Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

Looking back at a distinguished business career over several decades, Harris is unequivocal: ‘The pace of work is getting worse, there’s no doubt about that. It’s the rate of change in globalisation – you’re subject to competition from people who are far bigger than you and who do things you’ve never thought of. Wherever you look you see the global competition, and you no longer have the forms of protection because of deregulation.’

Globalisation is a notoriously large piece of baggage into which all manner of phenomena can be packed, but the most significant are information technology and deregulation, and the way they interact. They put organisations under intense pressure to remain competitive, and the bigger the potential pickings, the sharper the competition. It is that need for competitiveness which becomes the cause and justification of work intensification. For example, it was trade deregulation which opened up Saltfillas’ UK market to the European company which undercut it, and egg had to fend off competitors from Europe and the United States. Transnational corporations closely measure the comparative performance of the labour forces in the different countries where they have affiliates, found the Joseph Rowntree Report on Job Insecurity and Intensification. This makes for intense intra-firm rivalry, and companies move production to cheaper labour markets.

(#litres_trial_promo) These factors were profoundly unsettling for British workers, because of the ease and speed with which corporations could move production from one country to another, claimed researchers David Ladipo and Frank Wilkinson.

They also found that workers were unsettled by the ‘impatience’ of dominant stakeholders, and that ‘managers and employees were conscious of the increasingly “contingent” commitment of their investors’. As Will Hutton puts it: ‘The more liquid a financial asset, the less committed the owner must be to the long-term health of the underlying investment. If the going gets tough or conditions change the investor has already made provision for his or her escape: sell the financial asset, withdraw the short-term loan, rather than share the risk of restructuring and of managing any crisis.’

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The connection between the convolutions of a company’s share price and hard work is not straightforward. Did the plummeting of Marconi’s share price in 2001 increase its employees’ workload? Or the spectacular gyrations of lastminute.com’s shares affect the hours its workers put in? The fluctuations of the stock market are one of the factors reinforcing the logic of competition and efficiency which undermine any resistance and inculcate insecurity, the survive-or-die mentality which enables managers to push through forms of work intensification and to motivate high levels of effort. Business psychologist Jock Encombe argues that the impact of the stock market is intense on private sector organisations, and can’t be overestimated: ‘The sheer pressure to deliver the numbers is systemic, because if the share price suffers, you get taken over.’

This was a theme which emerged strongly in another company I visited. Travel Inn, a budget hotel chain which made it to the Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For list, is a young, rapidly growing company in the expanding services and leisure sector, where much employment is expected to be created in the next decade. It is owned by Whitbread pic, and its workforce is young – the average age is only just over thirty. I was curious to see what made this generation work hard; they hadn’t lived through mass unemployment, so how did the ‘survive-or-die’ competition of the market bite on them?

Simon Mahon, the young general manager of Travel Inn’s newly opened 165-bed hotel in Liverpool, would be the first to admit that launches are always difficult and require long hours. He had a clear sense of the kind of hotel he wanted to run, and it was proving hard to achieve the standards he wanted. Why? Because the labour costs had been slashed in the launch budget. ‘I have to lower costs. There’s been a cost-efficiency drive on the food and beverages side. We have to get the right team ethic. There’s no slack in the system, and that gives the operator [manager] hell.’

I told him I’d noticed that there were only two people to serve in both the bar and the restaurant. As they ran from one disgruntled customer to the next, they looked panicked. Mahon, as a conscientious manager, was alarmed. So why the need for the cost efficiencies? ‘It’s corporate strategy to cut costs – it’s what makes the company more profitable and gives the shareholders benefits so they will invest more. That’s what my boss would say.’

‘What would you say?’ I asked.

‘I’d say that’s a short-term view, and that the customer will choose the company they like, and that it’s the fat cats who are the ones who get the benefits.’ Then he added, ‘My labour budget is very tight – I manage that, I don’t complain – the key is to get people trained. Two people could have managed that situation [the bar and the restaurant] if they had been trained. The cost saving was forced on me, and in the end we under-recruited so that there was no slack in the system, no allowance for any of the team leaving. We used to over-recruit by 25 per cent to allow for some slack. Training has been cut from six weeks to four weeks.’

When there was a staff shortage, managers had to help out. Mahon called over one of his deputies, Martin, to find out why he was working on his day off. ‘I’m working seventy to eighty hours a week at the moment,’ said Martin, ‘but we’re well paid – I’m on £22,000 with a bonus of perhaps another £5,000. In a few weeks it will be down to forty-five hours, but if I did that now, the hotel wouldn’t gel. It’s one to two months of being there, being very available, then the whole team comes together. I don’t get paid for today.’

Twenty-four-year-old Keri, the head of housekeeping, is also in on her day off to cover for shortages of housekeeping staff. She has a two-year-old child, and looks exhausted. ‘Today I’m cleaning rooms because we’re short of staff and I don’t want to put more work on my team – they’re all working overtime already. I need another ten part-time staff. It’s my day off today, and I’m supposed to finish at 2 p.m. At the moment I’m working six days a week because I want it to be right. Opening a hotel is very hard work. I’m enjoying it so much – it’s a new challenge for me, even though I’m cleaning rooms. I don’t get paid overtime, it’s for my personal goal; we have audits to achieve and I don’t want to let my team or the manager down by not giving 100 per cent. I get paid £18,000 plus another 25 per cent bonus.’ She jokes, ‘It probably works out at about £1 an hour.’

As Martin and Keri appeared at our table on their days off even Mahon seemed somewhat taken aback by their hard work, but he admitted he was not very different: ‘What frightens me,’ he said, ‘is that I don’t do anything else except work – I’ve no hobbies.’ He said things were about to change; now they’d launched he’d have the freedom to recruit more staff, and the management team would get proper time off, but he had a keen sense of the competitive pressure on the company; ‘For a short-term profit, you don’t invest in hotels. If we don’t get the investment we won’t succeed as a company. The return on capital employed on new build is 17 per cent over three years, and there are more attractive investment options, so we have to keep up that profitability. By 2007, supply will outstrip demand for budget hotels, and we will be fighting in the most difficult marketplace – and we will be fighting with a product which is three to four years old.’

My most striking impression as I left the Travel Inn in a dusty back street of Liverpool’s city centre, its new paint still gleaming, was that the brunt of the hard work fell on junior and middle management. As Les Worrall and Cary Cooper conclude in their four-year study of managers, ‘The prime driver to the creation of the long working hours culture is the cumulative impact of years of cost cutting where managers are just “plain overloaded” as they pick up the tasks left behind from delayered and redundant posts.’ They ask: ‘In an economy where competitive pressures can only get more intense, what can we really do to combat these forces?’

(#litres_trial_promo) The staff in Liverpool were putting in the long unpaid hours of overtime to compensate for the company’s cuts on labour costs, but that didn’t diminish their commitment; the company’s bonus schemes, incentives and career progression programmes had reconciled them to the enormous effort required of them. What legitimised the company’s claim on them was their understanding of the competitiveness of the market; they even seemed to find the toughness of their position exhilarating – something that the company seems to know works to its advantage: Travel Inn’s induction programme is called ‘Mission Innpossible’.

Hard Work is Not Enough

If globalisation and its rhetoric of competition and efficiency convinces many of the need to increase their effort, what part is played by the much-quoted theme of job insecurity? What contribution does the P45 play in keeping people’s noses to the grindstone? The theory runs that the unpredictable and sharp fluctuations in the global market lead to companies needing a flexible labour force – one which they can downsize without too great a cost, which they can shift to new tasks easily, and which they can increase through the use of agency, temporary and contract labour at short notice for short periods. Loyalty and hard work for a company no longer count for anything, and redundancies are an unavoidable fact of life, part of the restructuring companies continually have to implement if they are to remain competitive. The agile company has to delayer and downsize. These themes were pervasive in the media throughout the nineties: Francis Green has calculated that by the middle of that decade the phrases ‘job security’ or ‘job insecurity’ occurred on average one and a half times every day in the British press. But the media coverage didn’t reflect reality: the average length of time spent in a job in Britain actually increased significantly for all types of work between 1992 and 2000, and the UK’s proportion of temporary work is well below the EU average.

