http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2003/mar/24/madeleinebunting2
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday March 24 2003. It was last updated at 16:12 on March 24 2003.
Dear Ms Bunting,
Having a (rare!) idle moment, I would like to commend you on your continuing concern with the importance of achieving a work-life balance.
I believe the cult-like devotion to work that swallows whole lives these days is yet another nasty idea of US origin - and I say that as an American.
I am 53 and have spent my most of my working life, as a corporate writer, noting a steady decline in the quality of working conditions. Any number of things have combined to make the workplace the hellish place it is now.
a) The shift from a manufacturing to a service economy
b) The leveraged buy-outs of the 1980s and "outsourcing" of the 1990s that created "lean, mean" companies, permanently wiping out tiers of middle management and corporate staff
c) The globalisation of commerce and advent of the PC/internet/cell phone that cleared the way for 24/7 feats of Stakhanovite excess
d) Above all, the rise of the "winner-take-all" society, where CEOs and suchlike are seen as entitled to live large at everyone else's expense.
What amazes and depresses me is how readily over the years my colleagues have acceded to their exploitation. When cell phones and pagers first erupted in the workplace, my coworkers fairly burbled with delight at the prospect of being equipped with such symbols of importance, oblivious to these devices' obvious potential as electronic shackles. Yet, I will admit that - as seems to be the point of your investigations - it is impossible to escape the gravitational pull of today's work-maddened society, even for someone as inclined toward dolce far niente as I am:
a) Working for a PR firm in New York during the 1990s, I never for a moment imagined I was participating in the creation of a "New Economy"; even at the time the decade seemed no more than a steady succession of harebrained schemes. Nevertheless, I was up at all hours with everyone else, attending to urgent-urgent-urgent (but always nonsensical) document revisions. Of course, a PR firm, like a law firm, imposes its own special tyranny: billable hours. Billing by the hour - around as much of the clock as inhumanely possible - makes coffee machines as key to office productivity as computer printers.
b) That, however, was the 90s. Now I'm my own boss - meaning: I got chucked out of my job. I foolishly assumed that staying with one employer for 12 years would give me some protection from the inevitable major downturn, but quite the contrary. I was one of the first laid off at my firm, right at the start of the US recession in April 2001. Ever since, what with endless futile chases after a fulltime job combined with fitful periods of freelance work - again, often at crazy hours - I find have less control over my time than ever.
But enough lamentation about the woeful state of the States. May I end simply by wishing you the best with your project. I regret to say that the UK - via the awful example set by Margaret Thatcher in everything - made its own contribution to the decayed condition of American society today; nevertheless, the UK has something the US entirely lacks - a leftist political tradition that amounts to something - that, just possibly, could prove inspirational to the US in the correct way. I earnestly hope you do find ways to turn Workcamp UK into a more gemutlich place. Here in the US there's a lot riding on your success.
Yours,
Carl Remick
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam