28 The Sunday Times December 19, 2021NEWS REVIEW
But with half of UK workers insisting that
they will consider quitting if instructed to
return to the office full-time, and record
numbers here and in the US handing in
their notices in what is being referred to
as the “Great Resignation”, few bosses
have felt they have much choice.
Businesses that a couple of years ago
had aspirant interns offering their eye-
teeth for unpaid work experience are
reporting entry-level candidates rou-
tinely ruling out early starts, weekend
working and daily commutes. Many
employees have snubbed the “quick-fix”
pay rises being offered by employers who
are worried about haemorrhaging talent.
There is no doubt that a long,
unplanned and surprisingly successful
experiment in working from home cata-lysed this shift in sentiment. For most of
the last decade we’ve had the technologi-
cal means to work more flexibly. But, per-
suaded by HR managers and others
invested in the endurance of the estab-
lished office ecosystem, who believe that
routine remote working would transform
us all into a bunch of unproductive
moochers, we simply didn’t make use of
it. Since they have been proved so wrong
about this, it is no surprise that people
have begun to question what else they’ve
got wrong.
But this alone does not account for
what is turning out to be a far more funda-
mental shift in our relationship with work
— one that has added unprecedented
enthusiasm for ideas such as the four-day
week, which, in pre-pandemic times,
were dismissed as fringe or frivolous.
Rather, it is clear that the pandemic
has amplified deeper currents that were
already pushing us inexorably towards
what may prove to be one of the most far-
reaching inflection points in the history
of work for many generations.T
o get a better sense of why requires
stepping back in time. Studies of
small-scale hunting and gathering
cultures that survived into the 20th
century suggest that our hunter-
gatherer ancestors were well-fed and
rarely put in the long work shifts that we
are accustomed to. Before they were
robbed of their lands and traditional live-
lihoods, healthy adult Ju/’hoansi bush-
men of the Kalahari, whose grim encoun-
ter with the expanding global economy
I have been documenting for the past
three decades, rarely spent much more
than 15-17 hours searching for food every
week, and a similar amount of time on
other work, including domestic chores
such as food preparation and gathering
firewood. This is considerably less than
our standard 40-hour working week, and
the up to 35 extra hours many of us spend
on domestic duties and tasks such as
commuting.
The fact that they traditionally worked
so little compared with us, despite living
in an environment that is harsh by any
standards, is a reminder that the lives of
our hunter-gatherer ancestors during the
first 300 millennia of Homo sapiens’s his-
tory may have been shorter and harder
than ours in many ways, but almost cer-
tainly involved more leisure time.
We often describe our stated convic-
tion that hard work is virtuous and idle-
ness a vice as a product of what the Ger-
man sociologist Max Weber called “the
Protestant ethic”. The truth is that it was
a feature of pretty every society in history
that depended primarily on agriculture
to survive. Farming is more productive
than hunting and gathering, but it alsoplaced a huge premium on hard work.
Wheat sown in the early spring will only
turn into loaves of bread by year end, and
to get them there requires a great deal of
ploughing, weeding, tilling, watering,
pest management, harvesting, threshing
and processing. Hunter-gatherers may
have been content to work to meet their
immediate needs, but for farmers, secur-
ing enough food to eat this year was sim-
ply a cue to begin worrying about and
working towards ensuring that you had
enough food for the next.
We may still espouse an agricultural
work ethic, but in material terms our lives
are very different. Where two centuries
ago four out of five Britons worked the
land, now less than 2 per cent do. And
what’s more, they are so productive that
we can afford to send 9.5 million tons of
food waste to landfill every year.
Ever since the dawn of the industrial
era, advances in technology and produc-
tivity have promised the possibility of
lives liberated from the demands of ardu-
ous labour. This is why the economist
John Maynard Keynes voiced the ambi-
tions of his generation when in 1930 he
predicted that by now we’d all be enjoy-
ing lives of leisure, spending no more
than 15 hours a week on what little work
there was left to go round.
Keynes was not only wrong about
declining working hours. We also passed
some 50 years earlier than he predicted
the productivity, capital growth and tech-
nology thresholds he anticipated would
need to be met to enable us all to work so
much less. Put simply, he underesti-
mated the extent to which in the second
half of the 20th century our jobs would
become the social fulcrums of our lives.
