Posted on 15-6-2004

Work, Therefore I Am... Not

Work is no longer just a job - it's an all-consuming way of life. Just how
did employers persuade us to give ourselves body and souI to the company?
In the second exclusive extract from her compelling new book, Madeleine
Bunting examines how we were seduced by the culture of overwork.

June 14, 2004, The Guardian

If someone complains about having to work too hard, sooner or later
they'll say that they have "no choice". Probe a little further and what
becomes clear is that, for much of the workforce living well above the
poverty line, the connection between pay and overwork is about aspiration
to particular patterns of consumption. This is murky territory, where one
person's "needs" are another's "desires" .

Are mobile phones, foreign holidays and DVD players luxuries or
necessities of contemporary living? The perceived lack of choice may be
the consequence of a series of choices - the bigger house, the new car,
the rising debt - that trap people into working too hard. Consumer debt
has rocketed in the past decade, with the British splashing out with their
credit cards (borrowing three times more than they did 10 years ago) and
using their homes as cash machines (loans secured against homes surged by
a staggering 40% in 2002 alone).

Through consumerism we find our sense of dignity: you put up with the
bullying boss and salve your wounded pride by treating yourself to a
pedicure at the weekend. As Australian social scientist Sharon Beder
comments in Selling the Work Ethic: "It is only as purchasers that we are
treated with the courtesy worthy of a human being."

The harder you work, the longer and the more intense your hours, the more
pressure you experience, the more intense is the drive to repair, console,
restore and find periodic escape through consumerism. As one senior NHS
manager told me, as she described a hugely demanding work schedule, the
odd weekend in New York had become essential for her sanity. We've "found"
the solutions to the problems of the workplace in our private consumption
patterns: in millions of dreams about the perfect aestheticisation of our
homes and gardens as places of retreat and restoration; in the perfect
getaway, the holiday as far removed from our daily life as we can possibly
find. The fantasy is all about retreat and escape. Overwork and
consumerism feed off each other.

But money, and the consumer goods we can buy with it, don't tell the whole
story of why some people in the high-skill, high-income bracket are
working harder. Once the upper-middle-class desired leisure and scorned
anything that looked like trying too hard; now they are rarely parted from
their mobiles or Blackberry handhelds. They look exhausted, complain of
too much work, yet do nothing about reducing their burden. Money alone
doesn't explain the topsy-turvy inversion whereby in America in the 1890s
the poorest worked harder than the rich, but by 1991 the richest 10% were
working harder than the poorest.

Part of this is the hangover of a period of high unemployment, when
predictions of "the end of work" made having lots of work a status symbol.
But more important is the emergence of a new form of elitism in the labour
market: work as vocation and work as pleasure. In a society that places a
high premium on self-expression and fulfilment, to have a lot of
interesting work is a status symbol. It's not just that you have a job
that pays decently; you have a job which is so satisfying and fulfilling
that you don't want to stop working. According to Kristen Lippincott,
director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich: "We've become enamoured with
deadlines. We want to feel an adrenaline rush. We believe that if we're
always chasing the next deadline, we must be important. A lot of our
busyness is a way for us to avoid thinking about what is most important.
There's a difference between being busy and being productive."

In the creative, highly skilled parts of the labour market, the boundaries
between work and play have been eroded: work is play, work is your hobby.
Work becomes the organising principle of life. American journalist David
Brooks describes this in his cult book on the new US bourgeoisie, Bobos in
Paradise: "Work is a vocation, a calling ... employees start thinking like
artists and activists, they actually work harder for the company. If work
is a form of self-expression, then you never want to stop. Business is not
about making money; it's about doing something you love."

These are particular preoccupations of our age. Our sense of self is bound
up with our sense of control and impact. That's why a new mother will say
she's "got her old self back" when she returns to a job, where the
routines give a greater degree of control than the unpredictable demands
of a small baby. Agency is regarded as the most significant component of
well-being; it is so important that we will take on, and often claim to
find enjoyable and satisfying, more stressful responsibilities if they
give us a greater sense of agency. The concept of "self-realisation", as
developed in the therapy and New Age movements of the 60s and 70s, can be
trimmed down to mesh neatly with the neo-liberal labour market, comments
writer and social critic Thomas Frank in One Market Under God. Paid work
has so successfully absorbed the "project of the self" that it
marginalises all other routes to fulfilment, such as caring or the passion
of the amateur.

The cleverness of the fit between the project of the self and this work
ethic is that it is self- reinforcing. There is no resting point: the
project of the self is never complete, and is always riddled with anxiety
and insecurities. Because loyalty has been written out of the script,
you're only ever as good as your last assignment. The precariousness of
this sense of self requires a relentless effort just to keep steady: the
corporate lawyer, the consultant, the investment banker has to work on
bigger and bigger deals or run the risk of dropping down the running order
- or, God forbid, dropping off it altogether.

Success requires constant adaptation and reinvention of the self and its
skills. This is a point taken up by Yiannis Gabriel, professor of
organisational theory at Imperial College, when he compares Max Weber's
famous characterisation of the "iron cage" of industrial bureaucracies
with the "glass palace of flexible organisations" in contemporary work
culture, where successes are never an equilibrium but "temporary triumphs
at the edge of the abyss". This fuels its own rollercoaster of adrenaline
and exhilaration; snatching victory - the next big deal, a big sale - from
the jaws of defeat. Out of the discontinuous, episodic career "all of us
construct and reconstruct our fragile selves, moving from glass palace to
glass cage, at times feeling anxiously trapped by it, at others feeling
energised and appreciated, and at others depressed and despondent," says
Gabriel.

