WORK/LIFE BALANCE
Posted by John Redwood, MP for Wokingham, at 13:44, Thu 12 October 2006:
Work/life balance is a phrase often used by the left to bash employers. Their view is wrong headed. It leads people to believe that there is something called work, and then something called life; the latter being unremitting joy. All politicians have to do to make people happy is to regulate employers so that everyone works shorter hours and has more time off . Hey Presto, we will all be over the moon.
Most people’s lives don’t work that way. The author of the old proverb, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is much nearer the mark. What most people would like is more leisure time, preferably with some money to spend to make it more enjoyable. We have to be careful lest in our wish to regulate paid employment we make it impossible for people to afford the leisure time and leisure pursuits they like. Abolishing one man’s longer hours is abolishing another man’s overtime pay.
If my choice is between answering another constituent’s letter and peeling some more potatoes for dinner, I would rather reply to the constituent’s letter. The truth is I need to do both. So it is for many people. Much of the so-called life time of the left wing model is spent working, doing unpaid chores that we all need to do to live.
If I worked in the private sector rather than the badly run public sector, I could earn more by working more effectively - I could earn a bigger bonus or promotion and a pay rise. Then I could spend more on having others to help with the chores. Many people do spend the bonus on outings to the local restaurant or calling the Take away , to cut down on cooking and dishwashing.
We spend a third of our life sleeping. That leaves us 16 hours or so a day. The typical balance for someone working full time is to spend half of those hours in paid employment, and the balance of the hours in unpaid employment and leisure. People who feel under pressure may be spending most of their time off looking after the family, travelling to and from work and doing household chores. People who are happier often manage to spend more of their spare time in leisure pursuits, with friends or family and doing the things they want to do. For people to lead happier lives, they need to manage both the work/leisure balance, and the paid work/unpaid work balance.
You do not necessarily improve your work/leisure balance by skimping on paid employment. If you earn enough, you can buy a better washing machine, hire a gardener or get help with other household chores if you don’t like doing them.
Some mothers with young children miss having time for themselves with all their waking time being taken up with paid and unpaid work. They may decide to pay for their child to have a place at a nursery or a babysitter so they are freed from child care some of the time. Many working people get round dicing the vegetables or filleting the fish by buying dearer ready prepared food. There is a growing market for so called convenience products.
We are moving on from the age of mass production, to the age of mass customisation. The privileges of the few of fifty years ago are now available in a different form for the many, as people on average incomes find ways round chores that in days gone by would have been done by servants in grander households. Today everyone can have people working for them in the food factory or the take away.
The quality of life is about choice. It is quite possible to pursue the good life, doing many more things for yourself at home at the expense of having less time to undertake paid work. The problem with this strategy is it leaves you short of cash for both leisure and life’s crises.
I am all in favour of employers offering flexibility over time and place for carrying out paid work. It makes sense for them as well as for the employee. Intelligent employers in many businesses use the flexibility the employee wants to benefit the business. What matters is getting the job done well in a way which satisfies the customer. Increasingly that means something different from the old 9 to 5 pattern of corporate behaviour.
Because most people work they expect their supermarket to be open most hours and their broadcasters to be performing when they get home. If you expect the shop assistant and the broadcaster to work funny hours, you may need to accept you have to work funny hours too. The old ideas were based on post war factory organisation. You had to be there for the daytime shift. The machines would not stop for your absence, so there was no flexibility. If you worked longer or at week-ends it was overtime, paid at a higher rate. Today, in our fast moving service world, work can be organised much more flexibly than that.
Some people enjoy their jobs. Work fulfils a social function for many. They meet friends and interesting people there. They may like what they are doing. It may be preferable to an evening alone doing the ironing. Instead of arguing over whether we should force more regulations on business, we should expect a little more understanding of people’s needs from the biggest employer of them all, the government.
In practise the more you earn, the more choices you have over how you organise your life. You have the option of buying yourself out of work you otherwise have to do for nothing. That has not been taken into account by these left wing ideas that we should all rush home from the office to enjoy leisure time. The danger with the regulatory approach is that it will destroy some jobs and limit people’s flexibility to earn what they need to pay for an increasingly expensive and complex lifestyle. If government really wants to make us happier, they should regulate less and leave more of our money in our bank accounts so we can choose how to spend it.
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