A study published by King’s College London this week says the UK places less importance on work than any of the 24 countries included in the research. What to think? My first reaction is a rare moment of patriotic pride: against all odds, dour old Britain has glimpsed the emptiness of modern capitalism and achieved a higher plane of consciousness than our peers around the world.
But on further reflection, I’m not sure that the study – which spans the US, with a GDP of $23trn, to Morocco, at $143bn – does paint such a flattering picture of Britain. While its findings reflect the nation as a whole, they show a stark generational divide, with millennials significantly more likely than older generations to welcome a decline in the importance of work, and significantly less likely to say that work should always come first. On the one hand, this indicates a healthier approach to work-life balance, which is no bad thing. But doesn’t it also suggest that millennials have been deprived of the opportunity to find purpose, enjoyment and security in the workplace?
For a significant portion of millennials, work has always been insecure. I spent most of my 20s working zero-hours contracts in hospitality, and while I often enjoyed the work itself, the precarity brought with it a sense of unease. On displeasing a capricious manager, you might check the rota and find yourself, with no possibility of recourse, missing the day or two’s work you needed to pay rent (even worse was the dreaded “death by rota”, when a member of staff would be erased entirely, often for the simple crime of being slightly annoying). It is difficult to value work when it clearly doesn’t value you back, just as it’s difficult to invest meaning in something when you know it can be snatched away at any moment. In scenarios like these, a mercenary, antagonistic attitude of “take the money and run” or “minimum wage, minimum effort”, is entirely justified.
While these dynamics might be especially pronounced in the service sector, work is getting worse for just about everyone, as wages stagnate and rates of in-work poverty soar. Decimated by austerity, the kind of care-giving professions that might carry an intrinsic sense of purpose, like teaching, nursing and social work, have become underpaid and increasingly stressful: for workers in these fields, a degree of emotional disengagement might be a survival strategy. The avenues of work that allow people to pursue their interests, such as academia, journalism or the third sector, have become more casualised, and in some cases more tightly bound by the imperatives of the free market (writing, in my experience, is a lot less fulfilling when it is geared towards search engine optimisation and page-clicks).
It’s true that people hating their jobs is nothing new, and that millennials are not the first generation to notice that working life can be unfulfilling. But in previous decades, it seems there was the greater sense that you were at least sacrificing your time and autonomy for something, even if that were as simple as providing for your family. Think of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer, having traded his dream job in a bowling alley for a lifetime of drudgery at the power plant, plasters his workstation with photos of his daughter Maggie. In the final shot, a sign reading “Don’t forget: you’re here for ever” is obscured to become “Do it for her”. But when so many millennials face financial barriers to settling down and having children, this form of motivation is growing more scarce – if work has always been a means to an end, it’s less clear now what that end might be.
Nor is this just about forming a nuclear family: all sorts of long-term aspirations are becoming almost farcically out of reach, whether saving up to buy a home or avoiding penury in your old age. A recent Bloomberg report concluded that millennials ought to have saved at least $3m (£2.4m) in order to enjoy their retirement, and while this is clearly ridiculous, it does correspond with a real problem. Staring down the barrel of a bleak future, it’s easy to understand why so many millennials have given up on the distant dream of scaling the career ladder, and started banking on the climate apocalypse in lieu of a pension plan.
But are we wrong to totally lose our faith in the possibility of fulfilling and well-paid employment? There is a tendency evident among left-leaning millennials to consider work as something inescapably alienating and exploitative (consider the popular online catchphrase “I don’t have a dream job because I don’t dream of labour”). There may be an element of truth to this, but some jobs clearly afford more autonomy, dignity and security than others – which means it can be improved for everyone.
Work is not something we can mentally opt out of with an attitude readjustment, but a political problem that has solutions. Labour’s “new deal for working people” contains promising policies, including a ban on zero-hours contracts and the single status of “worker” for all gig economy employees, but Keir Starmer has recently indicated that the plans will be watered down. Maybe there’s something to celebrate in millennials turning away from the singular importance of working, but if we are still beholden to poor wages and long hours, this rejection is merely gestural. If people were better paid, if they enjoyed more free time and greater security, they would be able to disentangle themselves from their jobs in a more meaningful way, or perhaps even find something to value in working after all.
