April 2005 | The Parliament Magazine

Do Europeans work too hard?

Europe’s ills, such as they are, cannot all be blamed on work that is unbearably tough.

We all know the right-wing caricatures. Americans are hardworking, driven, take just two weeks’ holidays a year, and use unrivalled amounts of IT at work. George Bush’s free-market economy doesn’t tolerate much of a public sector; so, altogether, US workers are very productive.

Europeans, editorials in the Wall Street Journal frequently suggest, are different. They are more interested in food, wine and sunning themselves on the Med than in doing a decent job of work. They have short working weeks, long holidays, dozens of public holidays, and a public sector that’s a byword for scything off. Europeans take plenty of sickness leave, much of it unwarranted; and they are way behind the US in terms of IT. In short, Europeans are fundamentally unproductive.

If rightist caricatures distort reality, however, so do leftist ones. According to the left, the capitalist system all over the world does what Karl Marx always said it would: extend the working day and intensify work. The right of European workers to calm at work must be defended against such Americanising tendencies. The ‘offshoring’ of EU business to low-wage, long-hours, labour-intensive economies such as China or India must likewise be resisted.

Some forces on the European right join the European left in their hostility to the Americanisation of labour practices. So what’s the real picture?

The truth is that US productivity only looks good against Germany’s or France’s when it is measured over a year rather than over an hour. US workers do take few holidays; but when measured by the hour, their performance slips.

Perhaps, however, US workers are taking holidays, but at work, rather than away from it. And perhaps they quite a lot of such holidays not despite the unrivalled amounts of IT they have at their elbows, but because of it. In the workplace, IT has many merits; but in a service economy like America’s, there is also a lot of scope for using workplace IT on activities unrelated to work – family, shopping, dating, playing – is quite extensive.

Such displacement activities at work form a habit that Europeans share with Americans. The American public sector is not as big, in relation to GDP, as the EU’s; but, under George Bush, it is adding employees at an enormous rate. On the other hand, the leftist picture of a uniform global drive to lengthen hours and intensify work fails to convince, While firms in Germany and policies in France have recently begun to move away from shortish working hours, in many parts of Asia the trend to smaller working weeks has been around for nearly a decade.

What European workers suffer from more than most is the problematisation of work. Work is less about getting things done on time and on budget, or about getting ahead in productivity and career. It is more about the need to avoid stress and achieve, instead, that nirvana for our age, work/life balance. While it is a myth that the EU’s largely office-based work in 2005 is as intense, in practice, as going down a mine in Alsace-Lorraine was in 1955, work is today apprehended as an arena for bullying, sexual harassment, ill-health, and personal growth possibilities that are frustrated. Even telework, once seen as an opportunity, is now felt to be a potentially rather damaging enterprise.

The desire to get off the point of work, while formally engaged in the work process, has grown enormously. Answering personal calls and emails, daydreaming about alternative careers, managing your manager and bouncing ideas of little consequence off colleagues in bright new canteens – Europeans pursue these displacement activities as avidly as Americans. There is a whole lot of ‘self-organising’ teamwork afoot, and there are endless consultations about work organisation and workplace design; but decisive leadership is often lacking.

Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry, a big enthusiast for work-life balance, now offers SMEs in the UK an outsourced service through which they can have their Human Resources problems managed for them… by the government. That is striking news. Much of employment in Britain, as elsewhere in the EU, is based in SMEs. For the British state to take on the management of industrial relations in this direct way suggests that it will take even more of an interest than it already does in how workers ‘juggle’ work and private life.

That kind of government intrusion in our personal affairs is something that even the American right and the European left can probably agree with each other about. Managing Your Self – the subject of a special issue of the Harvard Business Review in January – should be neither the purpose of work in the EU, nor the business of the European Social Fund.

Europe’s ills, such as they are, cannot all be blamed on work that is unbearably tough. Despite its apparent modernity, work in the EU is, if anything, sloppier than it used to be. It is up to Europeans to own up to that problem.