesn’t allow for jacking it all in to go off and massage whales or whatever’s hip these days. I’ve got to get two kids through puberty and university yet. And where will they live? What percentage of new graduates can raise the money to buy a garden shed, let alone a house of any description?

And better this depth of shit than the one that comes with skiving off. You only take a sicky here knowing that tomorrow’s deadlines are the day after’s heart attacks. In addition to the stockpiled workload, there are the accusatory silences of jaded colleagues. Best avoided, believe me. And anyone still waiting for some meaningful and positive intervention from management hasn’t yet shed the delusion that gives way to abject despair.

So working oneself into an early grave seems the sensible thing to do. In reality, I needed to be reminded of how bad things really are, and you did just that. I’m buggered if I’m going to spend this year in this particular drab room doing this particularly thankless task. I’ve resolved to get the hell out and find something else.

When I met Pete, I found none of the bitter flamboyance of the email he’d sent me. It would be hard to imagine a man less likely to stage a walk-out. He was in the RAF for fourteen years, and it still shows in his reserve and slight formality of manner. He’s a technical consultant for a French multinational, working out of an office in the Midlands, but is often on the road. He makes an unlikely revolutionary.

He is contracted to work 37.5 hours a week, and he reckons that he has to put in, on average, another twelve hours or so. Add in the hour-long commute to and from the office, and most of his conscious life is taken up by work – it even wakes him in the small hours. Sometimes, in the run-up to a launch or when he’s travelling a lot, it will be more. For all that, he’s on £31,000 a year, and of course there’s no overtime pay; if there was, the company would owe him another £646 a month – that’s an extra 23 per cent of his salary, he says, working it out on his calculator as we talk.

The pressure and the hours have been getting worse. His department has been downsized by a third, but it’s still expected to meet the same revenue targets. He has colleagues who work much harder than him, taking large amounts of work home, and his boss (eleven years younger than forty-five-year-old Pete, and with no children) has ‘enormous amounts of energy which he pours into his job and does the work of more than one person’.

There’s a steadiness to Pete which is probably much valued by his clients, and it probably also stands him in good stead in holding off the pressure of these colleagues’ commitment – ‘They live to work,’ he comments. He takes pride in his work and regards himself as diligent and conscientious, but he vehemently rejects any idea of ambition. It simply costs too much.

He’s tried talking to his boss about the long hours and the workload. His boss is sympathetic, and promises to make representations to senior management, but nothing has happened. Pete believes that he didn’t make the representations clearly enough, for fear that it would harm his own reputation. Pete doesn’t know any of the senior management – they work at another office – so this is effectively a headless organisation, where responsibility always belongs to someone else. There is one senior executive Pete knows, but he is afraid that if he bypassed his boss to talk to him his job would be at risk. He heard about the European Union Working Time Regulations which limit the working week to forty-eight hours, but it had no impact on him – the paperwork was shoved behind a cupboard, he says. In any case, they have had little impact in the UK because of an opt-out which allows companies to ask employees to sign a waiver – a fifth of the British workforce have signed.¹

Inevitably, the pressure of the job spills over into his home life. Pete’s partner is a further education lecturer and works three evenings a week, so the household timetable is a precarious juggling act, with Pete spending time with his children from his former marriage. He emailed:

Anyone who strives to meet the demands of work overload will take this stress home with them: poor sleep quality, an inability to engage in evening conversation, a ‘Fuck it’ attitude to bills, shopping, housework, parent phoning, friend phoning, eating and sex. I rescue each of these when they reach crisis point but it usually coincides with when I’m least able to act. Collectively, and to me at least, these indicate psychological depression, though not serious enough to be recognised as such by my unsympathetic GP.

The point about Pete is that he is unexceptional. He’s not in a high-pressured metropolitan labour market where telephone-number salaries are the recompense for demanding hard work. He does a good job for a good company, yet none of that is enough. He has a profound sense that the demands his job makes on him are unjust, and that his company is making profits from his free labour.

Things should be better for Sarah. She works in the public sector, and her office allows flexitime. But it isn’t working out that way, and the demands of the job are affecting her health. A twenty-seven-year-old with two degrees working for the Department of Health in Yorkshire, she’s at a middle management level, but after only eighteen months in the job she’s already had enough. She works an average of forty-five hours a week – eight more than she is contracted for:

My immediate boss is a very old-fashioned civil servant, and although the department has flexitime, he doesn’t grasp it. Sometimes I put my foot down; I’ve tried sticking to the contracted hours, but if the work’s there, I’m expected to do it. I’ve laid down some ground-rules – I have to leave early on Wednesdays to attend a class, but I make up for it by getting in before 7.30 a.m. I’m often at work between 7.30 and 8 a.m., and stay until 6 p.m.

