Public Servant Lifestyle

Alan Johnson on the UKs long hours culture, the World Cup, and how he practises Work-life Balance.

Why Brits Work Long Hours

Alan Johnson: "All of the research shows that they do it because they want to do it. Maybe there’s an element of thinking that if they don’t do it in managerial positions, they won’t get promotion. Lots of the feedback really destroys some of our misperceptions about this, because you think most people really want to work a 35-hour week. We’ve got problems in some of these sectors where they seem keen to do long hours, for whatever reasons, so it seems more entrenched here than anywhere else."

The Work-Life Balance Campaign

AJ: "We’ve got three strands to the Work-life Balance campaign.

"The first one is continuing to spread best practice through the Work-life Balance Challenge Fund, offering help to those employees who want to change, but don’t really know how to.

"The second strand is concentrating on the difficult sectors, where the long hours culture – we’ve got a dreadful long hours culture in this country – and we need to do more to tackle that as part of our Work-life Balance campaign. We need to look at areas where it’s particularly entrenched , like construction and IT, my old stamping ground at the Post Office, and the Prison Service.

"The third strand is taking the social partners – people like the CBI, TUC – with us on fact-finding visits to countries where they have no problem.

"Why is it that we work the longest hours in Europe, but our productivity is worse than in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, where they work far shorter hours? What are we missing out on here? How come they can do it, without any problems whatsoever, it would seem, and we can’t?

"I think we can come back (from the tour) with some useful lessons, that will help us, at least, think five or 10 years down the track of where we ought to be in tackling the long hours culture."

Bringing WLB To All

AJ: "We come across, time and time again, people who are highly paid, highly-skilled, and can, to a certain extent, dictate their own pay and conditions. We found this under Work and Parents, women who are in a very strong position in the so-called ‘war for talent’ (low unemployment, tight labour market).

"It’s getting to women who aren’t in such a strong position, in terms of working parents, and 'Work-life Balance' in general. That’s why part of this is legislative, the Work & Parents bit, in particular, giving every parent of a child up to six years old the right to request (new ways of working), and a duty on an employer to treat that request seriously.

"That’s why we didn’t want to skip a generation through best practice, for parents of small children – we thought there was a need for a best practice approach now, and that is why we brought the bill (Work & Parents).

"We have a lot of employers of people who are not so highly skilled, and so mobile, buying in to this, and we’re very pleased about that, and so we just have to keep spreading the best practice – that’s why we’re concentrating on the most difficult sectors, where some of these people work on a production line, for example, and get into that kind of system where you cannot buck the shifts.

"So we need to do more, in those areas, but we also need to look at the legislative route, which we have done through employment bills."

Bringing Pay Into The Equation

AJ: "It indoubtably comes into the long hours culture, because, as an ex-postman, who worked from 5am in the morning, until 8pm at night, bringing up three kids, the pay was low. Now the Post Office is trying to do something about that, cut down overtime, and boost basic pensionable pay.

"I don’t think it’s so much of an issue in Work-life Balance, other than, perhaps, when you say to women, as we did initially, when we were out on Work & Parents, about having the right to return to work part time after maternity leave.

"Lots of women told us, firstly it’s not about returning after maternity leave, it’s about other stages in the child’s development. Secondly, it’s not about working part-time, because for many women, part-time means lower income. So it means doing the same amount of hours, distilled into four days, rather than five, for instance, term-time working, or annualised hours, means different ideas.

"So, in that sense, there was a pay element, but the basic thing we found is that - and unions have found this, as well, when they’ve done attitude surveys amongst their members – surprisingly, pay doesn’t come top of what people want from their employer. It comes about third. They want respect from their employer, they want to feel valued at work, they want the kind of thing that, they don’t term it as 'Work-life Balance', but those kind of issues. And then pay comes in around there.

“And in the public sector, of course, pay has increased dramatically, as has the number of jobs. I bargained pay in the public sector for years, and we were always way behind the private sector. Now, and this is not just this year, but for the last three years, public sector pay has increased at a much greater rate than the private sector.

"So it’s an issue about the long hours culture, employers and unions are going to have to tackle that, it’s not just a case of saying leave it to government, get rid of the opt out from the European Working Time Directive, and everyone will be quite happy then not working more than 48 hours.

"It’s about employers and unions recognising that they were at least encouraging the long hours culture back in the 1970s, and did very little to stop it. They’ve got to work with us to try and address the problem."

WLB Withing Public Sector

AJ: "If we’re telling (private) businesses that they ought to be focusing more on 'Work-life Balance', on 'Partnership Working', and on ending the 'long-hours' culture, then we have to set an example. They can turn around and say: "put your own house in order".

"It’s one of the problems about Parliament, in having such dreadful hours, that we’re not setting a very good example in that respect. Well that’s a bit difficult – for governments to change that is going to take a bit longer.

"But on issues that we are in control of Patricia (Hewitt, the DTI secretary of state) has done an awful lot to actually practice what we preach. I meet senior civil servants like Sue Bishop (in charge of the DTI’s work with the shipbuilding and ship repairs industries) who is part-time, having returned after maternity leave. I don’t think we (the DTI) always did that - it’s quite a recent innovation.

"I am proud that we’re doing that, but I’m not complacent that there’s not more we can do to take the agenda forward."

Improving Awareness

AJ: "Bob Appleby, of UNISON, was telling me what’s happening in the NHS, on the agreements they reaching, and we need to be more aware of what’s happening in the public sector.

"Doubtless (government department) officials are seeing this information – but we might need to do a bit more to focus at ministerial level on finding out what’s happening within other government departments, and throughout other parts of the public sector."

Long-Term Benefits

AJ: "It focused people’s minds on the issue which is: ‘Are you better off displeasing your workforce by insisting they work to a pattern that seems fairly rigid; or could you, with a bit of imagination, accommodate what they want to do in their domestic lives (in this case, watch football) to get more out of them in terms of their working lives’.

"Our line has to be: if employers can do this with a football match, then, with a bit more thought, they can do this on a more regular basis for people who have caring responsibilities, and other hobbies to pursue.

How Does He Personally Practice WLB

AJ: "I stop work and go home!

"The secretary of state (Patricia Hewitt) got some criticism for saying she works a 70-hour week, and that it’s wrong. She was accused of ‘whinging’, and that’s rubbish. She was absolutely entitled to say that she has to set some kind of example. And it’s difficult when you are a Member of Parliament, and a minister, because you have to do both jobs, especially when you have a constituency, as I do, 250 miles away from London.

"But you have to be determined to do it. I don’t feel that I, as a minister, have to be in this office every second of the day, otherwise I’m not showing commitment.

"And when recesses come, I take time off, reading, listening to jazz, running, playing with my children, walking, or just chilling out."

Alan Johnson, minister for employment relations, industry and the regions, at the Department of Trade and Industry, was born in 1950, and educated at Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea, London, before becoming a postman in 1968. He later became general secretary of the communication union the UCW, a member of the Trades Union Congress General Council, and the Labour Party National Executive Committee. He was elected MP for Kingston-upon-Hull West and Hessle in 1997.

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