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| Posted By: Dionysus Posted On: Jun 14, 2004 Views: 261 | "I can't read this, I'm too busy working." Here's an interesting article from the Guardian Newspaper. I work, therefore I am 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 soul 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. Read the first extract from Willing Slaves by Madeleine Bunting here Monday June 14, 2004 The Guardian Buy Willing Slaves at Amazon.co.uk 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 on June 21 at £12.99. A Guardian Forum, "Willing Slaves: why we need an alternative to the overwork culture", will take place at the RSA, 8 John Adam Street, London WC2 on June 22, 7-8.30pm. Chaired by Jenni Murray, the panel will include Madeleine Bunting, Susie Orbach and Alan Milburn MP. To order tickets, price £6, call O8708906002. |
| Posted By: legion Posted On: Jun 14, 2004 Views: 259 | RE: "I can't read this, I'm too busy working." I've decided to define myself by my anti-work ethic - to do nothing, and take pride in the doing of nothing, is my goal. To do the best nothing I can do. To be the best there is at doing nothing. This is my mantra. The first step in achieving that was to get rid of all consumerist debt and to owe NO money to the bankers, which I have already done. Now when people ask me the all important, all consuming question: "So, what do you DO?" - I answer: "Nothing, nothing at all." Or sometimes just to mess em up I answer "shepherd" or something silly but usually they are stunned enough at the concept of someone doing nothing successfully. I plan to be the first guy in history to make a million dollars by doing nothing. |
| Posted By: JSK Posted On: Jun 15, 2004 Views: 241 | RE: "I can't read this, I'm too busy working." I just knew Fluffy would be the first to post in regards to doing nothing. We have that here in the states. Its called "Welfare" and many forigners take advantage of it just as much as some Murkins do. If you wanna live out in the sticks thousands of miles from society thats all good and fine. BUT, if your in a decent sized populated place I say make your own bed and do something .... anything!!! How fair is it that others pick up your slack? Leege I'm not complaining about you seeing your in Cunuckland thankfully.I'm sure you did your time and everyone entitled to retire at some point in life. Some a bit more sooner I guess. The truth is NOTHING is secure. Your job, your house your country. Things change every day. Some people make 100 K a year and live it up when others can get by happy making only 25-30K a year. Usually the person who makes money spends it more and more. I got some buddies that make BOOKOO bucks yet they are always the one who never have money with them. They owe just about everyone they know. No they don't brag about making 80 grand a year especially considering they owe about that in credit card bills. Suckers. Its my goal to retire in a few years and go to the School of Fluffies. I know he doesn't drug test or change for his services of being a bum. There I will grow massive amounts of hemp and live with my wife and kid like Tarzan in the wilderness of Canada!!! I'm hoping to maximize my credit for before I die I can run up bills that stretch over a couple hundred thousand. I'll be sure to tell my relatives they can have all they want from me, but not to ask for my estate or they'll have to settle my debt. The average American owes 2-5000 in credit card bills. Most can's even pay off the finance charges and hidden fees they tack in. So, you'll always be paying them off for the next 10 years. Even today consolidation doesn't always do the trick. A credit card is a credit card no matter how you look at it/them. And I'll looking at 4 right now: (~ Drawing chicks fighting is by far the best job I've ever had though. Sure its part-time pay, but it beats real work. JSK |