Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) These figures conceal the increasing polarisation of work between those who have none (16.4 per cent of households have no one in work

(#litres_trial_promo)) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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,

(#litres_trial_promo) and the proportion working over sixty hours has more than doubled, from 6 per cent to 13 per cent

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) A quarter of those who work long hours do so reluctantly ‘all or most of the time’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 I have skills in my head,’ she says, and adds that she was the one in her family who went the furthest in her studies, and that she had hoped to get to university. ‘But I know it’s my responsibility. I know the supervisors don’t consider it a big job. I don’t see them normally anyway, but you get feedback from other people on the ward.’

Maev refers to the humiliations of the job, and talks of the intense emotions on the ward at times, but she insists that she’s ‘been brought up not to make a fuss’. She’s hoping to get home sometime later in the year to visit her family, but she grimaces at the thought of the expectations of presents which will inevitably greet her on her arrival. Her hopes of change are pinned on the dream of going home with enough money to set up a business – a shop, and flats to rent perhaps – to support her family. That would require better pay, and for that she puts her energies into the union’s fight alongside the East London Community Organisation (TELCO) for a ‘living wage’. It took nine months to persuade the management of the hospital trust even to meet them, only for them to be told that the wages were set by the contractor. ISS have said they’re sympathetic to the campaign, but that market conditions (i.e. their contract with the hospital) don’t support a higher wage. Everyone dodges responsibility.

Joshua is in a similar plight to Maev. He’s been a cleaner at the hospital for sixteen years. He takes home about £212 a week, out of which he has to pay £50 child support, £60 rent, perhaps another £50 in bills, and he tries to send about £30 a month home to Jamaica for his mother and two children there. He’s not eligible for any benefit or tax credits, and some weeks his money runs out, so he has to go hungry until his wages are paid.

‘I catch up on one bill and then another, and end up a madman,’ he says unhappily. ‘I’m in arrears to the council, but there’s only £30 left for a week’s food and clothing.’ He doesn’t mind the work – he insists on showing me how clean the carpeted ward is – it’s the pay which makes him angry: just £4.79 an hour. He’s thought of signing up with an agency and taking a second job, but he’d have to travel, and ‘Sometimes I get tired, I’m just a human being.’ Walk into any organisation and there will be plenty of people like Maev and Joshua. They work long hours doing the tedious, repetitive work of cleaning in a burgeoning service economy. Only people with severely limited choices and little negotiating power in the labour market would ever take such jobs, and in London and the south-east that effectively requires a ready supply of immigrant labour. Without immigrants, much of the public sector services in the south-east would be on the point of implosion. They clean, they cook, they do the washing up, and because their work is classed as low-productivity, they earn wages barely sufficient to support one person – let alone the multiple dependants whom both Joshua and Maev support.

The conditions of work have seriously deteriorated as these types of services in the public sector have been contracted out to the private sector. The relationship between employee and employer has been blurred – many of the cleaners I spoke to rarely saw their ISS site manager, who visited the hospital maybe only once or twice a week. They worked alongside NHS staff, but now wore the logo of a company about which they knew nothing. One long-serving employee had once been, several years ago, to a presentation in the centre of London on ISS’s corporate vision for the future, and how it aimed at being the world’s biggest personal services company. ‘ISS is an absentee landlord,’ he commented, as incomprehensible and meaningless to him as a French-speaking St Petersburg landowner might once have been to a Russian peasant.

Even more importantly, contracting out has meant the loss of good overtime pay. Working overtime used to warrant as much as double pay, as did working on Sundays; it was how the low-paid managed to earn a ‘living wage’. But employees taken on under the new contracts have had their rights to overtime pay removed, and extra shifts are paid at the standard rate. Weekend work earns only a small premium; the time of these employees costs almost the same regardless of what point in the week or the day they are working. Long-time employees transferred from the NHS to the new contractors who have their pay and working conditions protected say that they are now less likely to get overtime: those shifts go to the more recent employees who aren’t entitled to the overtime pay.

It is this kind of development which has helped to loosen the link between low pay and long hours. The lowest levels of overtime working are in the lowest pay brackets, and the higher the hourly wage, the greater the proportion of people working overtime: only 39 per cent of employees earning under £5 an hour ever work overtime, compared to 61 per cent of those earning £10 or more.

(#litres_trial_promo) The introduction of the minimum wage has led to a slight decline in hours as employers cut down their use of labour to save money.

(#litres_trial_promo) Childcare is another constraint on low-paid long hours; its cost simply cancels out the advantage. Also likely is that poorer families opt for both parents to work different shifts and do the 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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;

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 1998