On Saturday 17 October, Joanna Williams will be speaking in two sessions at the Battle of Ideas festival in London looking at the contemporary workplace: From quiet quitting to #lazygirljobs: workshy Britain? and Podcast Live: This Isn’t Working – are women to blame for ‘woke’ workplaces? She is also speaking in the debates We don’t need no indoctrination: the politicisation of education and Middlesbrough: what just happened?
Tickets for the festival are available via the Battle of Ideas website.
This essay is republished from Joanna’s Substack.
From quiet quitting to #lazygirljobs: why isn’t Britain working?
‘Why would anybody set up a business in this country right now?’ This was the question Jeremy Clarkson posed at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham this week, in a swipe at Labour’s punitive tax rises. But if it’s not worth setting up your own business, is it worth having a job at all? Do people even want to work anymore?
In the UK today, almost 21 per cent of all working-age adults are out of work and not currently looking for a job. Close to a million, or one in eight young people, are not in education, employment or training (NEET). Clearly, these statistics mask many different, individual stories: some people might want to work but can’t because they cannot find a suitable job, or their personal circumstances make it impossible. But the fact is that, in Britain right now, a sizeable chunk of the population is not engaged with the labour market.
This marks a significant shift from the experience of previous generations. In the first three decades after the Second World War, unemployment was consistently below three per cent, long before statistics were massaged by high numbers of school-leavers going to university or people being placed on sickness benefits with no obligation to look for work. For most of the twentieth century, except perhaps for middle-class mothers, going to work each day was central to most people’s lives.
Clearly, the nature of work itself has changed. Recent decades have seen not just the collapse of heavy industry, but also a significant decline in manufacturing. Alongside this, the impact of mass migration as well as AI means that jobs that are available are harder to get, not just for people without qualifications but for graduates, too. High levels of taxation, an increase in the minimum wage, and a more risk-averse culture have made the Saturday job, once a crucial first step into work, largely a thing of the past.
But none of this explains the growing number of people who are either unemployed and not looking for work, or employed but disengaged and determined to do as little as possible. It seems that in Britain today, many of us have taken to heart the old mantra that you should work to live, rather than live to work. And if it is possible to live without working, then so much the better.
We see this attitude playing out in the higher proportion of employees who work from home in the UK than in any other European country. Globally, we are outdone only by Canada. Recent TikTok trends highlight the popularity of ‘quiet quitting’ (doing only the minimum expected and nothing more) or having a ‘lazy girl job’ with little stress or responsibility.
In the past, for many people employment most fundamentally meant being able to provide for yourself and your family. But it also forged solidarity between colleagues – creating the working class – and allowed individuals to develop a strong sense of purpose or identity as they took pride not just in earning a wage but in contributing towards society.
It is not just the number and type of jobs available that has changed then, but the place of work within our culture. Rather than being validated as important in its own right, it is diminished as ‘just a job’. People deemed to work too hard, or to take their job too seriously, are not admired but considered to have a problem, to be ‘workaholics’ in need of therapy.
Here, I point to four things that have contributed to this change.
A crisis of purpose
Many public institutions and private corporations seem to have lost all sense of their main purpose. The thing they are supposed to do is no longer their main concern. Universities focus on student satisfaction, ‘belonging’ and employability; education is squeezed to the edges. Museum curators detail the sins of the past; preserving artefacts is a begrudging necessity. Police record hate incidents rather than apprehending thieves. The film industry has given up on entertainment; the art establishment has rejected beauty. Energy companies purport to care more about the environment than generating power, and even big business shouts about ethics rather than making profit.
Woke values and DEI initiatives disguise the moral vacuum at the heart of many workplaces, but they fail to give most employees a meaningful sense of purpose. As a result, even professional careers become just a job. Following process becomes all-consuming. Employees might put in the hours and pick up a pay cheque, but they come to abandon any sense that what they do is important in itself. I have written previously about the problems that ensue when all jobs become bullshit jobs.
Perhaps most significantly, when a job is robbed of meaning and reduced to following processes, no one is expected to assume responsibility for anything or anyone. Exercising responsibility requires believing that what you are doing is important and that your role is not just about following instructions, but that what you do really matters. Instead, today, the rise of bureaucracy and managerialism means responsibility is forever deferred, as in some bizarre hall of mirrors.
