The oldest tricks still work for some

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Boxer’s response to everything was always “I will work harder”. His belief that working harder would solve all problems was unshakeable. It’s a belief shared by many of the UK’s politicians as well as some ‘business leaders’, although they work to the slightly different version: “You must work harder”. The underlying problem of the UK economy, in their eyes, is simply that people aren’t working hard enough. Last week it was the Tories, with Chris Philp claiming that the UK was lacking a proper work ethic. This week, Labour are at it, with ministers threatening to make redundant any civil servants who don’t achieve more with fewer staff and less money.

We can probably take it as read that most of us believe that, in most situations, it’s better to use resources – whether financial or human – as efficiently as possible (although it’s worth noting that efficiency at a micro-economic level isn’t always the same thing as efficiency at a macro-economic level). But how is that efficiency to be measured and assessed? It’s not easy to measure the output of the average civil servant – or indeed, any employee who isn’t directly producing something which can be counted. But without measuring output, it’s impossible to measure productivity, which in this context is a cypher for efficiency. In that situation, lazy employers (in which category, we can generally count governments and public authorities as well as many private companies) fall back on simply cutting the resources available to do a job and insisting that the workers continue to do everything asked of them.

It isn’t really improving ‘efficiency’, although it often seems to ‘work’, at a simplistic level. The staff involved may suffer more stress, and may resort to working extra hours, but as long as those hours are ‘free’ – and in many situations that is what employers insist upon, although that’s a trend more common in the private sector than the public – then achieving the same output with less input counts as an increase in productivity, and it doesn’t even require measurement of the output to conclude that. Maybe corners have been cut, regulations ignored, staff well-being damaged, but none of that matters in economic terms. If 8 people each working 10 hours a day (whilst being paid for 8) can achieve as much as 10 people working 8 hours a day, economists will proclaim that productivity has improved. It hasn’t really, of course. The work done has still taken 80 person-hours, it’s just that the employer has only paid for 64 of those. People haven’t worked any harder – just longer.

‘Sweating the resources’, squeezing more out of people in order to improve profitability – it’s obvious who benefits from that, and it ain’t the employees. Yet somehow, the all-pervasive idea that the ‘problem’ is that workers aren’t working hard enough diverts attention from the underlying economic power relationship, and encourages people to blame themselves rather than their masters for poor economic performance, even if, in reality, that poor performance is often due to a lack of investment and innovation, issues which lie more in the hands of employers than employees.

Boxer accepted responsibility enthusiastically, and eventually collapsed from overwork. His reward for his service to his masters was to be sold to the knacker’s yard. What worked for Napoleon seems to be still working today.