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

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       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.

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