When I was small, my dad, who was a car mechanic, used to work on Saturdays. Then he only worked on Saturday mornings, and finally didn't work on Saturdays at all. I don't know exactly when this happened, but I think the shift probably took place in the mid-1970s. When I went to work in the strange world of museums nearly twenty years later, working at a weekend attracted time-and-a-half pay because the Council considered it exceptional that people should work on Saturdays and Sundays.
I thought of this in respect of the junior doctors' dispute yesterday. The disagreement between the BMA and the Government seems to have concentrated on whether NHS staff are to be paid a higher rate for working on Saturdays, and at other times, which the Government deems to be 'normal hours', thus enabling them to avoid forking out any more cash to make sure hospital rosters are staffed to the level they say they want at those times. There is a sense in which the Government are right, because Saturday is now basically a working day the same as any other for great numbers of people, at least outside the public sector.
My dad's working experience back in the 1970s reflected the culmination of a process which had begun in the 1930s, recognising the importance of life outside work. It was in the 1930s that big employers began to organise works outings and holidays, and legislation followed enshrining non-work within the social fabric. Work was still a necessity but there was a new sense that it had to be balanced with leisure and rest, and that these things had a legitimate place in the lives of individuals and families, and that place should be protected by the State.
But the march of individualisation and consumerism since the 1980s has broken down the communal nature of both work and non-work: people now have a portfolio of both rather than fitting in with what most other people do. In about 2000, the Chief Exec of Wycombe Borough Council told us at a staff meeting how fantastic it was that he could phone up one of the public utilities at 3am and get a response to a billing question, and how the Council should move to a similar 24-hour service; then we thought he was nuts, but now such expectations seem almost to be mainstream, driven by our experience of dealing with online retailers and suppliers who never shut or sleep. Of course lots of people have always worked at weekends or in the evenings, mainly those who service the leisure activities of those who don't; what's changed is that such 'antisocial hours' are no longer considered to be antisocial, they are normal, to be expected. More and more people I speak to describe their working lives as involving shifts, evenings, weekends, part-time this-and-that.
A lot of this is all very well and you may argue increases the control individual workers have over their own working practices, and after all a certain amount of non-work is still statutorily provided for. But it also works to the benefit of employers, who no longer need to recognise that there is any such thing as 'antisocial' work. The expectation that working on Saturday is exceptional has largely gone except in the reactionary bastions of the public sector such as the NHS, and Sunday can't be far behind. Eventually working on public holidays will no longer attract a higher rate of pay either. The high tide of communally-structured non-work has long since passed, and the junior doctors' dispute can be seen as one of the later battles in the struggle to preserve it, a war which has largely been fought, and lost, without anyone noticing.
Although most of the focus in the furore over the Government's '7-day NHS' rhetoric has been on hospitals and junior doctors, Jeremy Hunt also talked a few months ago about making GP surgeries work on a similar basis: 'busy people should be able to see their doctor when it suits them, in the evening and at weekends'. Actually, of course, if you really need a GP during 'antisocial hours', there is usually a no-frills service organised by your local surgeries which covers such times already: I used the one in Wycombe (WYDOC) when I had chickenpox, and very good they were too, actually far better than my own GP who had misdiagnosed me. What Mr Hunt actually means is that people should be able to see their doctor at a time which suits their employer, so they don't have to take a couple of hours off in the day. It's as though the Government thinks illness is a leisure choice. I remember what Il Rettore said to me in one of his most shop-stewardish moods when we were talking about the difficulties of getting to the barber's: 'It grows in the firm's time, it can be cut in the firm's time!'
The world the Government is forcing on NHS staff is the world we have implicitly chosen to live in, a world in which work is the moral centre of human life and in which there is nothing in between the individual and the economic machinery they have to negotiate an existence with. A world in which there are only fuzzy, indistinct boundaries between times of work and leisure will work to the moral disadvantage of leisure which has no monetary value (except in terms of someone else's work); this is what lets the Government paint NHS staff as self-interested opponents of change, morally to blame for refusing to work for other people's benefit. It's Fatcher's Britain, as one who grew up in the 1980s might be tempted to describe it.
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