Dr Anne Borrowdale, a novelist, speaker and personal coach from Oxford, reviews Madeleine Bunting’s ‘Willing Slaves’
'How is it that we have so little time – the most basic requirement of human engagement – to give each other? asks Madeline Bunting in this important book about the effect of the UK's overwork culture. We work the longest hours in Europe, and have rising levels of stress and dissatisfaction in our jobs, with the public sector especially badly affected. The pace and level of change and the increasing intensity at which people have to work, take their toll. This impacts on health, relationships and family life, leaving little time for involvement in wider society. We see and lament the consequences, yet go along with it claiming we have no choice.
Willing Slaves is an intelligent and readable analysis of the problem, using real-life examples – and prompting personal reflection about the balance in the reader's life. Bunting writes sympathetically about the pressures on women with family responsibilities, and the men who work longer hours while also being more involved in the home. Both can end up ‘with a sense of overstretch and of personal inadequacy either on the work front or at home, or both.’ Feminists wanted women's equality in the workplace to go alongside changing workplace culture, but while ‘emotional skills play an ever bigger part in the labour market … private emotional relationships are starved of the time and energy which they need to flourish.’
The concerns Bunting identifies are ones which Christians share, as are her values of care for people's wholeness and well-being, the importance of caring relationships, and justice. She stresses the need for corporate action – something Christians can forget when preoccupied with individual moral responsibility. There's much advice currently around on getting a ‘work-life balance’, as if it's a matter of reorganising the personal diary. As a personal coach, I work in that area myself. But Bunting is right to point out that the problem arises from ‘inbuilt contradictions between the organisation of how we work and how our families function’ and it's something society must address. Depressingly, Bunting's concerns have an echo in church employment, where a culture of overwork and long hours prevails because Christians feel called to be ‘willing slaves’. Except that in a time-poor culture, Christians who step back so that they have time for proper human engagement could be much-needed role models. Recommending reading, especially for those who don't think they have the time!
Willing Slaves is published by HarperCollins, £12.99
