If someone complains about having to work too hard, sooner or later they'll say that they have "no choice". Probe a little further and what becomes clear is that, for much of the workforce living well above the poverty line, the connection between pay and overwork is about aspiration to particular patterns of consumption. This is murky territory, where one person's "needs" are another's "desires" .
Are mobile phones, foreign holidays and DVD players luxuries or necessities of contemporary living? The perceived lack of choice may be the consequence of a series of choices - the bigger house, the new car, the rising debt - that trap people into working too hard. Consumer debt has rocketed in the past decade, with the British splashing out with their credit cards (borrowing three times more than they did 10 years ago) and using their homes as cash machines (loans secured against homes surged by a staggering 40% in 2002 alone).
Through consumerism we find our sense of dignity: you put up with the bullying boss and salve your wounded pride by treating yourself to a pedicure at the weekend. As Australian social scientist Sharon Beder comments in Selling the Work Ethic: "It is only as purchasers that we are treated with the courtesy worthy of a human being."
The harder you work, the longer and the more intense your hours, the more pressure you experience, the more intense is the drive to repair, console, restore and find periodic escape through consumerism. As one senior NHS manager told me, as she described a hugely demanding work schedule, the odd weekend in New York had become essential for her sanity. We've "found" the solutions to the problems of the workplace in our private consumption patterns: in millions of dreams about the perfect aestheticisation of our homes and gardens as places of retreat and restoration; in the perfect getaway, the holiday as far removed from our daily life as we can possibly find. The fantasy is all about retreat and escape. Overwork and consumerism feed off each other. But money, and the consumer goods we can buy with it, don't tell the whole story of why some people in the high-skill, high-income bracket are working harder. Once the upper-middle-class desired leisure and scorned anything that looked like trying too hard; now they are rarely parted from their mobiles or Blackberry handhelds. They look exhausted, complain of too much work, yet do nothing about reducing their burden. Money alone doesn't explain the topsy-turvy inversion whereby in America in the 1890s the poorest worked harder than the rich, but by 1991 the richest 10% were working harder than the poorest.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1238028,00.html
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