I have no choice but to seek a different career.’
A redundant banker decided not to try to find another job, because ‘Every week I hear similar stories of friends or friends of friends who, like me, worked sixty- or seventy-hour weeks, arrived home after dark each night, ate dinner and crawled into bed before getting up again the next morning whilst still dark to repeat the whole thing again, but who have now lost their jobs.’
A woman in advertising voiced what became a recurring theme when she wrote: ‘I feel that there is an expectation that work should be treated as a vocation, and that working hard is just not quite enough. But I don’t feel that my job is really that important (to society or to me) to really want to take on the extra and damage my home life. Not all of us have a vocation – what about those of us who want to do a good job, but want time to see partners, friends etc. after work?’
For a woman who had suffered a nervous breakdown because of the pressures of her job in television, ‘It is high time we re-evaluated our work ethic in this country – we are damaging ourselves and our children by not having the time or energy for caring, and trying to enrich our lives by buying more consumer goods only perpetuates the cycle…Where is it written that life should be endured, not enjoyed?’
The point is not that people don’t like their work; they often do. They appreciate the sense of fulfilment and usefulness it brings. They often find it stimulating, exciting and rewarding. This book is not a diatribe against work; it would be foolish not to acknowledge all the evidence that work is a crucial source of self-respect – and that the lack of work saps the confidence of individuals and communities. But as work gains an ever tighter grip on certain sections of the population, we have to face a new set of questions about the place it occupies in our lives.
Time and again, email contributors circled round the same point – it shouldn’t have to be like this; why hasn’t wealth and technological development brought us the leisure it was predicted to? Why, instead, has it brought even harder work? From John Maynard Keynes to Alvin Toffler, thinkers predicted that the twenty-first century would be an Age of Leisure, while in the seventies increasing automation even led policy-makers and politicians to worry how people would usefully fill their time. For some, this dawning era promised abundant opportunities for human beings in industrialised countries to reach their full potential. It would be the fulfilment of a long-cherished dream that we would finally be freed from the oppressive toil of long hours at work. The realisation of Aristotle’s belief that it is only in leisure that we are most human would be within reach of us all. Marx dreamt of society reaching a point where people could spend the morning thinking and the afternoon fishing.
It never happened. Quite the contrary: the historic decline in working hours has gone into reverse in the last two decades. Such are the demands of many jobs that leisure has been reduced to simply a time to recuperate before the gruelling demands of the next week’s work. British workers have a roughly one in three chance of finding at some time in the course of their working lives that those demands exceed their capacity to cope; the odds are even higher if you’re a woman. Ours has become a more work-centred society than ever; it demands more of us than ever, and it also purports to fulfil more of our needs than ever. One sociologist has identified five categories of experience as vital for well-being: time structure, social contact; collective effort or purpose, social identity or status and regular activity.1 With the decline in community, political parties and faith institutions, and the fragmentation of family, employment has become the main, often the sole, provider of all five. We look to work for a sense of integration and connection to society, while our grandparents would have been able also to look to their neighbourhood, their church, their political party, perhaps also an extended family nearby. This gives employers unprecedented purchase over our lives: how they are organised, how we perceive ourselves, and how we shape our relationships with others – both colleagues at work and personal relationships outside it.
The nature of work is changing, and its demands are increasing. These two trends have coincided over the last two decades with the move of women into paid employment. Family life no longer revolves around one breadwinner and one carer, but typically around one full-time and one part-time earner; in a generation we have seen a dramatic shift of time and energy from the unpaid caring economy into the paid labour market. The disinvestment of women in the caring economy has not been accompanied by sufficient compensating investment by men. The result is a care deficit – a shortage of time and energy to invest in relationships. It begins with a deficit of care towards ourselves, in which our work culture makes us ill, and at its worst can kill. There is also a deficit in the care of children, and across the myriad of interdependent relationships which sustain us in families, friendships and neighbourhoods. The result is an emotional impoverishment of all our lives: the office is now where the heart is, not the home, as the complexities of the workplace demand an ever larger share of our emotional resources. Women’s participation in the labour market did not need to exact such a steep price.
The emails I received echoed some of my experience as one of the generation of Thatcher’s teenagers, whose understanding of public affairs developed in the shadow of the severe recession of the early eighties, soaring unemployment and the miners’ strike. The harsh rhetoric of public debate in those years dismantled the post-war consensus – the role of the welfare state was challenged, old institutions such as trade unions emasculated. Dependency became a term of abuse, independence the ultimate aspiration; individualism was to be forged by work and upward mobility; these ideas seduced many, particularly women, determined not to be caught as their mothers had been in the confines of the home and child-rearing. ‘The only way is up,’ as the hit single went. The fact that many were left behind only underscored the ‘survive or die’ mentality. So we worked hard, very hard.
And then…we had children, and the whole game-plan had to be redrawn. None of the operating principles on which we had built our careers was of any use; we learnt for the first time the satisfactions and fulfilment of dependence and interdependence. But we also ran smack into the traditional separation between work and family, and found ourselves uncomfortably trying to straddle the two. ‘We were betrayed by feminism,’ said one contemporary of mine recently. In fact, it was more a case of our generation betraying feminism: we turned our backs on the feminists of the seventies, ignoring their warnings that the entire way we worked had to be revolutionised.
We cobbled unhappy compromises together – went part-time, gave up the career, put the children into nurseries. We were bemused by the lack of respect for raising children, we grumbled about the exhaustion, and about the re-emergence of old gender stereotypes as our male counterparts’ careers surged ahead while we were left, just as our mothers had been, amongst the nappies. So one very personal explanation for writing this book is that my generation are the offspring of an unfinished revolution. ‘Work-life balance’ is the weaselly term for where feminism – the historic development of women’s equality – has now got to.
In the course of my research another set of questions took shape which forms the central thrust of the argument. This book investigates the consequences of two phenomena: two decades of neo-liberal economic policy, and the impact of information technology on working lives. In the context of periods of high unemployment, a lightly regulated labour market, increasing inequality and high levels of perceived insecurity, I seek to disentangle how the dictates of the market, with its cult of rationalism and efficiency, extend into people’s individual lives. How and why do people collude with a system which, they are well aware, often does not have their interests at heart? What kind of trade-offs do they make, and why? What degree of choice do they have? How willing are these wage slaves? And finally, why is it that the choices become individualised, and that many of us have lost virtually all interest in collective reform of our working lives?
It is in the workplace that the pressures of market disciplines such as competitiveness and cost-effective efficiency impinge most directly on people’s daily experience. Those disciplines are often at odds with our intuitive understanding of effectiveness, not to mention our ethics and sense of purpose. They distort and erode the quality of relationships with colleagues, students, pupils and patients. This was a rich source of anger for many working in the public sector, where employees struggle to meet requirements for