Humans are social creatures who orga-
nise their lives around a relatively small
number of close social contacts, and with
most workers spending more time in the
company of their colleagues than their
families or actual homes, their workpla-
ces became surrogate villages and their
colleagues surrogate villagers. Work was
where they found friendship, a sense of
belonging, a sense of common purpose
and, in many cases, their spouses.
Arguably the most obvious conse-
quence of nearly two years in and out of
lockdown and working from home is that
it has enabled people to disconnect
socially from workplaces and connect
with their families and with the actual vil-
lages, towns and neighbourhoods where
they live. Priorities have been reoriented.
As importantly, the pandemic has
amplified and exposed some of the other
dangerous side-effects of organising lives
and societies around an agricultural
work ethic. As our economies have
become automated, so they have become
capital intensive rather than labour
intensive — meaning that asset ownership
often generates far more than most of us
can earn. One consequence is that it is
becoming hard to sustain the myth that
anyone can achieve their dreams so long
as they are willing to work hard enough.
Another is that the values of the single
asset most Britons need — a home — have
continued to inflate. As a result, home
ownership among young adults has
roughly halved since 1989, when the digi-
tal revolution began to kick into gear. It is
this problem that accounts for the grow-
ing willingness of younger workers to dig
in their heels about working long hours.
Given that few would be able to com-
mand a salary sufficient to own a home,
they, sensibly enough, are looking for
benefits elsewhere, and one of the most
obvious of these is spending time and
money outside the workplace.
If spending more of this holiday season
at home or in the pub is a cause for cele-
bration, it points to what may prove to be
one of this pandemic’s few enduring sil-
ver linings: it has broken the cultural
hammerlock in which our jobs and the
workplace have held our lives, and
reminded us of the value of virtues other
than hard work. And with the govern-
ment indicating that it intends to bring
forward the planned rise in the state pen-
sion age to 68, there has seldom been a
more apposite moment to ask: should we
instead embrace the spirit of our hunter-
gatherer ancestors and start exploring
how we might organise things such that
we work to live rather than live to work?James Suzman is an anthropologist and
the author of Work: A History of How We
Spend Our TimeKalahari bushmen work for only 15-17 hours a
week. Western societies are becoming far less
labour intensive than they once were, topShouting ‘bigot’
at each other
won’t end the
trans rights war
This approach is a long
way from the “no debate”
strategy that Stonewall has
adopted in recent years,
particularly with regard to
trans rights. In 2019
Fanshawe cut ties with the
organisation he helped found
because of disagreements
about its support of people’s
right to “self-ID” as male or
female.
That has put him on the
front line of one of the most
vicious battles in politics
today: trans rights. Last week
JK Rowling was once again
the focus of controversy after
tweeting criticism of Police
Scotland’s decision to log
accused rapists as women if
they identifed themselves as
such — even those who hadn’t
legally changed gender.
“I think it’s a symptom of
something that we need to
learn to deal with across the
board,” he says. The problem
isn’t that people disagree, but
that they want to force others
into agreement. “I just can’t
see how we can reach a
proper conclusion by
standing in opposite corners
of the room and shouting
‘bigot’ at each other.”
Sometimes a disagreement
is so profound that
compromise is impossible.
When that happens,
Fanshawe’s advice is for
employers to be pragmatic: if
two people genuinely can’t
work together, find themAnti-bias training and preferred
pronouns pull us apart rather
than bring us together, the
Stonewall founder Simon
Fanshawe tells Sarah DitumT
here’s a problem with
diversity in the
workplace, says Simon
Fanshawe. Since the
#MeToo movement
erupted in 2017 and the
global Black Lives Matter
protests of last year,
businesses have become ever
more eager to embrace all the
glorious variety of race,
sexuality and gender among
their staff — and ever more
willing to throw money at
achieving that by bringing in
pricey “diversity trainers”.
The intentions may be good.
But are the results?
“The danger is that the
definition of inclusion
becomes exclusive,” says
Fanshawe, 64. “In other
words, ‘You have to think like
this, and if you don’t, we’ll
exclude you.’”
This is not the kind of
comment you might expect
from Fanshawe. For one
thing, he’s a diversity trainer
himself. Through his agency
Diversity by Design,
Fanshawe has worked with
O 2 , Marks & Spencer, GCHQ
and many other big names
from the public and private
sectors. He’s also written a
book on the subject, The
Power of Difference.
As one of the founders of
Stonewall, Fanshawe is
practically inclusion royalty.
It’s also personal for him: his
husband is Nigerian. But
while he’s happy to see the
corporate world embrace
self-improvement, he’s
sceptical about many of the
methods being applied.
Terms such as
“unconscious bias” and
“intersectionality” — the
bread-and-butter vocabulary
of the diversity training
industry — mean little to most
people. “Go down the street
and say to somebody, ‘What’s
a microaggression?’ Most of
them will say it’s the Sim card
in the back of your phone.
Whereas if you say to people,
‘Do you experience those
really annoying things where
somebody says something,
and it’s just drip, drip, drip?’,
they go, ‘Yeah!’”
As he sees it, businesses
are often “panic buying” their
diversity training rather than
thinking about what they
want to achieve.
Concepts such as “white
privilege” and “critical race
theory” may simply leave
people despairing about the
possibility of change — if
racism is ingrained and
inevitable, can anything you
do at work change that? They
can also, perversely, heighten
the “minority status” of the
people they claim to be
helping, leaving them even
further outside the
mainstream.
By thinking of inclusion in
terms of “deficits” to be
rectified, Fanshawe says
businesses overlook the
“dividends” that come from
being a truly inclusive
workplace. Which is how you
end up with companies that
boast of their support for
Black Lives Matter while
having an all-white board.
Fanshawe is not your
typical corporate figure.
Before his turn to activism, he
was the first gay stand-up
comedian, just pipping Julian
Clary to that title. But he
struggled with coming out in
a homophobic society.
Getting involved with politics
gave him a way to turn his
unhappiness into advocacy.
It also gave him a crash
course in working together
across differences. Take, for
example, his part in the
unlikely alliance between the
gay rights movement and the
striking miners that was
forged in 1984 and later
dramatised in the film Pride.
The groups were divided by
culture, class and life
opportunities. “To be blunt,
had we ever met any miners
and had they ever met any
lesbians?” writes Fanshawe.
Later, in Stonewall, he
would seek conversations
with people who opposed the
group’s aims. “There was no
point really talking to
anybody else — there were
too many people who didn’t
agree with us!”Fanshawe: sometimes we
must agree to disagreeBefore his
activism, he
was the UK’s
first gay
stand-up
comedian
roles in which they don’t have
to deal with each other. But
that should be a last resort. “I
always say to businesses, put
into your values: ‘We expect
people to disagree, and we
support that.’”
Part of Fanshawe’s
argument is that expecting
people to think the same
things just because they
belong to the same arbitrary
category is always a mistake.
“Somebody said to me the
other day, ‘Are you LGBT?’
And I said, ‘I can’t be all of
them,’” he laughs.
“It’s a peculiar irony about
diversity that, in some ways,
it has become a tool of
conformity,” says Fanshawe.
Think, for example, about a
business that encourages all
staff to announce their
“preferred pronouns”. Some
trans people argue that this is
“inclusive” for them. But it
ends up excluding anyone
who isn’t comfortable
declaring their gender
identity, or who doesn’t
believe they have one.
“The only way you achieve
your common purpose is by
combining your difference,”
says Fanshawe. “You don’t
have to agree with people
about everything in order to
work with them.”The Power of Difference:
Where the Complexities of
Diversity and Inclusion Meet
Practical Solutions, by Simon
Fanshawe, is out now (Kogan
Page, £19.99)IWM/GETTY IMAGESI recognised the
behaviour: finding excuses to
drink earlier in the day (I’m
stressed; I’m celebrating; it’s
6pm somewhere!) and the
“handbag wine” taken to
school events with plastic
glasses, which I’d thought
was cool and rebellious.
I expect that next we’ll see
Miranda googling, “Am I an
alcoholic?” late at night and
telling herself it’s not drinking
alone if you’re with the dog.
She’ll set herself endless rules
and boundaries: I won’t drink
during the week; I’ll only
drink when I’m out; I’ll stick
to three units a day.
Rules which, within a week
or two, she’ll break. Because
that’s how addiction works.
And each time she “fails”,
she’ll lose more self-respect.
Miranda is part of a trend.
Statistically it’s middle-class
drinkers in their fifties who
are most likely to have a
problem. Women who dress
smartly, run the PTA and
order chablis from Ocado.