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The intense media interest reflected two trends. Firstly, British workers’ remarkably high level of fear of losing their jobs. According to OECD figures, in 2001 Britain was second only to South Korea for the proportion (41 per cent) of workers ‘unsure of a job even if they perform well’. Interestingly, British workers’ sense of insecurity concerned their own personal position, not that of their company: the percentage saying they were worried about their company’s future was well below the OECD average. What makes this such a disturbing statistic is that even if the company was successful, and they themselves were doing a good job, many British workers did not feel secure.

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Another international survey found that the drop in job security between 1985 and 1995 was sharper in Britain than in any other European country, falling from 70 per cent to 48 per cent.

(#litres_trial_promo) There is no sign of this anxiety easing. In a 2003 study Britain topped the international insecurity league, well ahead of the US and the rest of Europe.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the same year, a survey by the trade union Unifi (it represents many clerical workers, particularly in the banking sector) found that over half its members expected job cuts in the next year. There is a strong correlation between levels of insecurity and long hours: the highest rate of insecurity is found among full-time workers in the prime of their careers; managers are among the least secure.

(#litres_trial_promo) This level of fear plays a considerable role in influencing Britain’s overwork culture, yet its causes are far from clear. Is it the legacy of the mass unemployment in the eighties, or is it related to wider issues about Britain’s sense of decline in world status, and of falling behind in the economic race?

The second trend which clearly influenced the media interest in job insecurity in the nineties was that professional and managerial jobs experienced it for the first time. The middle classes were catching up with some of the experience of the working classes in the eighties – though the levels of unemployment were not comparable. Francis Green found a decline in levels of job insecurity over the period 1986 to 2001 in the British workforce, with the exception of white-collar workers; they were the most secure in 1986 and the least secure in 1997 – bringing them into line with blue-collar workers. At the same time, workers who had been in their jobs for a long time showed an increase in insecurity which brought them into line with those who had been in their jobs a very short time. Questions about the likelihood of getting another job also improved for most workers, but not for those in professional and managerial categories.

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The encroachment of job flexibility into the middle classes is evident in the growth of temporary work; for example, the use of short-term contracts is now common in higher education, information technology and the media. In particular, self-employment used to be dominated by construction and distribution workers, but by 1999 the proportion of the self-employed who were in business, education or the health services had nearly doubled to 29 per cent; and the self-employed have a tendency to work longer hours than average. The reality of life for the famous ‘portfolio worker’ juggling several work commitments (a concept which generated more media interest than actual exemplars) is usually insecurity and long hours.

These measures of job insecurity starkly reveal people’s fears of losing their jobs, and the consequences if they do – such as the difficulty of finding another job, the risk of defaulting on mortgage payments and the problem of caring for dependants. But they don’t tap into the range of insecurities around ‘doing the job well’, promotion and the increasingly precarious path of upward mobility which in managerial and professional groups can be a major motivational issue. It is this form of insecurity and uncertainty which often lies behind the syndrome of ‘presenteeism’ – being seen to be working late – which has grown stronger in the last fifteen years.

It is driven by several factors. Firstly, there is a much greater assessment of performance, with over 80 per cent of British workplaces now implementing some form of appraisal system, and for a third of workers pay is now linked to performance.

