Work and Leisure

The devil still makes work 37no doubt that what the new economy wants and needs is a ‘flexible’ labourforce. In practice, this means workers who will work the hours employerswant, under conditions they cannot collectively negotiate and in a state ofpermanent insecurity. Employers clearly predominate in the balance of powerwith employees. Work and class inequalities still remain centre stage in thestruggle over time. Selling labour power is still at the heart of people’s everydayexperience of capitalism. Postmodernists may write about how culturalintermediaries skilfully celebrate the aestheticisation of everyday life, as theyexperience dedifferentiation and the blurring of the boundaries between workand leisure, as workplaces become more leisurely and people ‘work out’ intheir leisure time. But for the majority of workers, dedifferentiation meanswork time invading the rest of life, eroding the boundaries with family andleisure. The material reality of the ‘online society’, Sunday and late-nightshopping or the 24-hour call centre, means that someone else is workingantisocial hours, with contractual conditions lightly regulated by the stateand outside trade union influence. Some people can embrace new flexiblepatterns and construct new lifestyles which run counter to the biologicalrhythms and task-based routines of traditional work. But it is always theemployer’s prerogative to choose flexibilisation, to introduce new technologiesto monitor performance and measure output and to introduce new patternsof work. Self-employment often means high risks and long hours.Indeed, the middle class as a whole has experienced changes in conditions ofwork which are qualitatively significant.In Beck’s (1992) thesis of the risk society, power relations and power differentialsin employment are transformed. Growing insecurity of tenure andintensification of bureaucratic control and surveillance applies to all sectorsof paid employment. The traditional confidence and trust reserved formiddle-class professions is dissipated. With demands for quality controlprocedures and transparency of performance, the majority of professions,particularly within the public sector, have had their traditional work practicessubject to increased surveillance (Sennett 2000).The common experience of those selling labour power has been the actualintensification of work. The leisure revolution has been betrayed on twocounts – people in paid work are not only working longer but also workingharder. Ironically the very architects of post-Fordist regimes of deindustrialisationand work flexibilisation find that they themselves are subjectto the same logic of work discipline as their subordinates, such as downsizing,stress, casualisation, increased workloads and long-term insecurity. Careerpatterns and trajectories change; the harried middle class experiences anexcess of work (Seabrook 1988; Schor 1996).Of the many ways in which employment status impacts upon leisure, itseffect on individual and household income remains central. Where access toleisure increasingly rests on the capacity to purchase goods and services in themarket, the distribution of income becomes an important determinant of