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                                                                              RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS     



ANALYSIS  
HEAVENLY WORK?

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Frances Cairncross
Producer:  Zareer Masani
Editor:  Nicola Meyrick


BBC 
White City
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020 8752 6252





Broadcast Date:  29.11.01
Repeat Date:  02.12.01
Tape Number: TLN147/01VT1048
Duration:  27'27"


Taking part in order of appearance:

Richard Reeves
Director of Consultancy, Industrial Society, and author of 
"Happy Mondays"

Arlie Russell Hochschild
sociologist, University of California, Berkeley, and author of 
"The Time Bind",

Jonathan Gershuny
Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University 
of Essex

Ed Smith 
Director for Strategy, PriceWaterhouse Coopers 

Dr Paul Brown
Occupational psychologist and Director of Adaptive 
Research,   Penna Consulting

Lynn Segal
Professor of Psychology and Gender studies, Birkbeck 
College, London, and author of  "Why Feminism?"

Theodore Zeldin
historian of leisure and author of "The Intimate History of 
Humanity"


CAIRNCROSS		If you go off to work in the morning, do you leave 
home with a heavy heart, or are you delighted to get out of the house to earn 
a living?  More people go out to work today than ever before, but is that good 
for our society?  

HOCHSCHILD		If we keep going in the direction we're going now, 
it's toward a male workaholic model.  Workaholism is the new name of the 
game in an era of deregulation, a declining labour movement, draining of 
community and family life.  There's more emphasis on what you can do for 
the company.

REEVES			When I hear people saying: "I feel torn between 
my work and my family, because I feel like I'm never doing either side justice 
and, you know, I'm running between the two", I have no sympathy at all.  I say 
to those people, "you are the most privileged people in our society because 
you love your work and you love your home to such an extent that you feel 
torn between the two; lucky you, stop complaining".

CAIRNCROSS		Richard Reeves, director of consultancy at the 
Industrial Society, has written a book called "Happy Mondays" in praise of 
working life.  He is irritated by the social convention that obliges people to 
pretend to find work a bore. Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist at the 
University of California, Berkeley, has also written about work, but her book, 
"The Time Bind", describes a study of  the tension between work, home and 
the community. Both acknowledge that some of the most skilful and well 
qualified workers are now putting in long hours. But why is that?  Do talented 
people do sixty hour weeks because they enjoy it, or because employers 
expect it of them? And what about those women who make it to the upper 
ranks of the workforce? Are they  triumphant victors in the feminist war for 
equal treatment with men? Or are they the victims of a masculine work ethic 
that imposes on employees what Arlie Hochschild calls a time bind?

HOCHSCHILD		The time bind is what happens when you put more 
of your heart into work, less of your heart into homes and communities, which 
are, in fact, increasingly denuded, and then you come home and people are 
cranky because you haven't been there.  That makes it less pleasant to be 
there.  And even though your identity is in being a good mom and a good dad 
and good community member, your actual heart gets a little relieved to leave 
home.

CAIRNCROSS		It sounds, from what you're saying, as though 
employees themselves are partly responsible for the 'time bind'.  Is it that they 
choose longer hours because they enjoy being at the office?  Or do they 
choose longer hours really under duress because they're scared that if they 
don't they'll lose their jobs?

HOCHSCHILD		I don't want to get into a blame game here.  What I 
see is workers who, on the one hand are very eager in an era of deregulation 
to hold on to their jobs, together with workers who want to do a good job and 
who live in a society in which less is going on in the community and at home 
and more is going on at work.  It's a complicated thing.  I mean, is it, you 
know, the bartender or, you know, the drinker who's responsible?  It's a 
combination of both.   A lot of the people who I interviewed for this study, 
working at a Fortune 500 company in the Midwest, were saying to me, and it 
was almost like a refrain, "we do it to ourselves, we do it to ourselves".  

CAIRNCROSS		But are workers really just doleful addicts, putting 
in long hours like drinkers propped against the bar, unable to summon the 
strength of willpower to go home? Are they there because the boss expects it 
– or because life in the office is more interesting than it used to be?  Richard 
Reeves.

REEVES			The content of more jobs has become more 
interesting.  The very nature of the work that we're doing now is that we're 
using our brains more at work and the research that I have looked at shows 
that when we use our brains at work, that makes us happier at work - we're 
more engaged, we're more absorbed.  So I think that's one critical change 
that's taken place.  As a trend, it is clear that people have become more 
autonomous at work, that there's now more control over their time and over 
the content of their jobs than in the days when the majority of people were 
working in much more routinised, commodotised kinds of work - the kind of 
work where you had to turn your brain off to survive the day on a factory line 
or whatever.  There's less of that work around now.  I also think there's been 
a change in the nature of relationships in the workplace.   Firstly the gendered 
nature of work has changed - it's no longer just full of testosterone and that 
makes work more of a natural community.  More of us spend more time 
talking to each other at work now.  Research that we've done at the Industrial 
Society shows a third of us make most of our friends at work now and half of 
us meet our life partners through our work now.  That means that work is 
becoming more of a community than it was before which, in turn, makes it 
more important and more enjoyable.

CAIRNCROSS		No children or old folk, of course, but many offices 
have become more accurate reflections of the community than they would 
have been 50 or 100 years ago. But then, many aspects of working life are 
now different.  Jonathan Gershuny runs the Institute for Social and Economic 
Research at the University of Essex and is one of the world's leading 
authorities on the way patterns of time use and concepts of work have 
changed through the years. 

GERSHUNY			A large number of these tasks that now fall 
substantially into what we think of as the service sector were upper class, 
leisure class, unpaid activities.  Those people who now do the service jobs 
that in the 19th century were unpaid, very often worked really quite long hours, 
long into the night to do them.  If you're a top class lawyer and you're paid 
£250 an hour for your services, well yes you're going to be jolly rich, but you 
have to sit at your desk for a good number of hours to earn the 2 or 300 
thousand pounds of £250 an hour.  So the best off people in society now 
probably work much harder than the best off people in the society did a 
hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago.

CAIRNCROSS		So quite a lot of things that people once did simply 
because they enjoyed doing it, they now do and get paid for as well?

GERSHUNY			That's exactly right.   And that, of course, provides 
another part of the motivation for the relatively long hours that a lot of people 
in the best paid sorts of jobs do - they are having fun and being paid to do 
things that their predecessors as members of the most privileged classes did 
for free.

CAIRNCROSS		That might sound like a good deal. But of course, 
if somebody pays you, they may expect you to work in ways that you would 
not choose if you were a volunteer. That old Victorian leisure class wasn't 
made up of workaholics, but gentlemanly amateurs who deftly balanced work 
and community life – with the help, of course, of squads of servants. 
The deal for employers has changed, too. Now that more of them need to 
employ brains rather than muscle, they have to attract the brightest and best 
– and to offer what it takes to get them.  Price Waterhouse Cooper is a giant 
consultancy, typical of the new kind of brainpower business, and Ed Smith is 
their board member in Britain responsible for strategy and people.

SMITH			The average age of people in our organisation is 
27, so it's actually about their choices as much as it is about ours.  We have, 
now, occupational health, dentist, doctors in the offices.  We'll have sports 
facilities, networks, clubs.  Recently, which is a fantastic innovation, we've laid 
on a whole series of concierge services.  So people, for a small monthly fee, 
can get tailoring done - was the latest example -  and plumbing.  And people 
will go home, wait at home and receive plumbers which, for young people 
living on their own, is fantastic.

CAIRNCROSS		I think it'd be pretty fantastic for everyone else.  
Now some people would see this as an attempt by Price Waterhouse 
Coopers to lure people away from the home - is that part of what your secretly 
trying to do?

SMITH			I think what we're trying to do is to stay very 
competitive and there is an increasing war for talent as everybody knows.  
We are now in a supply side environment where clever people are in short 
supply and we've got to do what it takes to attract them to work.   They're high 
achievers but they want things laid on, and that's what we're doing.  We 
certainly see the people in our organisation here having tremendous fun at 
work with their colleagues, very much socialising as part of the fabric of our 
overall organisation.  And that, when you're in a knowledge society, a 
knowledge organisation, helps the knowledge sharing so, again, the business 
case comes back to the importance of networks and socialisation of the 
workplace.

CAIRNCROSS		So in some kinds of business, part of the case for 
making the office a sociable place to be is that people work more effectively. 
And of course, if all those plumbing and tailoring services make it easier to 
hire the cleverest youngsters, then bosses will provide them. But employers 
have always paid some of their staff more than others. Is there a danger that 
this new emphasis on making work pleasurable will benefit only the hard-to-
hire few? 

REEVES			I think it's very difficult to oppose any step which 
makes work better.  I think there's a danger in saying that if only some people 
are being offered dry cleaning services or concierge services or subsidised 
child care or whatever, that's a bad thing -  because not everybody's receiving 
it.

CAIRNCROSS		Richard Reeves of the Industrial Society.
	
REEVES			The history of improvements in the workplace, it 
seems to me, is that today's perk will become tomorrow's necessity.  Thirty 
years ago, an occupational pension was seen as something really for the 
rarefied classes - now, occupational pensions cover two thirds of the work 
force.  And four week's paid leave was seen as a bit of a perk - now, 
legislation has forced it through for everybody because expectations have 
risen as a result.  There is good research showing that lower paid workers 
have much lower expectations of their work - rightly so, you might say.  But 
the research also shows that that's one of the key barriers to them improving 
their work, because they don't demand it in the same way as the middle did.  
The sharp elbows of the middle class are getting the perks but, at the same 
time, we need to ensure that everyone's expectations at work has been 
raised, so that it becomes part of the demand that workers make of their 
employers.

CAIRNCROSS		The sharp elbows of the middle class may be 
more effective in securing those perks than the lesser bargaining power of the 
unskilled. After all, low expectations aren't the only reason that employers 
make less effort to make work fun for their lower-paid workers. A clever young 
manager is much harder to replace than a security guard who works the 
same long hours.  But even the clever young manager may pay a high price 
for those special perks. Dr Paul Brown is a clinical and an occupational 
psychologist. As director of adaptive research at  Penna Consulting, he 
spends a lot of time working with chief executives on the pressures on their 
people and organisations.

BROWN			People get many more rewards out of work than 
they used to, both financial and personal, but the cost of that has gone up 
colossally, because organisations now no longer create a very tight structure 
in which they define what people are supposed to be doing.  So, if we go back 
thirty years, the big companies, the Unilevers, the ICIs of this world, had a 
very clear understanding of what level people were at and what was expected 
of them.  In the leaner, meaner, slimmer world that we all now inhabit, 
organisations are no longer clear about what they want from people very 
often because the world is a much more complex world and you can't plan 
your way into it in the way that people used to think they could.  And, in 
consequence, people are left with a dilemma that they have to bring much 
more of themselves to work.  And the cost of bringing more to themselves, 
personally, is a lot more uncertainty and a lot more uncertainty means a lot 
more stress or, on the other hand, if they get it right, a lot more excitement.

CAIRNCROSS		Even an organisation as confident as Price 
Waterhouse Cooper has to face the problem of executive stress, and to come 
up with new ways to support its staff.  Ed Smith.

SMITH			The socialisation of the workplace in our 
organisation is actually quite high but we do find stress.  We have introduced, 
over the last 18 months, a survival clinic which is actually about looking at 
people's stress levels formally through medical programmes, through 
occupational psychologists and, indeed, moving beyond the traditional 360 
degree feedback to looking at, what's now called, 720 degree feedback, 
which is actually getting feedback about performance from wife, family and 
friends, which is a very new development.  We're just testing it out, but I think 
reflects the importance that we put in people as a whole being both at work 
and at home.

CAIRNCROSS		What has this new kind of feedback thrown up so 
far?

SMITH			It's shown that perhaps we haven't got the balance 
quite right, because some of the feedback from friends and family is that 
people are still spending too much time at work.  But, there has been some 
recognisable improvement including, I have to say, husbands and wives going 
on our survival clinic together.

CAIRNCROSS		The problem of long hours at work was until 
recently one that affected mainly men.  It mattered less when their wives were 
at home all the time. But that era has ended for most families. One of the 
most striking social trends of the past half century has been the unstoppable 
procession of women into the job market.  That brings the stress - for both 
men and women - of trying to combine a day at work with all the tasks that 
running a home and family require; although women seem to enjoy their jobs 
– at every level – more than the men who work beside them. But then, 
perhaps women have always had a rather different concept of what work 
entails than men do, simply because, as Jonathan Gershuny observes, they 
have always done such a lot of it without being paid.

GERSHUNY			Work is anything that you could, in principle, pay 
someone else to do for you without losing the main point of that activity.  Now, 
it's really important to remember that in a modern society, a large part of what 
would fall under that definition of work is, in fact, not paid for.  There's a lot of 
time spent washing floors and cooking and cleaning and looking after 
children, going shopping and caring for older people and so on and so forth.  
And if you look in a modern society, you find, pretty much, that about half the 
work that's done is, in fact, unpaid for work.  Half of the work of a modern 
society is well outside the cash nexus, it's outside the economy as we 
normally think of it.

SEGAL			Well I certainly don't think of work in terms of what 
people get paid for.  You know, that was the essential sea change which 
feminism brought in, to say work is not just paid work.

CAIRNCROSS		Lynn Segal, Professor of Psychology and Gender 
studies at Birkbeck College, London, is author of a book called "Why 
Feminism?" 

SEGAL			The economy runs on the work of many people 
who are not paid to raise it's future work force and all the different things that 
feminists point out - to look after the sick at home, to look after the elderly.  
You know, the economy depends on there being unpaid work as well as paid 
work.

CAIRNCROSS		How do we know what work is?

SEGAL			Well, quite.  How do we know what work is?  I 
mean, some people's paid work might involve creative and pleasurable labour 
which they mightn't even want to regard as work.  I tend to enjoy many 
aspects of the work I do - both teaching and writing - for which I am paid and 
I've always had somewhat more trouble in what's meant to come naturally to 
a woman - that is doing the housework, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets - 
though it's meant to be in our genes to be able to do that and, of course, most 
women who can, just like most men who can, prefer to have someone they 
love do it for them or else to pay someone to do it for them.

CAIRNCROSS		Lynn Segal has campaigned for many years for 
women to have more choice in the job market. The fact that most women now 
prefer to go out to earn alongside men looks at first glance like a victory for 
feminism. But is it really the seduction of what Arlie Hochschild dubs the Time 
Bind?

HOCHSCHILD		We've been pressing men into taking on 
responsibilities for caring for people at home in addition to their jobs.  And, 
now what's happening is actually the other thing.  Rather than men taking on 
some of the jobs women have traditionally done, women have been moving in  
the other direction to become a little bit more like men.  You know, and 
surveys show that over half of fathers and mothers say they spend too little 
time with their children.  So I think we have to design a world in which we take 
that seriously.

CAIRNCROSS		But, I mean, I wonder if there isn't a bit of nostalgia 
in all of this.  We've had years of feminists campaigning to free women from 
having to spend a lot of time looking after children, having to spend a lot of 
time looking after elderly, having to spend a lot of time on domestic drudgery.  
Now women are free from it - they're in the work force, they're earning, they 
can pay other people to do some of these things - are you sure this isn't really 
nostalgia for a world that's gone?

HOCHSCHILD		Oh, hey.  This isn't nostalgia for the kitchen sink - 
this is nostalgia for the 8 hour day, which in the United States, I have to say, 
we have lost.  29 percent of US workers regularly work overtime.  And, again, 
adding long commutes, this is a long work day.  So, I'm nostalgic for the 8 
hour work day and flexibility and parental leave.

CAIRNCROSS		In Britain, where most working mothers with young 
children have part-time jobs, this is less of a problem – although fathers 
typically work the longest hours when their children are young. Maybe that is 
because the family needs the money most at that stage, or maybe because 
home life with small children can be more wearing than a job. But the upshot 
is that working mothers often end up doing two jobs, not one. They work for 
pay at the office, and then they cope with the unpaid task of feeding the kids 
when they get home.  So for most mothers, the split between work at the 
office and life at home may not be as stark as Arlie Hochschild implies. Lynn 
Segal.

SEGAL			Well, I have a problem with the notion of work-life 
balance.  What feminists used to talk about was the balance between paid 
and unpaid work, and I think it can be slightly misleading to talk about the 
work-life balance, because the problem for many women in particular, 
because they tend to do more of the caring work, is that their life is more 
work.  And so it's getting the balance between paid and unpaid work, which I 
think feminists were always concerned about.  

CAIRNCROSS			Is it the fact that the work that people do 
outside the home is paid that has made it so attractive to women that so 
many of them have decided that this is where they want to spend a large and 
larger proportion of their lives?

SEGAL				Women certainly need payment - we all 
need payment in order to live - and particularly since a lot of women are 
ending up on their own and can no longer rely permanently on some man 
supporting them, and that isn't the way in which things are organised in 
society today.  They certainly have to secure a financial stake in society.  
However, women are still doing a lot of unpaid work and a lot more unpaid 
work than many men.  That's why I don't see it as life and work exactly 
,because I think that the home front for many people involves a lot of work, 
and the workplace can involve a lot of pleasurable activity.  And so we are 
slightly fudging things, I think, by having a life-work split.

CAIRNCROSS		Lots of work gets done at home – not just cleaning 
and childcare, but also paid work, as more folk do jobs without an office. 
Meanwhile, others do things at work that are really leisure, whether going for 
a sandwich with colleagues at lunchtime, or booking a holiday from their desk. 
So perhaps we need to rethink the whole notion that work and leisure are 
clear opposites. Theodore Zeldin is a historian of leisure and author of "The 
Intimate History of Humanity".

