Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back into Work [Paperback]

Do you love your job? In Happy Mondays Richard Reeves suggests that many of us do and all of us can, yet we tend to view jobs as something to be got through rather than something to be enjoyed. This, he claims, is as much about history as about reality. He looks at both the theory of work and real situations, describing how work has changed in recent years and how it can be about more than simply money. "We spend most of our waking lives working", he writes, "To waste them in bad jobs is nothing less than a crime against humanity."

Happy Mondays charts the nature of modern work and what it can become. It looks at the notion of careers, the ways in which modern employers address the leisure, health and spiritual needs of employees and the ways individuals can choose their work and vary their hours to suit. Reeves mixes academic treatise and practical example in a thought-provoking way, the bottom line being that today we should be able to find fulfilment, expression of ourselves and pleasure in any job--whatever it pays--from supermarket checkout to corporate management. The theory is not without flaw: there seems to be little recognition for example of just how many people in the UK are tied to production-line working with no real alternatives or of the wider politics of employment. Nevertheless, Happy Mondays, like Richard Donkin's Blood, Sweat and Tears is an interesting take on the notion of work in the 21st century: an alluring vision of what it already means for some and could become for many. --Sandra Vogel

Work has had centuries of bad press, being blamed for everything from unhappiness to lack of sex. It’s time to give work a break. This is a book for people who love what they do - or wish they could - and shows how to get the best return for your love as well as your labour. For centuries people viewed ‘work’ as something to be endured. They worked in order to live. The 9 to 5 grind, done purely for the money. Some people still endure work today - if they don’t enjoy their job. But a new era is dawning. We are in the midst of a revolution in the role of work in our lives. Work is now important - more than ever before. Work is who you are. And a growing number of people actually love to work. Work is becoming more central to all our lives. It is now a provider of friends, gossip, networks, fun, creativity, purpose, comfort, belonging, identity - and even love. In short, the things that the ‘home’ has traditionally supplied. Work is getting homely. This stimulating and provocative book will:

• Present a ground-breaking challenge to anti-work rhetoric. Addressing issues such as ‘is it stupid to work hard if you love it?’ and ‘what can I expect from my employer in return?’
• Kick-start a more honest debate about our relationship with work.
• Take a whole new perspective on work as being a positive, life-enhancing part of your life.
• Provides a current analysis of what companies are offering in return for employees time and emotional input.
• Gives practical guidance as to what you can (or should) expect from your employer

Click on the link in the right hand navigation to download the corrected table of references.

Richard Reeves is Director of Futures at the Industrial Society. He is also an admired journalist - with a fortnightly column for the Guardian and frequent extended articles in both the Observer and New Statesman. He is regarded as ‘Britain’s leading expert on workplace trends’ (The Guardian) and is a first choice social and workplace commentator for a wide range of media.

Work has had a terrible press over the years. God started the negative PR campaign by condemning Adam to live 'by the sweat of his brow'; in the beginning was the work. The ancient Greeks and Romans dismissed work as fit only for slaves and as a punishment from God. And Martin Luther, the man who put the 'P' in the Protestant work ethic, preached that work - preferably hard, monotonous, soulless work - was the entry requirement for heaven. Charles Dickens dramatized the horrible working conditions of early industrialization. And with some cause - much of nineteenth-century work was dark, dull and dangerous. Then consumerism - the engine fuel of the twentieth century - turned work into nothing more than a means to a mortgage; 'Well, it pays the bills, doesn't it?' Work has become the wicked witch of the West.

But Work is a good thing. Otherwise, why would unemployment be such a bad thing? It's time to throw off centuries of bad press. It's time to write a new headline: Work is Wonderful - Official.

Stairway to heaven: punishing work

It will take some serious spin, though, to counter the effects of centuries of negative campaigning against work. Almost 3,000 years ago, Homer decided that the fact that we had to work was a sure sign that the Gods hated humans. Hesiod speculated that the deities had deliberately hidden food underground, simply to make us dig for it.

Aristotle, a bleeding-heart liberal by the standards of his time, thought that work was a curse best performed by cursed people i.e. slaves. In ancient Rome and Greece work meant manual labour, necessary for the maintenance of life. Finer pursuits such as teaching, writing and politics didn't count as 'work'. (Aristotle even argued that sculptors should not be considered citizens, on the grounds that they worked with their hands.)

Sisyphus is the personification of the ancient attitude towards work and punishment. He was condemned for eternity to roll a large rock up a hill, only to see it roll down and have to start again. Albert Camus wrote that the gods 'had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour'. Ocnus's burden fits more closely with the frustrations of some modern workers. He plaited a rope endlessly, while a donkey chewed at the other end - producing endlessly to meet a never-ending demand.

Given that manual work was seen as so demeaning, it's not surprising that it was left to slaves - and in some parts of the world, still is. Even today we condemn people to 'hard labour' and describe a boss as a 'slave driver' - echoes of the history of work as punishment and enslavement.

Reg Theriault, author of How to Tell When You're Tired, says this speaks volumes about our subconscious attitudes to work:

The sentence of 'hard labour' was deemed the most severe, short of death, that society could administer. Using this reasoning, the vast multitudes of everyday workers all over the earth might have asked what crime they had committed. Work, especially manual work, was seen as a necessary evil until the Middle Ages. Serfs replaced slaves; but the gloomy view of work was unchanged. Then, in Renaissance Italy, a new spirit was born. Work became the continuation of God's work and a vessel for human creativity - as re-creation. Work was welcomed in its own right for 'filling so well the slow passage of the hours', in the words of Renaissance architect Leon Battista. For a flicker of time in a fragment of European space, work was seen as craft, as an extension of the worker, as essentially human.

But the moment was short. Protestants Martin Luther and John Calvin brought Renaissance man down to earth with a bump. For them, work was the fulfilment of God's wishes (an improvement at least on the work-as-punishment line) and they insisted on it as a universal moral obligation. Rather than the 'sweat of brow' Genesis quote, they recited Proverbs 22:29. 'Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.'

But there was to be no pleasure in work; it was much too serious for that. The harder the work the better. Suffering at work was a way for people to prove their faith. Remember that Luther described marriage as a hospital to cure lust - pleasure was not top of his agenda, at home or work. The Calvinists and Lutherans did at least value manual labour, but they gave no thought to the needs or desires of the workers themselves. Whether or not the worker was satisfied was irrelevant. It was God's satisfaction that counted.

While Christianity has been historically miserable about work, other religions have adopted a more upbeat stance. Confucius said that a person who finds a job they love never works another day. The Buddha's teachings call for us to pursue a 'right livelihood' as part of our journey to inner peace. One of the defining characteristics of Buddhism's right livelihood is that it cannot cause suffering to others - a lesson sadly missed by the factory owners of industrial England, who dealt the next serious blow to work's image.

Factory fodder

Industrialization has a lot to answer for. Child labour, pollution, urban slums, and the musical version of Oliver Twist. But above all, the birth of the industrial economy ruptured the link between work and home. Until the factory age, most men and women worked from or near home - weaving, cooking, farming and caring for children. Suddenly they became commuters. The work/life divide appeared; and both sides of it were hard slog. The demands of the early industrial economy forced men, women and children to do dangerous, monotonous work for long hours and little reward. People worked to earn the money they needed simply to survive, usually in miserable conditions. The wage slave was born.