Worse, risk-averse institutions actively discourage staff from taking personal responsibility by framing it as unnecessary. A sense that it is safer to follow procedures, rather than step out of line, is reinforced by senior figures being rewarded for failure.
Perhaps the most shocking example of this reward for failure is found in Nottingham. In 2023, Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley Kumar and Ian Coates were murdered at the hands of paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane. The subsequent inquiry into their deaths has exposed a litany of institutional failures. Police officers, psychiatrists, medical professionals, and university staff all failed to secure and treat Calocane and keep the public safe. Senior figures within these institutions sought to protect themselves and avoided making crucial decisions. Yet some, such as the senior police officer who led the investigation into the killings, have since been promoted.
Sadly, Nottingham is not an isolated case. Major scandals have rocked the Post Office and maternity wards, and daily failures plague healthcare and social work. Yet people are rarely held to account; instead, they are promoted.
Mental health
According to the mental health charity Mind, in England, one in four people will experience a mental-health problem of some kind in any given year, while one in five people report experiencing a common mental-health problem (like anxiety and depression) in any given week. It claims that about one in five children and young people aged eight to 25 have a probable mental health problem. On top of this, NHS England estimates that almost 2.5million people suffer from ADHD.
What lies behind these figures is a complex mixture of a small number of people suffering from very serious illnesses (Valdo Calocane in the previous example) and a much larger cohort who have been led to believe that routine emotions – feeling worried or sad – are mental-health problems in need of professional intervention. Belief in a mental illness easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those who see themselves as suffering from anxiety (as opposed to the more transient state of being worried) might change their behaviour and avoid situations that push them out of their comfort zone, thereby reinforcing a sense that they cannot cope.
We are not born less resilient than previous generations. But we live in a therapeutic culture that locates every problem we experience within our individual psychological makeup. From childhood, today’s young adults are bombarded with the message that they are mentally vulnerable and must avoid unnecessary risks to their mental health.
In this context, events such as starting a new job, hitting a deadline or meeting with colleagues – things that were met as routine occurrences by previous generations – come to be perceived as insurmountable challenges. A cohort of young people raised to believe they are too vulnerable to cope with stress, and that protecting their mental health is their utmost priority, will, if they can bring themselves to work at all, seek out a lazy girl job.
This prioritising of mental health feeds into the crisis of purpose within our institutions. Following the tragic suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry in 2022, the impact of Ofsted inspections upon school staff came under scrutiny. Teachers and trade union leaders successfully argued that passing judgement on schools in just one word created stress and anxiety. They argued instead for a colour-coded report card that would provide more nuance and highlight strengths as well as weaknesses. Having won this argument, headteachers have now decided that the new system is also stressful and are calling for inspections to be diluted further. This risks taking Ofsted and schools away from their core purpose. Rather than holding teachers to account, inspectors are asked to consider their mental health, and rather than educating children being the primary goal of schools, safeguarding teachers’ mental health becomes the priority.
Perhaps more worrying is when these same messages about personal vulnerability and mental health are internalised by children. School leavers convinced they can’t work may find they are rewarded with sickness benefits and relieved of all pressure to find a job. While they may initially appreciate this paid idleness, they soon find that the longer they are out of work, the harder it is to get a job. Sadly, it is not impossible to imagine this rapidly becoming a vicious circle. Being disengaged and isolated is not a recipe for good mental health.
Lack of solidarity
One reason people show up for work each day and take responsibility for various tasks is to avoid letting down their colleagues. If your absence, or your failure, creates more work for other people, particularly those you feel a close bond with, then you will do your best to be part of a team. But in many workplaces, this sense of solidarity between colleagues is no longer there.
The rise of working from home has certainly contributed to this sense of atomisation. Sharing an office and staff canteen means people are more likely to know their colleagues’ names and interests. After-work socialising further fosters bonds. It is much harder to develop these relationships when work involves sitting at the kitchen table, and meetings happen over Zoom. Since Covid lockdowns, there has been a huge increase in the number of people who spend part or all of the working week at home.
