All Out Drive for 35

When I was young my Dad edited the paper for his local union branch (I think this is what he did, although memory is a funny thing).  I think I was about 8 or 9 years old and loved the idea of making a magazine.  I went with him a few times and can smell the xerox paper, ink and tippex that seemed to be an essential part of the production, as if it was all happening right now.  The ink came out a peculiar blue/purple colour and the paper was shiny.  At the time he worked for the Post Office, as it was before BT took over and they were embroiled in a fight to get a 35 hour working week.  I loved my little badge, pinned to my lapel, which shouted, "ALL OUT DRIVE FOR 35." Today the teaching union, the N.U.T., are calling for teachers hours to be limited to 35 hours a week and if you read the press this sounds like a ridiculous idea.  

In those days, there was no blurring of the boundaries between work and home.  People couldn't just log-on and check their e-mails and many households didn't even have their own telephone line.  Their boss couldn't  ring their mobile and say, "Can you just...."  My Dad had breakfast with us (unless he was cycling the 8 miles to work), was home in time to supervise homework and always had dinner with us.  He even cooked it sometimes (especially on a 'Friday Night is Curry Night').  He did some overtime, which he was paid well for  and as children we were often aloud to go with him on his "Mergencies", which involved driving to a telephone exchange; sitting on a swivelling chair; listening to the speaking clock or book at bedtime; talking to the operators, while he ran round the exchange flipping switches; then driving home via the pub, where we sat in the car with a bottle of coke with a straw and a packet of crisps. Any work he brought home was in his head.  

The idea of only working a 35 hour week came from research that showed how working longer hours was bad for your health.  When I was at University, we had a guest lecture from the rather handsome and charismatic Professor Cary Cooper, who is an expert on workplace stress.  I mention his looks only because it may go some way to explaining why I remember his lecture better than most.  He said that people who worked over 60 hours a week were killing themselves and that over 45 hours a week had a significant effect on health including an increased risk of heart disease and depression.  It didn't occur to me that I would ever consider working that many hours at the time, because I'd never seen anyone do that and also I am basically lazy but happy.  Over the last 10 years, though, I have noticed how many more hours everyone is working.

What used to be the preserve of junior doctors, who would work long hours to prove themselves and eventually earn the right to spend much of their consulting time on the golf course as pay-back, is now common for anyone who wants to keep their job.  Talk to anyone who is in business or sales and you will find they are practically killing themselves.  They don't even get a proper holiday because they have a mobile phone.  Ring ring...., "Could you just..."

In 2004, Madeline Bunting wrote a brilliantly researched book called 'Willing Slaves; How Overwork Culture is Ruining Our Lives', which looked at the reasons we were all working harder with longer hours.   Between 1997 and 2004 the number of employees working over 48 hours a week had risen from 10% to 26% (this figure goes up to 52% for women) and only 44% of workers were taking their entitled annual leave. Only 35% of the workforce were taking their full hour's lunch break and the average lunch time was down to 26 minutes with many people eating at their desk.   By 2002 a sixth of the labour force were working over 60 hours a week.  This was nearly 10 years ago and I suspect things have become significantly worse for most people.  The title of her book is interesting.  People have willingly signed up for this.  No one has actually said, "You must..." but people have bought into the idea.  She points out that in the 18th and 19th Century the techniques for making people work such long hours were 'fear of God' and 'fear of hunger.'  Wages were set at a low level to ensure that people (including children) were hungry enough to return to work on Monday morning, after their Sunday lecture on the work ethic and how God loved hard workers and eternal flames of hell awaited the slackers.   This continued until the Trade Unions won a hard fought battle for better working conditions (I learnt about this testing my daughter on her A level history and it's fascinating stuff.  I can see why Mr Gove might want to remove it from the curriculum) 

 People are not hungry any more.  They could go home on time, take their full lunch break, not work all night, not answer the telephone to their boss, leave work e-mails until the morning without starving to death but they don't.  She says that employers have used a coercive technique of brand to get people to agree to all sorts of conditions.  She says that employers look for 'team players', people who are upbeat and jolly and willing to submit to anything for the sake of the brand.  In 2004, she thought some of her examples were horrifically comic or cultish but today they sound quite normal to me.

 "One Asda manager, for example, describes an occasion when all employees were asked to wear a pink item of clothing for a breast cancer awareness day. "Everyone joined in, it was a great cause. But there were two dissenters who forgot. I told them to go home. I told them, 'You're not in the team.' They knew what was the right or wrong behaviour, and they went off, bought pink shirts and came back."

Although we are not going to starve to death rampant consumerism has taken the place of hunger.  How can we possibly survive without high speed braodband, an i-phone, a new car, Christian Laboutin shoes, ballet lessons for the children?  The press and government propaganda have taken over from the church and here I must point out to anyone who thinks I'm being a rampant lefty that it was the last Labour government who really made the idea of not working to be 'evil'.  Everyone including mothers, carers and the disabled were sent on restart schemes and given working tax credits to encourage them not to be so idle.  Work became the only thing that you could use to measure someone's success and the more hours they worked the more successful they had to be. 

Good book:  Available from Amazon and other good book sellers

The NUT's request for a 35 hour week are not sitting well with ordinary people, who think that teachers already have it easy.  They know that they can only get rid of their children to school for 7 hours a day (although most will round that down to 6 because 8.40 is really 9 O Clock and 3.20 is really 3!).  They know that this stops them working as many hours as they would like to get the latest thing they really need, which includes an after school gym club, which they wouldn't have to pay for if teachers worked the same amount of hours they do.  They know that teachers get great holidays, they say to their friends, "What I wouldn't give for 12 weeks holiday a year!" although we know they probably wouldn't take them, as they don't take their full entitlement of 25 days.  The Daily Mail, in classic form, reported the story that teachers wanted more non-contact time because they didn't have time to talk to each other. 

Teachers are no exception to the rule of being willing slaves in the workforce.  They have bought into the concept of working harder, longer and proving their worth just as much as the car salesman or the software engineer.  The Guardian has interviews with 6 teachers about their working hours today and many of those teachers are saying that they don't agree with the TUC's request.  All teachers interviewed were working many more hours than the public think they are but lots of them thought this was fine.

At the weekend I read an article about the habits of seven highly effective people (nice twist on the Stephen Covey book I thought) in the Guardian.  Helena Morrisey, CEO of Newton Investment gets up at 5am and checks her e-mails until her children get up at 6.30.  She is at her desk by 8 and goes home at 6, to eat with her family at 7.30.  After supper she sends some more e-mails and prepares for the next day's meetings.  She goes to bed at 10 and works on Sunday mornings while her children do their homework.  She has an undisclosed seven figure salary and 9 children.  Compare this to a teacher interviewed in today's Guardian:  He gets in at 7.15am and leaves at 6pm.  He teaches 5 lessons and spends the rest of the time doing paperwork or supervising the odd detention.  He goes home, puts his children to bed an does his marking between 7.30 and 10.30pm.   He works most of Saturday, so that he can have Sunday off and tries to have a week off in each holiday, working his usual hours for the rest of the break.  His salary will probably be about £35,000.

Most teachers that I know don't want to spend less time with the children.  They want to do less paperwork, especially the paperwork that no one ever seems to look at.  They want teaching and inspiring children to want to learn and do their best to be enough. I suspect that's what children and parents want too. I'd quite like the public to embrace unions that want  improve working conditions but they won't for reasons that is a whole other, long ranty blog.