Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. Madeleine Bunting

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СКАЧАТЬ This has been true throughout the economy, affecting most sectors of the labour market. If long hours have particularly hit white-collar Britain, work intensification has been across the board in both the public and the private sector, from school classroom to factory floor. Many of the cost savings attributed to contracting out public sector services have been achieved through work intensification: cleaners have more wards to clean, and catering assistants have more meals to prepare. The killer combination is when both the hours of the job and its intensity have increased, and that is usually the case: surveys show that the single biggest cause of long hours is having too big a workload.² ‘More for less’ is an old tool used by employers to reduce labour costs and improve competitive advantage, and the fight against it has historically been a large part of the trade union struggle, while the challenge to leverage up work effort has been a central preoccupation for management theorists. But the balance of power has tipped decisively against trade unions in Britain. They have lost members and lost battles, and with a few notable exceptions have failed to combat intensification.

      One crude, anecdotal measure of job intensification is that the British used to be famous for what the French called ‘tea-breakism’. Ask managers about teabreaks now, and they laugh with incredulity at how quickly they have become a distant memory. Office workers sip lattes and espressos at their keyboards: perhaps it’s only possible to maintain their workrate with large and regular doses of caffeine. Such is the pace of work that over half the British workforce say they are too busy even to go to the loo.³

      Economist Francis Green acknowledges that work intensity is notoriously difficult to measure – how can anyone assess how much someone is putting into their work? – but the best available measure is how people regard their own levels of effort.⁴ Drawing data from nationally representative samples,⁵ he compared responses to the statement ‘My job requires that I work very hard.’ In 1992, 32 per cent of workers ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement; by 1997 it had jumped to 40 per cent. Women were slightly more likely to agree than men, and the figures were higher in the public than in the private sector. Top of the intensification league was the education sector, where the proportion strongly agreeing rose by 14 per cent, to well over half of all teachers. These increases are dramatic.

      Green also looked at workers’ sense of their ‘discretionary effort’ – how much they choose to put into the job, as opposed to what they feel is asked of them. Again, this showed an increase in the number replying ‘a lot’, from 68.4 per cent in 1992 to 71.8 per cent in 1997; women indicated a more dramatic increase, from 69.9 per cent to 75.9 per cent. Green then looked at European surveys which asked workers whether they had to work at high speeds, and how often they had to work to deadlines. Those reporting working at very high speed ‘all’ or ‘almost all’ of the time rose from 17 per cent to 25 per cent between 1991 and 1996. When Green used these figures to create an index of work intensity for western Europe he found that Britain outstripped all other European countries for the fastest rise in work intensity. Some countries, such as Germany, Denmark and Greece, showed almost no increase at all.

      Green’s analysis is borne out by the European Working Conditions Surveys (EWCS), which asked respondents in all EU countries whether they had to work to speed or to tight deadlines.⁶ The general trend in most countries has been up, but the UK is well ahead. More recent findings from the same survey indicate that the rate of intensification may have eased in the late nineties – a sharp push in the first five years of the decade may have subsequently stabilised.⁷

      Green’s analysis of the situation in Britain is echoed in the findings of the Job Insecurity and Work Intensification Report of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which asked whether employees had experienced an increase in the speed of work and the effort they put into their jobs over the previous five years (1992-97), and found that 64 per cent reported the former and 61 per cent the latter. This was a dramatic increase on a study a decade earlier, in 1986, which reported 55.6 per cent and 38.1 per cent respectively.⁸ Intensification began in manufacturing in the eighties, and accelerated in the nineties when it hit professionals and white-collar workers in particular, found the European Working Conditions Surveys for 1995-96 and 2000. The evidence of white-collar blues is underpinned by a 1999 survey for the Institute of Management which found that 69 per cent of its members reported an increased workload in the previous year.

      Marx argued that there were three main characteristics of labour under capitalism: it was progressively deskilled as part of the mechanisation process; the surplus value accrued in production was appropriated by the owner of capital; and the latter sought always to reduce the ‘porosity’ of the working day. By porosity, Marx meant those moments of downtime which were interspersed in the routine of the day – the minutes spent waiting for supplies to arrive on the assembly line, for a machine to be mended or prepared, or for someone to arrive for a meeting. On the first characteristic Marx was plain wrong, but on the third he foresaw one of the central characteristics of the late-twentieth-century labour market – reducing porosity, or intensification, has become a crucial component of efficiency and performance. What managers have sought to do over the last two decades is to whittle away all ‘unproductive time’. Shifts have been rescheduled to eliminate breaks, and the organisation of work has been refined to ensure a steady flow of work.

      One of the ways in which this last is achieved is through ‘functional flexibility’; employees have been trained to do more than one job, so that if a machine breaks down or there is a delay in stocks arriving, they can do something else and then turn back to the original job. Francis Green found a strong link between this kind of flexibility and agreement with the statement ‘My job requires that I work very hard.’ Companies instituted multi-tasking – giving someone several jobs to do, and leaving them to co-ordinate the different tasks in the most time-efficient way. The aim is to ensure a continuous workflow, so there will be no time wasted waiting at the employer’s expense. The conclusion of one study of six organisations was that the whole ‘wage-effort’ relationship is being restructured in several different ways, by reducing non-working time and by increasing the effort required.⁹ The study quotes a machine operative from one of the organisations it looked at: ‘We’re running the presses with four men, five if you’re lucky…stress and fatigue are beginning to creep in. Young men in their twenties are tired. I hear of people coming in at six and I say, what are you going to do with the afternoon? “I’m going to bed.”…There used to be a lot of activity, there used to be football and God knows what else after, they haven’t got the time.’

      The study described the same process in the public sector, and quoted a local authority employee: ‘It’s run more like a business…whereas before you’d go in and it was like a more friendly basis. You’d go in and you’d do what was required of you and then [the patients] want the company, cup of tea, sit down and have a chat, whereas you can’t do that now because time’s money.’

      Green cites two influential management techniques as important in speeding up workflow: total quality management and just-in-time working: ‘The imperative of total quality management is that many more individuals have to take continued responsibility for quality checks and improvements and so on. Rather than wait for someone to tell them what to do, they have to get on and do it.’ Just-in-time aims to perfect the logistical flow of materials so that whatever is needed for a task arrives – just in time.

      In an attempt to understand the process of work intensification and how it came about, I went to an industrial estate on the outskirts of an old coalmining town in the Midlands. This is the home of Saltfillas – the name has been changed – a small family company. From the windows of its offices СКАЧАТЬ