No matter how grownup you may like to believe you are, there is something about the arrival of September that provokes an unmistakable back-to-school feeling. The dominant rhythms of the year are hard to overthrow, even if your schooldays are decades in the past. But something that could be changing is our notion of holiday – paid holiday, that is – and proper, healthy downtime away from work.
About 1.2 million workers in the UK get no paid leave at all, while a further 2.2 million are not getting their full legal annual allocation of 28 days, according to the TUC. And this on top of the average of more than seven hours of unpaid overtime put in by around 5 million workers already. That’s 2 billion hours of unpaid work.
With more people expecting to go freelance in the coming years, and the growth in zero-hours contracts and precarious work, as well as self-employment, we could be entering a world in which guaranteed, extended breaks become a rare privilege instead of a hard-earned right. And that, of course, is a dismal prospect. It would be a case of “doing the wrong thing righter”, as the management guru Russ Ackoff used to put it. Long hours with shorter breaks, or no breaks at all, has hardly proved a winning formula when it comes to raising miserable UK productivity. It hasn’t led to higher wages for most people.
And now there is more evidence that permawork has a severe impact on life expectancy. A 40-year study from the University of Helsinki found that men who took three weeks or less annual leave were found to be 37% more likely to die. Not only will you not wish you had spent more time at work on your deathbed, but that deathbed could already be in a delivery van and on its way to you – possibly driven by someone on a bogus self-employment contract.
These are the sort of stories that make you question the idea of progress. Workers’ rights have not, by and large, been granted readily. They have been fought for and won. But even if some employers have been reluctant to acknowledge the human factor at work, and the reasonable expectations of working people, many have at least acquiesced in that general sense of progress, of building a better and more civilised world of work. But unions have found it hard to organise and recruit in this harsher, changing world, and this has entrenched a damaging imbalance of power.
Management has long called for flexibility from its workers, and expected the “freedom to manage”. But now, supported not so much by a reserve army of labour (the unemployed) as the threat of automation and new technology, bosses are less inhibited about making ever greater demands on people. And while official unemployment figures look good on the surface, underemployment and precarious working conditions conspire to create an insecure world where people are less likely to complain about the terms that are on offer.
We heard recently about how management’s passive-aggressive (and sometimes just plain aggressive) use of email can cause harm at work. The gradual shrinking and possible disappearance of paid holiday is another example of brutality in practice. We may not yet have been overrun by robots and machines at work, but too many people are being treated like machines already.
Shorter life expectancy would be gruesome way of dealing with the costs of an ageing society. It hardly seems like an idea worthy of the 21st century. But as we crank up to go “back to school” this September we should stop to think a bit harder about the world of work we are creating, or are conniving in creating.
• Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre
