Читать книгу Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives - Madeleine Bunting - Страница 14

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.³⁰ 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.³¹

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.³² 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.³³ 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.³⁴ 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.’³⁵ 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.