On Wednesday an analysis of official statistics released by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development attempted to draw parallels between the working world of 1950s Britain and the present day.
Back then we worked longer hours – 30% more on average – and took around half as many holidays as we do today – just 16 days a year on average.
In those austere postwar years, the emancipation of workers was high on the public agenda and had supporters in unexpectedly high places: Winston Churchill, the prime minister of the day, expressed the hope that technological advancement would "give the working man what he's never had – four days' work then three days' fun".
But somehow it never worked out that way. Instead of liberating us, technology seems to have spawned more gadgets to bind us to the workplace – from desktop computers and laptops, to smartphones and touchscreen tablets like the iPad. Tellingly, a recent study of Generation Y workers found that most would value a state-of-the-art mobile device over a higher salary.
At the same time, over the past 30 years measures of anxiety in the workplace have risen, to the point that stress has replaced back pain as the most common cause of long-term sick leave. In 2011, the author Ian Price wrote eloquently for the Guardian Work section about how our problem switching technology off outside working hours is leading to more and more cases of burnout.
Unlike the 1950s, our career paths are no longer linear. Few of us would expect, or hope, to remain with the same employer for our entire working lives. For many in a fast-changing world, that is a liberating thought. But with that liberation comes the pressure to adapt constantly and move with the times. And that's before you even look out of the door at the dreadful state of the jobs market.
Happily, just as in the postwar days of Churchill, the subject of our happiness – be it at work or just generally – is once again on the agenda: the government has begun measuring it, seeing it as a key measure of future economic progress.
But a shift is happening in unusual places. The radical economic thinker Umair Haque, who blogs for the Harvard Business Review, has built up a huge Twitter following by questioning the ways in which global corporations can give more meaning and purpose to their employees and society as a whole.
What would make you happier in your job? Greater job security? Better shift patterns or pay? The ability to escape from your email outside work? Or would it be simply about doing something more worthwhile?
