It’s the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee this year and I’ve been searching the archives as background to a CIPD Work Audit on how our working lives have changed during her reign. “Death of the King” headlined the late London edition of The Times newspaper on Thursday 7 February 1952. The inside pages were dominated by a detailed review of the life of the late king George VI, plus some background on the 25-year-old new queen, Elizabeth II. The front page, meanwhile, printed a long list of situations vacant, mostly for professional or skilled technical positions and an array of domestic jobs as nannies, cooks and housemaids. The paper also reported news of serious staff shortages affecting rail services. The monarchy had passed to a new generation but working life went on much as before.
In the six decades since, work has continued to be the warp and weft of everyday existence. In 2012, even in the wake of the worst economic recession in the queen’s reign, there are 6 million more people in work in the UK than in 1952. Her majesty’s subjects may devote more of their available time and money to leisure pursuits, and work has certainly changed in ways that could not be imagined two generations ago, but the UK still shows no sign of becoming the kind of leisure society predicted by the “end of work” futurologists of yesteryear.
However, despite constant talk of a long-hours culture, this doesn’t mean we’re nowadays worked off our feet. Though there are more people in work today, the total number of hours worked in the economy each week is unchanged since the 1950s. This means that the UK has undergone a process of informal “work-sharing” with a fall of 10 hours in the length of the average working week. In 1952 only 4 per cent of employees worked part time; 60 years later the proportion is one in four (6.5 million employees). But the really good news is that the real value of output produced by the economy has quadrupled for the same amount of effort; in other words, productivity has increased. Britons are working much smarter and less hard, enabling society to enjoy a far higher average standard of living.
It’s worth reminding ourselves of this when confronting today’s economic hardships. Although five years into the queen’s reign, as our nation was emerging from post-war austerity, the then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, declared that Britain “had never had it so good”, the average material lifestyle was very meagre compared with what in 2012 we also call “austerity Britain”. At the beginning of the queen’s reign, only one in five households had a washing machine, one in 10 a telephone, one in 20 a fridge. Almost nobody had central heating. Fewer than half of all households had a television – most people crowded round a shared set to watch the queen’s coronation in 1953.
Yet what’s also clear is that while we’ve grown more prosperous, there is also much greater inequality in society. When Elizabeth II came to the throne, the distribution of weekly earnings was almost identical to that prevailing when Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee at the end of the 19th century. In the second half of Elizabeth’s reign, following a couple of decades of egalitarianism, a widening gap between rich and poor has once again become so ingrained that the fictional Downton Abbey is considered by some to represent a desirable model of the social order. Top business executives in particular have emerged as such an elite group, they now look as comfortable on the grouse moor as in the boardroom, while most of those they employ get on with the job but are ever more reluctant to “go the extra mile”.
In our grossly unequal society, with the threat of unemployment also a more common underlying concern even during good times, people do not seem much happier about their working lives and many exhibit the symptoms of work-related stress. Whatever the future of work, the lesson of the past six decades is that increased productivity and prosperity isn’t enough to enhance the common good in the workplace or society in general.