Why Labour’s ‘right to switch off’ is bad for workers

Obsessing over work-life balance is a poor substitute for raising living standards

A No10 spokesperson has announced plans to give workers ‘the right to switch off’ – that is, the right not to be contacted by employers outside work hours. Speaking last week, the spokesperson said that good employers understand that ‘for workers to stay motivated and productive they do need to be able to switch off’. A ‘culture of presenteeism’, of workers feeling the need to be present in the office and contactable at all times, could be damaging to productivity, she continued. Giving employees the right to avoid being contacted outside work could therefore raise productivity and ‘boost the UK’s economic growth’, she claimed.

So, according to the Labour government, Britain’s economy will grow faster if we all act like Sir Keir Starmer says he does on a Friday night – and clock off at six o’clock on the dot.

Things are not so simple, of course. For a start, the government tellingly misunderstands the problem of presenteeism. It sees it as a symptom of today’s supposedly ‘toxic’ office life, in which workers are expected to turn up early and depart late from the office. But this is a very modern, therapeutic understanding of presenteeism.

By contrast, In the early 1980s, presenteeism referred to workers feeling they had to work, or do extra hours, when unwell – not least because they needed the money. It was only in the 1990s that presenteeism started to be recast less as a symptom of poor wages or workers’ rights than as a cause of mental distress.

Take the 1994 book, Creating Healthy Work Organisations. Organisational psychologist Cary Cooper and HR specialist Stephen Williams noted the ‘huge costs to private-sector and public-sector organisations of people turning up to work, who are so distressed by their jobs or some aspect of the organisational climate that they contribute little, if anything, to their work’. They argued in a way that anticipated Labour’s therapeutic view of work, and called for the creation of office environments ‘that lead to enhanced well-being and productivity’.

Blaming workplace culture and employees’ declining mental health for low productivity certainly proved attractive to policymakers during the 2000s. It allowed them to avoid facing up to more challenging problems, such as the decrepit state of the UK’s service economy, or the failure successfully to automate basic service processes.

The unions also warmed to this new understanding of presenteeism. In a 2006 research paper for Britain’s Trades Union Congress (TUC), the authors complained of ‘a long-hours culture and a culture of presenteeism at work across Europe’. The TUC paper proved influential in Labour circles. It prompted them to attribute Britain’s low productivity growth to the deteriorating mental health and well-being of the nation’s workforce. It now seems that today’s Labour government is about to put this thinking into practice.

What’s odd about the focus on presenteeism is that it’s hardly a huge problem right now, as statistics from across Europe show. Quite the opposite. Between 2010 and 2023, workers’ average weekly hours actually declined in Germany from 34.7 hours to 34.3, and in France from 36.5 to 36.2. In the UK, hours did rise slightly from 36.2 to 36.5. But that amounts to an increase on average of 18 minutes a week. That’s hardly a sign that ever-growing numbers of stressed-out workers are being ordered to turn up early and depart late from the office, and remain contactable at all times.

If Labour was serious about tackling low productivity, it would focus on the real problems. On state support sustaining unprofitable, unproductive businesses. On a corporate unwillingness to take risks. Or on company boards that prefer the tricks of financialisation to the hard slog of innovation. Raising productivity would bring precisely the kinds of benefits for workers that Labour claims to want – from higher pay to shorter work hours. But instead, the government has decided to solve a bogus problem of presenteeism with ‘the right to switch off’.

No10 made a still more extraordinary claim last week as part of this right-to-switch-off announcement. It said that a legal right to switch off was ‘about ensuring that we’re not inadvertently blurring the lines between work and home life’.

But if anything will blur the lines between work and home life it is Labour’s desire to police both. In the language of rights and rules, Labour will give more power over our work and home lives to Human Resources (HR) departments, employment lawyers and the state. This is bad news above all for workers. It threatens to expand state fiat over both the workplace and the home.

According to deputy PM Angela Rayner, what workers really need is ‘a better work-life balance’. This means ‘spending less time commuting and more time with their family’, either through flexible hours or the option to work from home.

The problem with this starry-eyed vision of flexible work is that it affects to be progressive, but neglects to mention the productivity benefits of the modern office. After all, in many jobs it is useful for people to work together and shout instant instructions to each other fast. For white-collar workers, the best place to be at action stations is in a modern, physical office, not at home. And the odd after-hours call or email to a worker at home is sometimes necessary. It hardly qualifies as traumatic.

Labour may talk a good game on the importance of economic growth. But its obsession with working hours and work-life-balance is counterproductive. It ignores the real causes of low productivity, which is itself the cause of poor hourly pay.

What Labour also forgets is the fact that work can sometimes form a rewarding part of one’s life. Collective face-to-face work can help workers realise their talents and their aspirations.

With the right to switch off, Labour is not bowing to trade-union bosses, as some on the right now complain. This is no skivers’ charter, either. Rather Labour is cocooning workers in a more legalised, rule-bound, state-supervised employment regime. Instead of liberating us from our desks, this threatens to drown us in yet more bureaucracy.

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