If watching And Just Like
That... made you feel
uncomfortable, then don’t
despair. There is life after
alcohol, a wonderful life. And
there’s lots of help out there.Clare Pooley is the author of
The Sober DiariesF
or many, December is a notori-
ously slow month at work, a
time to nurse office-party hang-
overs and take the early train
home as often as possible. Even
so, the glee that greeted the
PM’s announcement that we
should work from home for the
rest of the holiday season was
not the kind of response one
would expect from a nation where politi-
cians of all stripes laud our “hardworking
families”, extol the virtues of “strivers”
and deplore the idleness of shirkers, even
if they don’t always agree who the hard
workers and the shirkers are.
Is our apparently diminishing work
ethic a form of sociological long-Covid
that we will recover from when (and if )
the pandemic is beaten? Or is there some-
thing more to it?
Even during the heady days of summer
when it seemed that the vaccine roll-out
had sent the pandemic packing, there
was far less talk of things returning to
“normal” than there was even last Christ-
mas — at least as far as our relationship
with work and the workplace was con-
cerned. So at the same time that govern-
ment ministers were cheering us back
onto packed commuter trains, senior
managers were dotting the “i”s and cross-
ing the “t”s on plans to downsize offices
and institutionalise “hybrid working”
arrangements that offered workers far
greater choice when it came to deciding
when and where to work.
Worried about “company culture” and
mythical water-cooler moments, many
senior managers signed off their hybrid
working policies through gritted teeth.Whatever
happened to
hard work?
Younger employees have realised that extra
effort doesn’t necessarily lead to a better life. So
they’ve stopped striving, writes James Suzman
Miranda, you’re
sloshed in the
city, just like I was
E
ven if Samantha’s
missing this time round,
it’s good to have the Sex
and the City girls back.
But in the first episodes
of the new series And Just Like
That ... it’s obvious a serious
storyline is developing:
Miranda has a drink problem.
Anyone who orders a glass of
chablis in a bar before 11am
probably has one. And, for
me, seeing Miranda knocking
back the booze brought back
a host of bad memories.
I was 29 when the first
episode of Sex and the City
landed. It was 1998 and my
friends and I gathered in
someone’s flat for the
occasion. We loved Carrie
and her friends immediately.
They were us! Young, fierce,
single and ambitious. ButThe 11am glass of chablis seen in
the new Sex and the City spin-off is
familiar behaviour to Clare Pooleyagain was terrifying. And
here I have to thank Carrie
Bradshaw. I was too ashamed
and scared to go to Alcoholics
Anonymous. Or to talk to
friends or family. But I
needed to confess to
someone. And that’s when I
remembered Carrie, fingers
flying over her keyboard late
at night in her Manhattan
apartment, spilling out her
hopes and dreams. And I
thought: I can do that. That
can be my therapy.
I started an anonymous
blog called Mummy Was a
Secret Drinker, and every
day I confessed my past
sins and fears for the
future. That blog
became a
community of
women with the
same struggles.
Those strangers
saved me, and I
saved them back.
I often
wondered what
would have
happened to
Bridget, Edina
and Carrie if
they’d carried
on drinking that way.
So I was fascinated to
see Miranda showing
clear signs of alcohol
addiction.“mother’s little helper” and
“me time”. Then I’d open the
fridge, again. My tolerance
increased to the point where I
could drink a bottle of wine
without it touching the sides.
And, just like that, I was
drinking ten bottles a week.
Then, the morning after
my 46th birthday party, I
found myself drinking red
wine out of a mug at 11am to
cure a hangover. On the front
of the mug were the words
“The world’s best mum”. My
children at the time were six,
eight and 11. I had
never hated myself
more. That was my
last alcoholic drink.
By that stage I
was a terrible
insomniac,
anxious all the
time, two
stone
overweight
and a shouty,
distracted
mother. My
life had
become
smaller and
smaller, and
alcohol took
up an
increasingly big
part.
The thought of
never drinkingMiranda with
Carrie and
Charlotte in And
Just Like That ...
Cosmopolitans,
left, were the
drink of choice in
the original SATCwith better
shoes.
And they
drank. Endless
cosmopolitans. As
did Bridget Jones
(chardonnay), Patsy and
Edina in Absolutely Fabulous
(Bollinger, sweetie) and the
“ladettes” (anything). It felt as
if drinking men under the
table was part of our feminist
duty. It was what kickass, fun,
successful women did.
The addiction crept up on
me so slowly that it took me a
decade to notice. I honestly
believed that everyone drank
the way I did. At least
everyone who was any fun.
And when social media
arrived, it reinforced this
belief. I’d scroll through
memes about “wine o’clock”,