It is difficult to know whether continued WFH is driven by employers looking to save costs or employees insisting on a perk. Large corporations offer flexible working to retain and recruit senior staff. It seems that WFH is more prevalent among older workers in professional occupations. Data show that staff on salaries above £50,000 are more than twice as likely to favour remote working as lower-paid staff and ‘hybrid working’ (mixing days in the office with days at home) is most common among ‘managers, directors and senior officials’. According to the ONS, less than a fifth of 16- to 29-year-olds are hybrid workers compared with well over a third of 30 to 49-year-olds. This is hardly surprising. WFH is far nicer when you have a big house and a family for company than when you live alone or in an overcrowded flat share.
Working from home contributes to a breakdown in solidarity among employees because strong connections are never forged in the first place. The workplace continues to function, but people act as individuals, protecting their own interests, rather than as part of a collective. Yet, the demand to WFH is also itself a symptom of a more atomised society. Just like the headteachers in revolt against Ofsted, it speaks to an assumption that work is to meet the needs of employees – whether that’s to protect their mental health or pick their children up from school – rather than any greater purpose that may be worthy of some sacrifice.
A lack of solidarity in the workplace is not only driven by the fashion for WFH. Divisive policies, often introduced by Human Resource managers, can end up pitting workers against each other if people are viewed as members of distinct identity groups rather than one group of colleagues. Attempts, such as the take-up of ‘unconscious bias training’ in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, to present some groups as particularly privileged or oppressed only add to the breakdown in solidarity. Similarly, dictating how people should relate to one another, for example, compelling the use of pronoun badges in email signatures, rather than trusting adults to communicate with one another without instruction, can also add to a reluctance to forge relationships in the workplace.
Breakdown in socialisation
Ultimately, we do not learn our attitudes to work through formal instruction, whether from school teachers in the classroom or HR managers in the office. How we dress and act in the workplace, and how we approach our job, is shaped by the broader culture we inhabit. In other words, the attitudes of our family and friends, the views we see reflected on social media and in popular discourse, and, most notably, the attitudes and values of older colleagues shape our own habits and practices.
In this way, work plays a socialisation role in transforming young people into citizens, prepared to assume responsibility for their own role and stand in solidarity with their colleagues. This is an informal, intergenerational process; it depends upon older colleagues taking new recruits under their wing and showing them the ropes. It requires older colleagues to be present in the workplace and not sitting in front of a laptop at home. When older adults leave the office, younger workers are left to create their own behavioural codes and set their own (low) standards and expectations.
But it is not just the rise of WFH that means older colleagues no longer play a role in passing on skills and wisdom to young adults. Long before Covid, major companies and institutions were experimenting with ‘reverse mentoring’, where older (often male) colleagues were expected to meet with and learn from junior (often female) colleagues. The assumption, from the outset, was that rather than older colleagues having wisdom to impart, their attitudes were outdated and their language and values were all wrong. They had to learn how to speak and behave correctly from the new recruits.
Such schemes sent a message that extended far beyond those who participated. They challenged the informal socialisation process that used to take place in the workplace by telling young staff that older colleagues were behind the times and not worthy of respect. Unfortunately, this message is often reinforced in wider society. It means that, over the course of a few years, traditional workplace habits and values – the importance of being punctual, present, working hard, assuming responsibility – are lost. And new values – such as avoiding stress, complying with processes, deference to identity groups – take their place.
To conclude, our underperforming economy, stalled productivity and failing public services reveal a major problem with how we approach work today. There is no need to romanticise the past or attempt to bring back a time when work could be physically dangerous. But people giving up on work creates a vicious spiral of social and economic problems. It must be dealt with seriously. The problems I have outlined here – the crisis of purpose, the prioritising of mental health, the collapse of solidarity and the breakdown of socialisation – have not been caused by workshy young people, but by an older generation who have abandoned the workplace and left young people to their fate.
Joanna Williams is currently a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Budapest. She is the author of How Woke Won (2022); Women vs Feminism (2017); Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (2016) and Consuming Higher Education, Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (2012). She is a columnist for the online magazine Spiked and writes regularly for The Times, The Spectator and The Telegraph.
My mother who is now 100 started work at the age of 14 as a runner in the Cardiff docks. Finished school on the Friday and started work on Monday. She has never felt bitter about it or hard done by. In fact she enjoyed working. She didn't feel that it was a duty or that she had to do it because of the economy, it was just what you did and not to rely on other people or the state. She had 3 sisters who all did the same. My wife's family was the same.