In December 1967, five young typists in an office in Surbiton decided to work an extra half an hour unpaid each day to help Britain’s struggling economy. Within days, their “I’m backing Britain” campaign snowballed. More workers joined in, badges were made and Bruce Forsyth recorded a single. An editorial in the Financial Times called the campaign “a beacon of light in an otherwise dismal economic and industrial prospect” and commended its spirit if not its economic logic.
The campaign fizzled out after a few months, but the notion that Britain would be better off if people worked harder has not gone away. In a book in 2012 called Britannia Unchained, five Conservative MPs revived the argument. “Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world,” the book says. “We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”
Given that two of the book’s authors, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, are now the country’s prime minister and chancellor respectively, it is worth revisiting this characterisation of the workforce. Is there any truth to it? Yes and no.
Let’s start with the “no”. Workers in the UK don’t work among the lowest hours. International comparisons of working hours are tricky because of varied calculation methods, but the available data suggests average usual weekly hours in the UK are slightly above the OECD average — lower than the US and Switzerland but higher than Sweden, Germany and France.
Some people probably could and would work more hours if they had access to more affordable childcare — a point that Britannia Unchained rightly makes. But even so, it should be clear from this data that working longer hours isn’t the key to prosperity: countries like Turkey have long working hours but lower GDP per head, while some countries with shorter hours than the UK have higher GDP per head.
Workers in the UK don’t retire particularly early by international standards either. OECD data shows the average effective labour market exit age for men in the UK is 63.7 — about the same as the OECD average. For women, it is 63.2, above the OECD average of 62.4.
As for teenage aspirations, it’s hard to argue that Britain has a shortage of people who want to be doctors. Almost 30,000 people applied to study medicine at university last year, but in spite of a nationwide shortage of doctors, the government has capped the number of medical school places in England at 7,500. Young people want to become doctors and their country needs them. The failure is rather the under-investment in training them.
That brings us to the point on which Britannia Unchained is correct: workers in the UK are less productive in terms of the output they generate per hour than their peers in comparable countries. Nor are they catching up. Productivity growth has slowed since the financial crisis in lots of countries, but in the UK it has practically stalled.
Are British workers just lazy? That’s not what the data suggests. A set of large government-funded surveys which have been conducted since the 1990s shows the share of people who say they work at “very high speed” for at least three quarters of the time rose from 23 per cent to 45 per cent between 1992 and 2017.
Customers, clients and managers now have the whip hand, people report. In 1992, 71 per cent of employees said they had “a great deal” of control over how hard they worked; by 2017 this had dropped to 46 per cent. This tallies with data from the Health and Safety Executive which shows work-related stress, depression and anxiety on the rise.
A better explanation for poor UK productivity is the lack of investment in new equipment and technology to help people do their jobs more efficiently. Amazon workers in robotised warehouses pick roughly three times as many items per hour as their peers in the company’s non-robotised warehouses, for example. They aren’t working three times harder; they’re more productive because the robots are bringing the shelves to them. Yet business investment has been weak in the UK by international standards, and took a further hit after Brexit. As a recent report by Giles Wilkes at the Institute for Government concludes: “The UK has shifted even more to a labour-intensive, lower-capital model for growth.”
The British aren’t the worst idlers in the world. The problem — one Truss and Kwarteng would do well to focus on — is worse than that. They are running just to stand still.