Such a rollercoaster ride is a classic description of addictive behaviour.
What increases the stakes is that you not only have to do your job, but
you have to make sure everyone knows how well you've done it - to secure
both your position and your performance-related pay. In The Future of
Success, Robert Reich (formerly the US labour secretary in the Clinton
administration) argues that, in flatter organisations with fewer promotion
opportunities, "the only way to promote yourself is for you to do it".
Careers are as much about your own public relations skills as about
talent: "The old organisation is vanishing, and in its place are men and
women who not only believe deeply in themselves but can persuade others to
believe in them. To this end, a generous dose of self-esteem is more
important than gregariousness, beaming self-confidence more useful than
humble charm," concludes Reich.

In 1999, Tom Peters made the subject into a book - Brand You 50:
Reinventing Work. "Starting today you are a brand," he wrote. "You're
every bit as much of a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi or the Body Shop ... [
your] most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You."
Peters' injunctions accurately capture the strategy needed to navigate the
highly skilled areas of the labour market. It is no longer enough to do a
good job; you also have to do your own PR. When the London Evening
Standard reported on the case of a City analyst, Louise Barton, who tried
unsuccessfully to bring a case of sexual discrimination against her
employers in 2002, it concluded: "Crowing is as much part of City success
as being clever, well-informed and having a great contacts book. It's
something [Barton] tells young City women to do ... especially as she
thinks she's paid the price for underselling herself."

Self-promotion is a demanding task, according to the 10 tips offered in
People Management magazine in April 2003. First off: "Network until you
drop. Speak up at meetings and sit in the front row at presentations. Let
people get used to the sound of your voice." Second: "Create messages that
sound positive and inspirational." Third: "Make a great entrance. You get
roughly three seconds to make a first impression." Other tips include
"smiling with your eyes as well as your mouth", never fiddling or folding
your arms and "dressing the part". It is a daunting list, in which every
part of your body language and appearance has to be corralled into the
right image.

"The sale of the self makes relentless demands on one's life," writes
Reich. "It also encroaches on one's personal relationships. When the
personality is for sale, all relationships turn into potential business
deals."

Success demands more of you, and, at the same time, its definition has
become more elusive and more precarious. Professor Richard Sennett of the
LSE comments on this in his analysis of the contemporary work ethic, The
Corrosion of Character, when he describes how one of his interviewees
"felt constantly on trial, yet she never knew exactly where she stood.
There were no objective measures which applied to doing a good job." The
result is anxiety, insecurity and stress. We pursue the dream of a
breakthrough - of our true worth being acknowledged - which might finally
make sense of our work and reconfigure the downsizing, reorganisations and
new assignments into the meaningful trajectory of a career.

The new work ethic has been astonishingly successful at exploiting the
insecurities of employees and disciplining them to work harder than their
parents or grandparents probably ever did - and with zero job security.
The feat has been remarkable, particularly in corporate America, where
hundreds of thousands of white-collar workers throughout the early to
mid-90s were made redundant, yet managed no collective protest. Instead,
they redoubled their efforts - hours of work lengthened significantly over
the same period - to devote most of their waking hours to those same
corporations. The new work ethic tantalises the white-collar worker with
the possibility of satisfactions that are just out of reach, thus heading
off potential challenges to the way work is organised, and continually
throwing the problem back on to the individual to resolve. As therapist
Susie Orbach points out, more and more of our life is taking place at
work, so that "work-life balance" is a misnomer.

In the overwork culture, personal relationships are forced to take on the
role of offsetting the stress: love, like leisure, is purloined as an
adjunct to keep the worker going. After the worker has spent a gruelling
day in the office or the factory, his or her partner can expect little in
return. Meanwhile, the emotional engagement in work is reinforced by
employers who specifically address the emotional needs of their employees
in a way that a working spouse and parent could never hope to emulate.
They satisfy the employee's introspection and self-absorption with
coaching sessions or mentoring.

In a telling metaphor, the former head of brand communications at Orange
described her attitude to the brand as a "love affair": emotional
engagement, energy and time are finite resources - the more they are
invested at work, the less there is available for home. One American
computer company, recognising the gap between work and intimate
relationships, decided to bring the latter into its orbit: employees had
to specify at monthly meetings their professional and personal targets,
and assess how they had matched up to them - the ultimate absorptive
corporation which makes it its business to ensure the success of your
private life.

The focus is skewed from the reciprocity of intimacy to the preoccupations
of the self - its promotion, development, growth and career advancement.
None of this helps to nurture a resilient basis for the kind of emotional
intimacy to which people aspire, let alone for the kind of complicated
negotiations required to raise children.

As far back as the 50s, the great US sociologist, C Wright Mills, worried
that white-collar workers sold not just their time and energy, but also
their personalities to their employer. He believed that work took up too
much of people's time, and shaped them in such a way as to destroy
meaningful life outside work. The overwork culture makes his fears as real
as ever.

· Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives by
Madeleine Bunting is published by Harper Collins