World Review October -December 2005

The living dead

THE POPULAR DEPICTION OF TODAY'S office worker as highly stressed, struggling to get ahead in the rat race of today's cut-throat corporate world is a familiar one. Yet the key concepts in a book at the top of the UK business list in November 2005 were boredom, time-wasting and

apathy. The Living Dead, by Times columnist David Bolchover,1 turns notions of time management and striving to maintain a work-life balance inside out-its aim is to 'unearth the last taboo': that a large proportion of office workers do not actually do very much work at all. Offices across the public and private sectors around the world are argued to be filled with workers whose talents and energies are being wasted, as employees spend their time pretending to work hard instead of actually doing so.

Statistics such as '14.6% of US workers admit to surfing the internet for non-work related items constantly', presented in support of this perturbing phenomenon, may elicit a nod of identification from those workers who while away their employers' time playing internet games at their desk. The international popularity of Dilbert cartoons2 and The Office, a UK 'mockumentary' parodying workplace dynamics, reflects the element of identification that many people feel with their own working lives-work is not a meaningful activity that engages our skills and motivation but a often a fa?ade of productivity that must be paid lip-service to between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm.