Work Until You Drop

In this third feature on the topic of work, Sean O’Shea describes the influence of the changing economic and political climate of the eighties, and the impact of the modern culture of efficiency, on the professional and personal lives of workers.

The dominance of work, punctuated by periods of administered leisure, as the main life activity of the majority of the population, and the enforced idleness or dependency of the rest, is a relatively recent phenomenon (see previous posts).

The optimistic expectations of the sixties that, with the advance of technology and social democracy the working week would be much reduced, wealth would be more widely shared and increasing numbers of people would have more time for their personal development and participation in the cultural and civic life of their communities, have been dramatically disappointed.

In the eighties and nineties workplaces were transformed by a new enterprise culture built on the imperatives of economic rationality and consumerism. There was an extension of privatisation and major “restructurings”, “downsizings” and “outsourcings” took place. While this resulted in some improvement in economic competitiveness, it also resulted in constant change, work intensification and redundancies.

The euphemisms used to describe this process gave little indication of the trauma inflicted, both materially and psychologically, on the lives of the individuals and families affected by these changes. Nor did the spreadsheets, which listed the people to be “deleted”, betray any whiff of the dread and anxiety experienced by workers as they were instructed, often at short notice, to clear their desks and return their security access cards. More descriptive and revealing metaphors were also in vogue such as “cutting to the bone” and “getting rid of dead wood”. All this, of course, was “nothing personal, just business.”

Morals, or the concern with the ultimate aims and goals of our activities, i.e. “the big picture,” became increasingly regarded as a matter of purely subjective preference without cognitive content. And some commentators characterised all moral evaluation as meaningless, and argued that the notion of human agency itself was a myth.

Along with the privatisation of the economic and moral spheres, there was a de-politicisation of the political domain.

Francis Fukuyama, an American political economist, in his retrospective on the fall of communism, described history as a story which culminates in liberal democracy (The End of History and The Last Man, 1992). Political liberalism and the free market was declared as the highest attainable form of human “freedom”, and the old practical and ideological battles associated with class struggle, the continuing unequal distribution of wealth and power in society, and contrasting visions of the “good society”, were claimed to have been surpassed and no longer relevant.

To fill the vacuum arising in this business-dominated, economically crisis-ridden, politically bankrupt and morally relativist universe, a single interest became dominant: the utilitarian concern with efficiency. And a new professional tribe, the technical efficiency experts, arose from the ranks of the middle classes to manage and meet the demands of this rapidly expanding market.

If history teaches us any lessons, it is that the growing preoccupation in such a society becomes one of how to deal with those classified as unproductive, unemployable, useless, ill, old, disabled or recalcitrant.

 

The culture of efficiency

If it moves, measure it.

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Everyone is for “efficiency”. When you go to a restaurant, you want to be served promptly. When you go under the surgeon’s knife, you want to feel assured he/she knows what they are doing. When you travel you don’t want to queue for hours before you can get on a plane. It appears at first sight to be perhaps one of the few remaining undisputable virtues. However, on closer inspection efficiency becomes a slippery, ambiguous and paradoxical concept.

Efficiency was initially a philosophical term: the “efficient cause” of an object, according to the philosopher Aristotle, is that which causes change and motion to start or stop. It re-emerged in the Scientific Management movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In one of its modern manifestations the concept takes its meaning from thermodynamics, and the measuring of the performance of machines as they convert useless into useful energy. A key aim is to maximise the amount of useful energy that can be extracted from a machine and minimise waste. As thermodynamic processes can’t completely overcome waste, the aim of perfectability remains out of reach.

The efficiency concept was extensively applied to industrial production, such as for example the manufacture of automobiles, most famously by the Ford Motor Company. In the factory, what was required was docile bodies and docile minds, and workers were reduced to functioning like the machines they operated, a development dramatised in Charlie Chaplin’s movie Modern Times.

The evident increase in productivity associated with Fordist management principles ensured that the gospel of efficiency was soon generalised to other fields of activity including economics, health, and education.

 

Persons or machines

The application of concepts originating in engineering to the domain of human relations is scientifically, morally and politically problematic. It blurs the traditional distinction between persons and things. It also clashes with the imperative identified by the moral philosopher Kant, that persons should always be treated as ends, not merely as means (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 1797).

Nor does the pursuit of efficiency guarantee that either social justice or the goals of an organisation will be achieved. The overriding concern of corporations is for productivity, their own survival and “the bottom line”. Moral considerations can be sidelined as obstacles to the pursuit of efficient outcomes, and the corporation’s limited liability status enables them to offload the costs of their mistakes, or the damage they cause, onto third parties, i.e. workers and communities.

It is a characteristic of this topsy-turvy world that we have economic organisations which may be efficient in the pursuit of profit, but undermine the stability of the wider economy and ultimately imperil their own sustainability.  We have political organisations supposedly set up to promote and protect civil liberty, which end up repressing such liberty. We have welfare organisations set up to care and protect the elderly that end up denying them services or neglecting and abusing them. And we have transport systems which in their efficient pursuance of ever-faster travel ensure that many of us spend hours sitting stationary or moving at a snail’s pace along our motorways. Freedom in such a context becomes a choice of the queue in which you wish to wait.

Nonetheless, some still celebrate the rigorous pursuit of efficiency, arguing that it has contributed to rising living standards and been the main source of wealth creation and prosperity in industrial society. Others view efficiency as a neutral concept or quality, which is neither good nor bad in itself, but depends on the context and the value we attach to it. Still others maintain that the concern for efficiency has become the dominant “ideology” of our times, and as such has superseded moral considerations and become a method of control and exploitation, which has extensive and dehumanising consequences.

 

An illustrative vignette – John’s story

John works as a care worker in the social services. Early in his career he felt he had a degree of autonomy and most of his time was spent in direct contact with the people in his care. Though the work at times was stressful, he found it rewarding.

Then John noticed that the work environment and the language of work changed.

Clients became “customers”, and the service was referred to as a “business”. The humanistic language of care and welfare was replaced by a technical discourse of inputs, outputs and transformation systems. There were targets, quality assurance systems, continuous monitoring and “performance” appraisals. He began to work longer hours (unpaid) to meet the required targets, and spent an increasing amount of his time on his computer collating statistics for the SED (systems efficiency department).

Once a set of targets was achieved, the bar would usually be raised and “continuous improvement” became the popular mantra.

He had less and less time to spend with his “customers” and found that he had to make appointments to see his wife who was working under similar pressures. He came to feel that the whole of his life was becoming a series of performances with ever escalating expectations.

His sex life suffered, as he was generally too tired to “perform”. The only place he felt that he was not subject to some performance standard or other was in the bathroom, or during his annual fishing trips.

He took Prozac and Ritalin in an attempt to conform to the work norm of continuous improvement, and to the social norm of compulsory hyperactivity and cheerfulness, but this didn’t allay his growing anxiety.

An image that began frequently to haunt him, in his conscious mind and in his dreams, was that of the gates of Auschwitz. He often woke up sweating after such dreams, and would for a time find it difficult to breath.

He recalled reading how in the late thirties the German work camp officers, in their zealous pursuit of efficiency, researched the average time required for a toilet break. Workers who took longer than the statistical average were subject to sanctions. This gave new meaning to the phrase “time and motion study”

He gloomily reflected that most of the people who entered the work camps never again saw the light of day.

 

A sense of entrapment

Changing workplace and economic conditions over the past 30 years have led to an epidemic of work-related stress. Employees are expected to work harder and faster. There is also increasing job insecurity. New technology has added to the burden of information overload, accelerated the pace of work and blurred the boundary between work and private life.

There is a growing body of evidence of the negative impact of high levels of work-related stress on the physical and psychological health of workers.  Associated illnesses include anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, IBS, burnout syndrome and high blood pressure. And some studies have suggested that working in such environments can increase the risk of coronary heart disease.

Over recent years I have heard numerous accounts similar to John’s from teachers, nurses, and workers in the private sector. John’s use of the imagery of the concentration camps may be considered extreme. But the use of such metaphors in workers’ descriptions of the pace and climate of modern workplaces is not, in my experience, unusual. It vividly expresses an emotional truth, and captures well his sense of increasing depersonalisation and oppression in his work situation, which has also affected his home life.

The image also illustrates the widespread sense of entrapment experienced by workers who, with rising unemployment, face decreasing career options, feel lucky to have a job at all, and feel that if they did manage to change to another job they might be subject to even more rigorous performance demands.

The gap in life expectancy, as well as the gap in income, between the highest and lowest socio-economic groups has considerably widened in recent decades. As a consequence, many younger workers, facing the prospect of having to work longer before they become entitled to a state pension, are now beginning to wonder if they will survive long enough to experience retirement.

 

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