Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

Description

A hardhitting expose of the overwork culture and modern management techniques that seduce millions of people to hand over the best part of their lives to their employer. Work has come to increasingly dominate British national life. 'Job intensification' affects every shopfloor, office, classroom and hospital, as a cult of efficiency has driven a missionary magnetism of tighter deadlines and more exacting targets in the most exploitative and manipulative work culture developed since the industrial revolution. What do we get in return for this hard work? Stagnant wages, job insecurity, stress, exhaustion; the British workforce has not been so powerless for over a century. Willing Slaves exposes the paradox that, though we're all being exploited, it's work that has come to give our lives meaning: religion, political causes, family life have become secondary. This book reveals how this astonishing fraud has been perpetrated, how millions of workers know they face burnout but believe 'there is no alternative'. Bunting tells us how to take our lives back -- and what will happen if we don't.

Madeleine Bunting is a columnist on the Guardian. She joined the paper in 1989 as a general reporter and has been a leader writer as well as reporting on religious affairs, Europe and development issues. She has won several awards for her journalism and is a regular broadcaster. Her previous book, The Model Occupation, on World War II history of the Channel Islands, was published in 1995. Born in Oswaldkirk, North Yorkshire, she studied at Cambridge before winning a postgraduate scholarship to Harvard. She lives in East London and has three children.

'Brilliantly thorough and thoroughly brilliant attack on the contemporary work ethic' Guardian 'Excellent' Suzanne Moore, Mail on Sunday 'Highly readable and informative' TLS