Say your company offers a new perk: a car-cleaning service, or a free manicure at your desk. Chances are you'll be thrilled. But beware. Your employer may have joined a new and sinister group - the Absorbers. These firms introduce schemes to make your life easier, on just one condition - that you hand it over to them; that you work 18-hour days and at weekends, eat, exercise, play, even sleep in the office in the service of their profits.
The heartland of the Absorbers is the US. The wooded New Jersey campus of the pharmaceutical company Merck has running paths and private dining rooms for entertaining friends and family. Texas Instruments' concierges will fix your car, Sun Microsystems does your dry cleaning for you, Netscape has a dentist on site. But the virus is spreading east. British Airways has created a "café culture" at its HQ, with paths and trees. Games rooms are de rigeur at trendy ad agencies. Gyms, subsidised restaurants and "meditation" rooms are proliferating. In what must be the most extreme case of Absorptiveness recorded, one company has even paid for a dating agency for its over-stretched staff. Can company concubines be far away?
Changing attitudes towards work is one reason for the trend, but there is a more fundamental explanation. It's the economy, stupid. With unemployment in the US hitting record lows, and some areas, such as Madison in Wisconsin, recording statistically implausible unemployment rates of 1.2%, employers are having to work harder to work their people harder. Here in the UK, too, the jobless rate is at an historical low point. Once the threat of being jobless diminishes, what's to keep you at work past 5pm? Without fear, bosses are turning to favour.
And it's working. The US is "enjoying" its ninth successive year of economic expansion, the longest in the nation's history. This year Americans also overtook the Japanese as putting in the longest working hours in the world. Surely no coincidence.
The message looks clear: question the motives behind any move to make your work environment more attractive. Maybe you're being conned into working longer hours. And that's bad. On the other hand, maybe it's not. Many jobs give people a high degree of autonomy, demand intellectual input and generate a real sense of achievement. Some create space for creativity. A few are even fun. More and more of us make our friends - and meet our mates - in the office. If you are a software designer or scriptwriter or campaigner, and you have the choice between 1) working an extra hour and picking up your clean clothes on the way out or 2) going home to do your own laundry, which would you pick?
This is the problem with the debate about "work-life balance". The very phrasing suggests a clear divide between our work and our life, when for most of us the boundary is far from clear - and not just because we take our lap-tops home: but because work can provide many of the benefits that are central parts of our "life" - friends, conversation, stimulation, long lunches, even, at its best, humour. As Susie Orbach put it at a recent Industrial Society seminar, for many people "work is where life is".
And while the workplace is growing in attractiveness, for many people home, or "life", is looking a bit gloomy. For dual-earner couples with children, life outside work is one of fixed timetables (daycare), conflict (whose turn is it to leave early to pick up the kids?), low-skill work (cooking, cleaning, nappy disposal) and thankless masters and mistresses (the kids). Home life has been industrialised just as paid work has enter a post-industrial era. No wonder we work long hours - for many people, "work" is a relief from the real work at home: a masculine secret that's been rumbled by women.
None of which is to say that as a society we can simply keep working more and more hours. Even if the economics make sense and the individual rationale is clear, the social consequences of an office-bound adult population are worrying. What happens to the children? And without a hinterland, what will people do with themselves in retirement? What price will we pay in terms of our health from working at high intensity? We can't let working hours grow unchecked - but we need to admit that sometimes, some of us work long hours because we want to.
If an extra warning is required, look again across the Atlantic, where the labour secretary, Alexis Herman, sets a chilling example to her fellow Americans. The newly married Herman, who returned to work about as quickly as she could get her wedding gown unzipped, was asked recently whether she would go on honeymoon with husband Chuck. "That's a goal," she said. "Now whether it will really happen is another matter." Chuck must feel real special.
It is rare that relabelling a problem makes it go away. "Differently abled" workers would rather, given the choice, have a ramp than a rebrand. Words fill the spaces left by the absence of action. The latest example is the vogue to refer to "ageing" workers, the latest version of old, elderly, "third age", and older. People in their 50s and 60s face clear discrimination and the government's efforts in this direction have been, at best, quarter-hearted.
But the new term is especially meaningless and therefore useless. In the future, some highly skilled workers may have their genes expensively modified by their companies to halt the process of ageing. But until then we are every one of us "ageing" from the day we are born. Surely we can do better than this. We could go for "people of many years" - which echoes "people of colour". Or, given that "wrinklies" is likely to be off the agenda, how about "chronologically challenged"? Don't bet against it.
What is German for partnership? According to wags in the motor industry, the precise translation is partnerschaft.
Richard Reeves is director of futures at the Industrial Society. You can email him at: rvreeves@indsoc.co.uk.
