Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

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

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.

Willing Slaves

How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

Madeleine Bunting

To Simon

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u035adcc4-5368-5f40-aab6-91f4724551ac)

Title Page (#u819a4187-1be4-570e-8f20-8529bc7a5eb9)

Introduction (#uec242c40-0f31-59d0-b0bd-13bf95d207d7)

Part One: The Meaning of Overwork (#u82d31dea-61fd-5bb0-af1b-edeb958e85b6)

1 Working All Hours (#u6187a9c0-42f2-5a1e-b572-7a38fbda0123)

2 All in a Day’s Work (#uc8996aa9-4b50-5c2e-9b6c-73c501ac854f)

3 Putting Your Heart and Soul Into it (#u1cebbe51-3e84-5214-82cd-d2bf1a33873b)

Part Two The Slavedrivers: Who’s Making us Work so Hard? (#litres_trial_promo)

4 Missionary Management (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Government, the Hard Taskmaster (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Three Why Do We Do it? (#litres_trial_promo)

6 You’re on Your Own (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Four The Human Cost (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Keeping Body and Soul Together (#litres_trial_promo)

8 The Care Deficit (#litres_trial_promo)

9 An Unfinished Revolution (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Five What Can be Done? (#litres_trial_promo)

10 In Our Own Time (#litres_trial_promo)

11 The Politics of Well-Being (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. (#litres_trial_promo)

About the author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Questioning the World (#litres_trial_promo)

LIFE at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)

FAVOURITE BOOKS (#litres_trial_promo)

A Writing Life (#litres_trial_promo)

About the book (#litres_trial_promo)

A New Generation (#litres_trial_promo)

Read on (#litres_trial_promo)

Have You Read? (#litres_trial_promo)

If You Loved This, You Might Like… (#litres_trial_promo)

Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#ulink_43e2c1bd-32ba-51c3-9ebb-b236bb813f7a)

The starting point for this book has been readers of my column in the Guardian. Whenever I touched on the subject of overwork, I would be overwhelmed by the volume and emotion of the emails I received in response. It was like a burst water main – a torrent of anger, bewilderment and sometimes despair. Here was a source of deep frustration beneath the surface which fitted awkwardly into the public space allocated to it in the national conversation. ‘Work-life balance’ was an inadequate label for the set of issues which stirred these passionate emails and letters. When I started researching the book, one of the first things I did was to set up a column on the Guardian’s website called ‘Working Lives’. I appealed to readers for their experiences, opinions and ideas on how things could change. The response was astonishing, as the emails poured in on every aspect of their work. Few of them, if any, could be put down merely to the sender’s grumbles about his or her job; I made a point of steering clear of individual injustices to focus on the mainstream. The underlying theme was the sheer invasive dominance of work in people’s lives, and the price it exacted on their health and happiness.

‘It’s not that I completely hate my job, it does have its good points. It’s just the amount of my valuable time that it takes up. Employers these days want blood, and if you’re not prepared to give it, you’re not part of the “team”. Our society should learn to relax more and stop working as slaves to the “economy”. It’s time to call a halt to this never-ending pursuit for more and more money. It’s time to reclaim our lives back from the so-called “employers” and it’s time to start living our lives as they should be lived, more life, less work,’ wrote a storeman in Hertfordshire.