(#litres_trial_promo) There has also been a big increase in pay assessed on team performance, which now covers more than one worker in five; peer pressure becomes a major driver of overwork as employees don’t want to let their colleagues down. Secondly, flat, fluid organisations make promotion harder to achieve – the pyramid sharpens to a smaller point, the concept of the middle-class career is less clear-cut, there is no smooth progression up the corporate hierarchy, and chance plays a bigger part – being in the right place at the right time can be critical. Long hours can become a crucial determinant of success, either because they are a way of demonstrating superior commitment over rivals or because they simply increase the chances of being in the right place. Thirdly, 70 per cent of British managers are affected by major organisational restructuring every year,

(#litres_trial_promo) which increases the stakes – the right office politics and you’re in charge of a major project or department, play it badly and you’re restructured out of a job altogether. As one banker reflected ruefully, he took his eye off the ball for a few months because he was getting married, and in the departmental restructuring he lost his job. Nearly 60 per cent of managers say they are spending far more time on organisational politics: overwork involves not just doing your job well, but making sure you still have the job. Eighty per cent of employees didn’t feel they were involved in the decisions around restructuring, and nearly 50 per cent didn’t feel the reasons for it were adequately explained. Its impact is destructive, with nearly half of managers reporting less loyalty and motivation as a result, and over 60 per cent reporting lower morale.

(#litres_trial_promo) Restructuring may seem necessary to adapt to changing market conditions, but the fallout is devastating on the level of trust within the organisation: only one British worker in three trusts his or her boss ‘a lot’.

Insecurity can become a crucial ingredient of how work is organised – for example how meetings are run, who insists on being at them, and how people use technology, particularly email. People insist on being copied into material so they stay in the know, and they get hooked on checking their email. Insecurity intensifies the desire for control, points out Yiannis Gabriel, Professor of Organisational Theory at Imperial College, London: ‘It is not accidental that faith in control rises with feelings of insecurity, uncertainty and impending chaos. Among managers today such feelings are generated by volatile economies, global markets and technologies revolutionising information systems and government policies…Under such conditions, managers’ needs for reassurance and comfort become exacerbated as insecurity becomes chronic…Reading popular management texts, one has the impression that the manuals are advising drivers to grip their steering wheels ever more tightly as their vehicles run out of control.’

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The compulsion to stay in contact can become almost obsessive, leading employees to phone in on their mobile or log on to their PCs at the weekend, anxious not to miss anything; as one person pertinently emailed, W.H. Auden said that it was only bearable to be a member of an organisation if you were indispensable. Or at least felt yourself to be indispensable.

Hard Work for Little Gain

Perhaps this insecurity can shed some light on one of the most bizarre paradoxes of Britain’s overwork culture – one which has consumed hours and hours of the time of economists, business theorists and government. Britain may be working more intensively, its labour force putting in unprecedented hours, yet this hard work is not paying off: British productivity measured as GDP per hour worked is embarrassingly far behind that of other countries. Germany is 27 per cent ahead, France and the United States 29 per cent.

(#litres_trial_promo) Are we wasting all that hard work in pointless meetings, phone calls and endless emails all devoted to office politics, rather than actually getting the job done? Are we spending long hours making low-value products with antiquated equipment? Are we fiddling with the paperclips, surfing the net and gossiping around the coffee machine rather than being properly managed to get on with the job? All these have been suggested in recent years to explain the paradox of Britain’s overwork and its economic underperformance. The Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt has said that poor management has a lot to answer for, while the government’s training body, learndirect, found in a study that office staff spend almost three hours a day unproductively – chasing information from colleagues, surfing the net or in unnecessary meetings.

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Britain’s productivity lag has generated more theories than any other of its economic indicators. Some argue that the cause lies in the labour force’s long ‘tail’ of low-skilled, low-productivity labour, which in other European economies might be in the dole queue rather than employed. Other theories focus on the spatial advantages of countries such as the United States, where huge economies of scale are possible on green-field sites. Another set of theorists focuses on the importance of capital density – how much is being invested in enterprises – and Britain’s low levels of capital investment. But one thing is clear, said Professor Michael Porter in his 2003 report for the Department of Trade and Industry, there are no further productivity gains to be had from employees working longer hours, or from getting more people into employment. ‘Labour force utilisation’ is already at a high level. The answers he suggested were a higher-skilled labour force, higher capital intensity and more effective use of technology.

