Programme Description

Why do we work so hard? Britain's full-time workers put in the longest hours in Europe. The ever-increasing hours we work keep us away from our families and give us heart disease. The looming pensions crisis means that we will have to work until we're even older. The traditional boundaries between work and rest are being erased, and work intrudes into our homes with mobile phones and laptops. Yet thinkers from Bertrand Russell to Alvin Toffler had predicted that the twenty-first century would be an Age of Leisure. And policy-makers in the 1970s worried how people would fill their time. So why hasn't technological invention brought the leisure we expected? Why are we still wage-slaves?

On the centenary of the first publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Philip Dodd and guests ask whether our love affair with work is a factor of economic necessity or a moral imperative.

In his famous essay Weber pointed to the curious relationship between religion and commerce. He showed how Protestantism was the driving force that encouraged hard toil and economic gain. Work was the key to Heaven. But now as we are becoming increasingly secular, could it be that we now expect work itself to provide the meaning and purpose in life that God once provided our forbears?

Philip Dodd is joined by: Jonathan Aitken, who went from working as an MP to cleaning prison lavatories; Madeleine Bunting, author of the recent study of our attitudes to work Willing Slaves - How the Overwork Culture is Ruling our Lives; writer Iain Sinclair, whose jobs have been strange and various; and psychology professor Adrian Furnham, author of The Protestant Work Ethic.

Should we end our love affair with work and fight for a future of idleness?

Night Waves: Undercurrents, Wednesdays, live at 9.30pm on BBC Radio 3.


Presenter: PhilipDodd
Producer: PhilippaRitchie




Additional Information:
1) Willing Slaves - How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives by Madeleine Bunting is published by HarperCollins
2) The Protestant Work Ethic by Adrian Furnham is published by Whurr