ZELDIN			I think the leisure society was a mistake because it 
allowed employers to say: "Well you have to do this disgusting work, but we'll 
let you out after 8 hours, and you can go and watch television and you can go 
shopping.  But the work, therefore, since we are giving you all these benefits, 
you cannot complain that you have to sit in front of a computer all day".

CAIRNCROSS		You've just come back from France, and France, 
of course, has introduced the 35 hour week.  Do you think that that's 
something that governments in general should do?  Should they be seeking 
to limit the amount of time that people spend in work so that they spend more 
time in leisure and at home?

ZELDIN			The French legislation about 35 hours working 
week is the last stage of the 19th century demand by trade unions to limit work 
because work was so horrible, and it is not a forward looking idea.  The 
question now is, what kind of work do you do?  We haven't taken seriously 
yet the fact that we've created a new sort of person.  There is a young 
generation whom we have educated to have enormous curiosity to want to 
travel, to feel that they have many talents which one profession will not use.  
And so, we are faced with a new kind of human being but we have not 
changed the industrial system to accommodate it.

CAIRNCROSS		In Britain, the government is now considering 
giving the parents of young children the right to ask for shorter hours at work. 
But imposing such rules may be counterproductive, especially at a time of 
rising unemployment.  In any case, Theodore Zeldin is surely right to argue 
that the key to job satisfaction for the new generation of well-educated and 
multi-skilled workers is not the hours they work but whether a job engages 
their full potential. Managing human beings to get the best out of them is the 
most complex thing that employers do. Lots of employers, in both the private 
and the public sector, do it terribly badly.  Does psychologist Paul Brown, who 
advises them, think they could do it better?

BROWN			This thing that walks in every day on two legs is a 
very complex thing called a self or a person - which organisations know very 
little about.  So this extraordinary capacity we have to be self-guiding 
mechanisms, isn't allowed to flourish at all.  What I think we're working to in 
organisations at the moment is a completely new understanding of the basis 
of the relationship between the individual and the organisation.

CAIRNCROSS		But should we also be conscious of the fact that 
there are, for some people, enormous rewards in going to work, including 
rewards that come from what we have always thought of as stress?

BROWN			I absolutely take the point that you're making.  For 
many people fulfilling the challenge that work brings is very exhilarating.  It's 
quite clear that if we look over two million years of human development, 
human beings are hard wired to respond to challenge, to change the world 
out there.  There's something very profound about being human, that wants 
to make things different.  And properly done, human beings have 
inexhaustible supplies of energy to do that.  Badly done, their energy goes 
into defending themselves into coping with the unwarranted pressures and 
that becomes destructive stress instead of exhilarating stress.  If we go back 
to an understanding in physics of stress in metals, you can make things much 
stronger by stressing them well but if you stress them inappropriately, they 
crack.  And the same is true of human beings.

CAIRNCROSS		Some of the most famous studies of stress in the 
workplace suggest that the people who suffer most are not those in the 
demanding top jobs, but those lower down the ladder, doing the bidding of 
others, with no control over their working lives.  In future, companies may 
become less hierarchical and, as we've already seen in some dot coms, more 
like voluntary associations.  More people will almost certainly work for 
themselves, as "free agents", in the phrase of an American management 
guru.  But there's no reason to suppose that any of this will mean shorter 
working hours and more leisure.  Working life can still offer many rewards that 
home life does not carry: adult company, clear goals, somebody else to fix the 
broken light and deal with the landlord, and a pay cheque at the end of the 
month.  So should we worry if more of us, like the workers at the company 
Arlie Hochschild studied, choose to make paid work the focus of our lives? 

HOCHSCHILD		You're asking what's wrong with a society in which 
work becomes the main source of meaning and I think there are two things 
wrong with it.  One is that citizenship comes to be based on our status as 
workers, and non-workers are cut out.  And who are the non-workers?  
They're lower class people, they're unemployed people, retired people, 
children, the elderly.  So, in a way, we're moving to a value system in which 
you count if you work and you don't count if you don't work.  I think that's kind 
of a dangerous move, because in this new way of living life, where work is 
really your religion, your total set of meanings, if you get fired from your job, 
you get fired from your life.

CAIRNCROSS		As the economy slows down, more people will be 
disenfranchised in this way. However, the result may not be to overturn their 
desire to be in the job market, but to reinforce it.  Those who bemoan the loss 
of community and family life rarely think about the consequences, especially 
for women, of reversing the march into the workplace. Quite apart from pay, 
work brings order to our lives and a sense of purpose. Work may be stressful, 
but most jobs in our post-industrial world are no longer dirty, dangerous or 
physically demanding.  Paid work may not be heavenly, but life without it can 
be hell. 

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