Unlike Pete, she’s made the decision to leave. It will mean a cut of 50 per cent in her and her husband’s joint income, so they’re moving to a cheaper housing market to reduce their mortgage: ‘I was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid, and I feel it was because I couldn’t manage my diet and exercise properly, I was eating two meals a day at my desk. I didn’t have a lunch hour, perhaps just a quick surf on the net for twenty minutes with a sandwich.’

Her husband, also in the civil service, has a long commute on top of his long hours; he has to be up at 5.30 a.m. to beat the traffic, and he’s often not home until after 7 p.m.:

By the time we’ve had supper and washed up, we’re shattered. There’s a huge amount of recovering at the weekends as well as the domestic chores we just can’t face in the evening such as cleaning, washing and shopping. We’re having difficulty conceiving; we’ve been trying for nearly a year, but we’re so shattered and we’re not eating properly and not relaxing and all that affects fertility. I’ve spoken to my GP, and he says rest more and relax. The decision to leave is not one I’ve taken lightly. I did a degree in politics and social policy and then a masters, but it’s just not worth it. I feel I’m just existing – not living.

There are hundreds of thousands of men and women like Pete and Sarah whose donations of time enable organisations in both 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 prize their entitlement to autonomy, have lost control of that crucial element of the employment contract, their own time? There were never any negotiations over it, let alone barricades or picket lines; it happened by stealth, piecemeal across thousands of offices, in millions of relationships, where that bit extra was demanded of the workforce…and apart from private grumbles, they complied.

There is another side to long hours which is much more straightforward. It is a familiar tale of cheap, low-skill labour which has always relied on long hours of overtime to compensate for low pay. The power relations of the labour contract are more clear-cut and harsh here, but at least the overtime is paid and every extra half-hour is accounted for.

Maev and Joshua work as cleaners in a London hospital. Her average working week is fifty-two hours, twenty-five minutes, because she has chosen to do a double shift. She’s at work by 7.30 a.m., and she finally finishes her second shift at 8 p.m. – with a break of an hour and three-quarters between shifts around tea time. Over at the other end of the hospital, Joshua works about fifty-four hours a week, with a similarly broken day. Both of them have had to sign a waiver on the Working Time Regulations, as requested by ISS, the Danish multinational company which employs them.

Maev has been working at this hospital for less than a year. She had a clerical job with better pay, but she wanted to cut down her travelling costs, so she took what the hospital offered her. As she’s employed by a contractor, she isn’t eligible for the overtime rates, sick pay or pension which NHS staff receive. When I first saw her in the ward she wore the blank, inscrutable expression adopted by those whose presence – let alone their labour – is rarely acknowledged. It was as if she had willed her own absence from her place and her task. But the moment we were introduced, she was transformed. She became human again, with a smile which animated her entire face.

Later, in a small office used by the union she belongs to, Unison, she explained why she works such long hours. She came to Britain in the early nineties; now aged forty-two, she is supporting most of her family back in Africa. She saves more than half her take-home pay to send home.

I send about £100 a week out of about £200 a week take-home pay. My rent is £54.12 and there’s phone bills on top of that. I had three sisters and one died last year from AIDS. Another is now very sick and both their husbands have died. I have one niece at university and I pay her fees. If I don’t she might have to go out with men and get married quickly – and then I might be left alone. My niece appreciates what I’m doing and has sent me two phone messages saying thank you. I have four other nieces and a nephew who lives with my mother. I’m helping all of them. I want to set up a business back home and I want to build a house there and then I want to devote myself to helping women organise and train themselves.

Several times as she talked, Maev’s voice would trail away, and as she fiddled with a piece of paper she stared blankly at the keyboard and desk in front of her. The long silences spoke of her frustrations, of how she has sacrificed her life for her relatives back in Africa, and her anxieties for their welfare. Maev knows she’s overqualified for the job, but she takes pride in doing it properly, pointing out that she doesn’t have to wait to be told to clean things such as the dirty mop-heads: ‘I don’t like ISS because of the pay. It’s not my joy to be cleaning when ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: The Meaning of Overwork
• Part Two The Slavedrivers: Who’s Making us Work so Hard?
• Part Three Why Do We Do it?
• Part Four The Human Cost
• Part Five What Can be Done?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• P.S.
• Praise
• By the same author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher