Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

Häftad bok. HarperCollins Publishers. 2004. 368 sidor.

Mycket gott skick. Storpocket. The title of this brilliantly thorough and thoroughly brilliant attack on the contemporary work ethic comes from an essay written in 1958 by CS Lewis. In it, he raged against the loss of liberty that the industrial revolution and interfering government had imposed on the freeborn citizens of Albion. "In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves in order to eat," he wrote. "So in society."
There's a great tradition of what we might call anti-work writing, which stretches back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. The thinkers and pioneers of the Enlightenment truly believed that commerce, machinery and wages would bring freedom to the British peasantry. But that was not how William Blake, Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, DH Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and EP Thompson, among many others, saw it. They saw capitalism and its machines as slave drivers. Now Madeleine Bunting has joined the argument, and the question she asks is: what has happened to the promise of work? Hard work was supposed to bring wealth and satisfaction. Instead, argues Bunting, with an abundance of statistics and anecdotes to back her up, it has brought worry, illness, poverty and debt. Why do so many of us voluntarily submit ourselves to low, low wages, long, long hours and high stress? Why do we willingly enslave ourselves?

In the late 18th and all through the 19th centuries, the great project of industrialisation was to take a nation of strong-willed and independent agricultural workers and transform them into docile wage slaves. The two principal methods used by those at the top were fear of God and fear of hunger. A new work ethic was promoted by the Methodists, who preached every Sunday to the new working class that it was their moral duty to work hard. God wanted you to work; God was a sort of über-boss, or "overlooker", in the jargon of the time. Slack off at work and the eternal flames of hell awaited.

Crucially also, wages were set low to ensure the worker returned to work on Monday morning. Hunger was found to be an effective prod to ensure that workers - men, women and children from the age of six upwards - made it to the mill on time.

These evils were, of course, resisted. First there was the 10-hour-day movement. Then, eventually, child labour was abolished. The trade unions - after much struggle, it has to be said - managed to improve conditions. The eight-hour day was introduced. Surely things are better today? The physically brutal conditions have gone, and no one is so poor today that they starve.

Bunting argues that we are still enslaved. We may not die from hunger, but we are certainly overworked and stressed out. Work has overtaken us, she argues; it has invaded our consciousness. And the physical hardships of working in the old mills have been replaced