It’s Been A Hard Day’s Night: The Concentration and Intensification of Work in Late Twentieth‐Century Britain
| Author | Francis Green |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8543.00189 |
| Date | 01 March 2001 |
| Published date | 01 March 2001 |
It's Been A Hard Day's Night: The
Concentration and Intensification of
Work in LateTwentieth-Century Britain
Francis Green
Abstract
This paper presents evidence on trends in work pressure in late twentieth-
century Britain. The main findings are: (1) Average hours of work levelled off
at the start of the 1980s, following a long historic fall, but have not increased
since. However, the dispersion of hours has increased, and working hours have
been concentrated into fewer households. (2) Work effort has been intensified
since 1981. Intensification was greatest in manufacturing during the 1980s,
and in the public sector during the 1990s. (3) Between 1986 and 1997 there
have been substantial increases in the number of sources of pressure inducing
hard work from employees.
1. Introduction
In the last two decades, despite the continuation of growth in living
standards, commentators have increasingly noted and occasionally deplored
a sense of increasing work pressure in Britain. The exact nature of this
pressure appears to vary from one account to another. A culture of long
hours at work came to be dubbed the new `British disease', elevating the
problem to a status accorded usually to only the most treasured of British
scapegoats.
1
Yet the metaphor of illness has also been appropriated by
commentators from the United States, lamenting the epidemic of `hurry
sickness', a virus engineered in California, and fearing that `time is running
out and it's driving us crazy'.
2
Long hours for men, in particular, came to
be seen as a constraint on the transformation of the household division of
labour, held out as part of the feminist project.
3
Long hours, reductions of
lunch breaks and other features have been touted as inimical to health. Long
hours for junior doctors, in particular, have rarely been out of the news for
long, given perceptions of attendant health risks to patients and recruitment
problems in Britain's National Health Service.
4
For Gallie et al. (1998) the
Francis Green is at the Department of Economics, University of Kent.
British Journal of Industrial Relations
39:1 March 2001 0007±1080 pp. 53±80
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issue is more one of hard work and tension in the workplace, of the pressure
of tight deadlines and increased task flexibility. In their in-depth survey-
based study of the transformation of both the subjective and the objective
experiences of labour in Britain up to 1992, they find that this transfor-
mation includes an experience of rising work pressure even with the same
hours of work. This increasing pressure is seen to go hand in hand with
perceived increases in skills. For others with a campaigning perspective,
increasing work pressure embraces both hard work and longer and more
unsociable hours, and is deemed to be self-evidently associated with
increasing job insecurity and health risks (London Hazards Centre 1994).
However, across this largely critical literature, the cited evidence to
support the general proposition that late twentieth-century Britain as a
whole is an era of increasing work pressure is decidedly limited. Indeed,
looked at just in terms of average work hours, there is little doubt that on
average people work far fewer hours each week and throughout the year
than they did even in the immediate postwar decades. This reduction in
work hours has enabled working men and women to have more free time, to
get more sleep, and to spend more time on family responsibilities (Robinson
1991). In recent years average work hours have changed very little, a statistic
that fails to bear out the feeling that work pressure is mounting.
5
All that
could be said of average work hours is that after 1980 average hours did not
continue their long-term historic fall, as happened in many other (but not
all) industrialized countries. This disjuncture between widespread perceptions
and the most obvious nationally representative statistic warrants investi-
gation: either perceptions of increasing work hours are inaccurate, or they
are relating to something other than the average number of hours worked.
With respect to work intensity, although there are some striking case-study
or sectoral studies which have occasionally found that work intensity has
been increasing (e.g. Burchell et al. 1999; Edwards and Whitston 1991; Edwards
et al. 1998), hitherto there has been no systematic statistical analysis of trends
in work intensity through the 1980s and 1990s. Even for short periods, only
Gallie et al. (1998) can claim to provide evidence on the basis of a nationally
representative sample. So the main question to be addressed in this paper is:
what statistical support is there for the notion of increasing work pressure in
late twentieth-century Britain?
An immediate reason for possible concern lies in the potentially detri-
mental effects on welfare of work intensification and an extension of hours.
Expressed concern is epitomized in the growth of the `stress' industry, that
army of occupational psychologists whose job is to find ways of relieving
the adverse effects of overwork on mental and physical health. Workplace
stress emerged as a political and social issue primarily in the 1990s. With
headlines such as `Work can damage your health',
6
reports of `stress at work
``rising sharply'''
7
and discoveries of the `stress factor as a British disease'
8
the
ballooning media coverage appeared to have discovered a new and growing
problem.
9
Yet stress is only the extreme manifestation of rising pressures at
work. Experiences of less extreme pressures may also be undesirable.
10
54 British Journal of Industrial Relations
#Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2001.
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