Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives
The title of this brilliantly thorough and thoroughly brilliant attack on the contemporary work ethic comes from an essay written in 1958 by CS Lewis. In it, he raged against the loss of liberty that the industrial revolution and interfering government had imposed on the freeborn citizens of Albion. “In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves in order to eat,” he wrote. “So in society.”
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In the late 18th and all through the 19th centuries, the great project of industrialisation was to take a nation of strong-willed and independent agricultural workers and transform them into docile wage slaves. The two principal methods used by those at the top were fear of God and fear of hunger. A new work ethic was promoted by the Methodists, who preached every Sunday to the new working class that it was their moral duty to work hard. God wanted you to work; God was a sort of über-boss, or “overlooker”, in the jargon of the time. Slack off at work and the eternal flames of hell awaited.
Crucially also, wages were set low to ensure the worker returned to work on Monday morning. Hunger was found to be an effective prod to ensure that workers – men, women and children from the age of six upwards – made it to the mill on time.
These evils were, of course, resisted. First there was the 10-hour-day movement. Then, eventually, child labour was abolished. The trade unions – after much struggle, it has to be said – managed to improve conditions. The eight-hour day was introduced. Surely things are better today? The physically brutal conditions have gone, and no one is so poor today that they starve.
Bunting argues that we are still enslaved. We may not die from hunger, but we are certainly overworked and stressed out. Work has overtaken us, she argues; it has invaded our consciousness. And the physical hardships of working in the old mills have been replaced by new psychological hardships. Wages are low, hours are long, stress levels are rising.
One coercive technique used by employers to make willing slaves of us, says Bunting, is the “brand”. Big companies use concepts such as brand loyalty and “teamwork” to give the illusion that the company is bringing some sort of meaning into people’s lives; meaning that was once provided by church and community. Thus they hang on to their staff. Brands cleverly use inspirational slogans to convince their employees they are on some sort of mission and not merely underpaid and exploited profit-creators for a handful of fat cats. Words such as “passion” and “commitment” are bandied around. Asda, for example, encourages its employees to believe they are lucky to be part of a caring family. Managers look for cheerful souls, team players. And woe betide anyone who doesn’t join in.
Some of Bunting’s examples are horrifically comic. One Asda manager, for example, describes an occasion when all employees were asked to wear a pink item of clothing for a breast cancer awareness day. “Everyone joined in, it was a great cause. But there were two dissenters who forgot. I told them to go home. I told them, ‘You’re not in the team.’ They knew what was the right or wrong behaviour, and they went off, bought pink shirts and came back.”
At Orange, Bunting says, similarly cultish techniques are employed to engage the hearts, minds and souls of the staff. “I see my values as aligned with Orange values,” says one manager. “I don’t hold myself up to being a saint, but I try to incorporate the brand values into everything I do … it’s beginning to sound like a cult.” Substitute “the brand values” for “God” and the comparison with the Methodists does not look so specious. As one management guru puts it: “It’s imperative that leaders give people meaning in their work because passionate employees get better results. If leaders can’t give people passion about their work, employees will find it somewhere else.”
The other factor that gets us out of bed in the morning to toil in the call centres, argues Bunting, is consumer desire. This is the replacement for the old hunger motive. There are millions of products out there competing for our money and their promoters are constantly seeking to deploy ever more ingenious tricks to persuade us to give them our money. Disgracefully, the companies play on our natural desire for freedom to promote their products. These days, our freedom consists of little more than deciding between Asda and Sainsbury’s, Ford and Vauxhall, Stella and Foster’s.
The government has also done its bit to support large companies by promoting the work ethic in policy and propaganda. Its working tax credit, for example, in effect subsidises employers who pay low wages. The message, it appears, is that any job, however awful, is better than no job. In her chapter “Government: the Hard Taskmaster”, Bunting argues further that New Labour’s obsession with “targets” has led to an epidemic of overwork, fudged results and corruption, as time-pressed public servants struggle to meet absurd demands.
For all its blather about “work-life balance”, the government remains firmly attached to work as a panacea for all social ills. Tony Blair believes in work for everyone. “Anyone of working age who can work should work,” he said in 1998. That included single mums and the disabled. And those unwilling to join in are sent on various Restart schemes.
So if it is true that work is a gigantic con trick that we are now waking up to, the question remains: if we dismantle the job system, then what do we replace it with? How do we live?
One answer is to live well on less. If we do not desire the panoply of products that are sold to us each day, then we will not have such a voracious appetite for money. Less money means less work. Less work means more freedom to do our own work or do what we want to do. Bunting gives a few inspiring examples of families who have downsized, gone part-time or freelance.
Bunting also calls on the unions to help. They have become so obsessed with wages, she says, that they have forgotten about conditions and employee well-being. They have neglected the terrible effects that not being able to control one’s own time can have on the human spirit. A shorter working week might be a start. Russell and Maynard Keynes thought that four hours a day was enough. The government, Bunting thinks, could be doing more. Are there legislative solutions – more generous maternity and paternity leave, and so forth? More bank holidays? But first, perhaps, we need to reject the work ethic in ourselves, embrace liberty and redefine, as Bunting suggests, the meaning of success.
· Tom Hodgkinson is editor of the Idler magazine. His book How to Be Idle is published by Hamish Hamilton in August.
Some interesting ideas – reminds me I need a vacation… so I can get some personal work done. 