There is a direct link between Britain’s overwork culture and our low productivity; it can be summed up as rather than working smarter, we’ve ended up working harder. This has been a concern of British policy-makers for many decades; as long ago as 1968 it was pointed out in government reports that long hours through overtime had become institutionalised in British industry, and were used to compensate for low productivity and to manage the peaks and troughs of manufacturing cycles. Trade unions became complicit in a bid to boost their members’ overtime earnings. Instead of investing in skills, technology and product innovation to boost productivity, companies simply push their low-skilled workforce to put more effort into a low-value process, argue economists Ewart Keep and Jonathan Payne.

(#litres_trial_promo) Government policy, they believe, has only reinforced this ‘low road’ approach, with a weakly regulated labour market which makes it so easy to hire and fire workers that it reduces the incentive to invest in skills and technology as a strategy to reduce labour costs. This is allied to ‘long-standing and persistent cultural beliefs, linked to the English class culture, that there exists a limited pool of intelligence or talent in the population to fulfil the most demanding jobs, whilst the majority are capable of little more than menial employment’. Thus both ends of the labour market are required to work very hard: the elite because there are relatively few of them, the majority because of the low value and low productivity of their labour.

Keep and Payne go on to argue that the key to unlocking higher productivity is the patient, long-term work of job redesign to ensure the optimal use of skills. That crucially involves high levels of ‘semi-autonomous group working’, or teams of workers largely managing themselves, and in 1998 such self-management covered only 5 per cent of British workplaces.

(#litres_trial_promo) Britain has a dire record on this kind of work redesign, unlike many parts of Europe where the ‘quality of working life’ movement got government and employer backing in the seventies and eighties. Countries such as Italy, Germany and France pursued the principle of worker participation to ensure that work was really paying off, rather than the much more conflictual model of management, adopting specific efficiency criteria, which prevailed in Britain through the seventies and eighties. The ‘humanisation of work’ agenda which was pursued in Scandinavia was strangled in Britain by the country’s history of poor industrial relations, with employers resisting any formal negotiation with trade unions over ‘production issues’, and the unions being forced to restrict their bargaining to wages and conditions. Interestingly, a TUC survey in July 2003 showed that potential members put job design and productivity as key issues for negotiation by trade unions, ahead of pay.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the kind of social partnership between trade unions and employers that could bring about this kind of work reorganisation – a slow and very complex process, admit Keep and Payne – would require much stronger unions, and has lacked government support.

Research shows that people are well aware of how unproductive long hours can be. Between 1998 and 2003 there was a sharp increase in the number of workers reporting how tiredness led to mistakes, and tasks were taking longer to complete. Nearly three-quarters of long-hours workers (over forty-eight hours a week) said their work took them longer and their performance suffered.’

(#litres_trial_promo) While long hours are still regarded as evidence of superior commitment, there is research to show that, particularly in high-skill areas of the labour market where creativity and innovation are required, they damage performance. Respondents to the ‘Working Lives’ website had strong views on the relationship between long hours and productivity. Their experience – and many of them had worked in Europe or the US as well as Britain – was that people wasted a lot of time. Effective intense work could only be managed over a certain number of hours. Much more than thirty-two hours a week and time was wasted because of distractions and poor concentration. It provoked considerable frustration that advantage was gained by staying late, rather than by working productively. As one civil servant emailed:

I often feel guilty for leaving at 5.30 or 6 even though I have done a full and productive day’s work, when I know colleagues will be staying on for another hour or two or three. I do not believe that because someone puts in a marathon day they are ‘better’ workers. In fact, I think that excessive hours make people less efficient – I think people end up thinking they have to work these hours to be seen as good workers, and so end up filling extra hours by doing work that they don’t actually need to do. I think long hours can cause you to lose the ability to focus on what really needs to be done and what can wait. Sadly, to progress to a higher grade in my job, it is given that you work the mad hours.

Depressingly, our overwork has been used to mask our economic underperformance. This is an option which Professor Porter believes has largely outrun its usefulness. We can’t now work any harder, and any future gains in productivity will have to be found through another formula; the win-win option is that productivity and quality of working life could be two sides of the same coin, an issue to which I will return in the final chapter.