No rest for the worker

Business and people don't really mix, I've always thought. Perhaps I should rephrase that, before someone points out the obvious fact that business is all about people. Business and personal relationships - whether they're the relationships binding together a family or a community - don't really mix.

The world of business is a harsh and unrelenting one: a constant struggle for survival and profit in which the weak or the inflexible go to the wall. It is a world in which enough is never enough, and in which the demands on the people who are business's lifeblood grow ever greater. Expand or die is the credo. Standing still as your competitors pass you by means certain failure.

In purely business terms, therefore, it makes perfect sense for a company to operate seven days a week - even 24 hours a day, if yours is a company in the manufacturing sector where every hour that expensive machinery or equipment is left lying idle represents lost return on investment.

But there is a cost to this move towards greater productivity and the seemingly ever longer working hours that it involves - a human and social cost. It's the weakening of the personal and community relationships that bind our society together. Business, the economic generator which drives our society, is also, because of the strain it places on family life, in one way at least a destructive force breaking it apart.

Just look at what has happened to Sunday.

A few years ago, even for those who weren't religious, Sunday was special. It was a day for the family - for outings to the coast, picnics or simply playing football with the children in the local park.

That is beginning to change. Love it or loathe it, the de-regulation of Sunday trading took much of the specialness out of Sunday. The corresponding boom in part-time Sunday working, taken together with the general extension of the working week where shift patterns for many workers now routinely include Saturdays and Sundays, means that often it is seen now as little more than another day.

The Rev Chris Cullwick, team vicar in Huntington, believes that is a shame. "A society which has no opportunity to rest is a society which is in trouble," he says. "Sunday used to be a day for rest, recuperation and recreation. We've lost that. The cost, in terms of relationships and the quality of time together, has been enormous in a society where we're seeing the increasing break-up of relationships and family life."

The point about Sunday was that it was time the family could spend together. Time off in lieu isn't the same: because if family members are working different shifts, they may never get to see each other.

"With so many families now you will find a situation where one parent has a day off which is not at the same time as a partner, or not when the children are not at school," says Chris.

It's this tension between the demands of business and the human needs of home and family life that lies beneath the unease of workers at North Yorkshire printing giant RR Donnelley.

The company isn't the first to want to introduce new shift patterns that will let it operate continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Nestle has had '7x24' shifts in some areas of its York factory for some time. Talks at Donnelley are still continuing.

RR Donnelley UK division director and vice president Roy Houston points out excess orders are already having to be sent to other firms in Bristol and Warrington - and that unless staff agree to the new '7x24' shift patterns, more work will have to be farmed out. To a business, that's anathema. "It has been shown to be too difficult over recent years to gain work, to allow it to be placed with competitors," a Donnelley internal memo states.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, Mr Houston points out, to see that 7x24 working makes sense - especially for companies like Donnelley, where substantial assets are tied up in plant and equipment.

"To realise the value of those assets, you need to utilise them to as close to 100 per cent as you can," he says. "If you have a large amount of money invested in machinery or other forms of investment that literally depreciates by the second you need to make sure that you're getting recovery from that." In other words, you need to make sure you make best use of it before it becomes obsolete or worn out.

Having more work than you know what to do with is actually a pretty good position to be in, points out Mr Houston. Donnelley's will be looking to take on up to 30 extra staff to make seven day operation possible. That being so, the new shifts won't see staff working longer hours - and, with increased rates for Saturday nights and Sundays, they shouldn't lose out financially either, unless they're among those now working serious overtime in a bid to meet demand. This is, Mr Houston says, a 'win, win, win' situation.

So why the reluctance by staff? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work that out, either. Roy Houston insists he's not asking staff to work longer hours, just different ones. "We don't want to overburden people with so much extra work that they don't have a home life," he says. "I need time off myself."

But in a sense, that misses the point. It's not only the amount of time off that counts - it's when you get it.

Seven day working is unpopular, says Don Place of the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU), because it interferes with the weekend. Staff won't be working every Saturday and Sunday under the new shifts - but they will be working some of them. "A guy my age doesn't want to work Saturday nights and Sundays," Don says. "Traditionally, that's the time for family and children - and members want to spend that time with family."

Sadly, for staff at Donnelley's and in businesses up and down the country, those Sundays with the family look like becoming an increasingly distant memory. More and more companies, admits Andrew Palmer, assistant regional director for Yorkshire of the CBI, will be moving in the direction of seven day working - especially those in manufacturing and engineering.

You can't blame business: it's a competitive world. In a global economy where British firms are competing with multi-nationals and low-wage economies, every rabbit has to be pulled out of the hat in the struggle for survival and profitability.

There are those who would like to turn the clock back - or at least stop it. Chris Cullwick, for example, would like stronger legislation to protect Sunday as a day of rest.

But the seven day week looks somehow unstoppable.

When our children grow up, they will probably wonder what all the fuss was about. A day when everything was closed? they might scoff as they rush about their busy, lonely lives. How quaint and boring!

Maybe so. But how dreary, nevertheless, not to have a day that's different from the rest.

Updated: 10:41 Tuesday, October 16, 2001