Sneaking out on Christmas: how our time and money are getting increasingly squeezed

I don’t know a lot about macro-economics, but it’s clear to me however we try to get ahead, all we will end up doing is chasing our tail in ever tighter concentric circles.

Click here to watch a video of a pug chasing its tail. This is how I feel.

I say this as I snuck out of the back of my kids’ Christmas concert 20 minutes early today to get back to work, to the chagrin of the headmistress who frowned at me as I ducked out before the last two classes took their turns at presenting ‘Christmas around the world’. These days it feels that whatever I manage to do, I’m not quite making the grade.

I’m sure if I’d asked for an hour off for a Christmas production – which believe me, you wouldn’t take a half day for, cute though it undoubtedly is – I would have been given permission. But, as the amount of child related time I’m forced to take off for vomiting/parent teacher conferences/broken collar bones/doctor’s appts grows ever longer, you can see why I’d just rather work late tonight to make up for it.

I work in an office mainly staffed by 20 and 30 somethings, several of whom who have recently gone on maternity leave, but none of whom has actual school age kids.  If I make it in closer to 9.00 am than usual, most of my colleagues are already at their desks. When I leave at 5.30, or quite often, nearer to six, most of them are still there, and I can feel guilty, slinking out on time, but often I just think they’re making a rod for their own back by staying later than they’re paid. But an increasingly child free workforce can work harder, making it more difficult for those of us with dependants to keep up.

It’s not that they don’t try to understand. I’m privileged enough that I sometimes get to work from home, something that allows me to be a lot more efficient and manage my own time one day a week. Usually I  get more actual work done because I’m not defeated by the tube, the weather, my bike, or rushing my kids to breakfast club by 8.00 am every day.

It’s more that the goalposts are shifting. Back when I was a child, I never went to breakfast club because in the 80s, for better or worse, such a concept didn’t exist. There was no expectation that my mother would be in the office by 8.30 am. Back then, working mothers were still  a rarity.

By the late 80s and 90s, two parents in the workplace meant  double earnings leading the new norm of  material affluence, and emotional neglect of the average 90s teens -I should know. I was one. But prices have adjusted, wages fallen.  Now you need two earners in a family just to keep your heads above water.

I am one of the lucky ones. I don’t think my working hours are unreasonable, especially for the private sector. In fact compared to a lot of my friends who work for film companies, magazine publishers, law firms and architecture practices, or, god help them, the NHS, my hours are really quite okay. My sister regularly works until 9.00 pm having risen to a senior post for a big British manufacturing company, and rarely sees her daughter in the week, for all she makes good money. She seems to think this is normal. But I just don’t know whether this is progress.

Though I feel under increasing pressure to stay late for the sake of making a good impression, or having  good ‘attitude’ at work, I doubt whether I would be more efficient even if I did hang around after hours. I suspect many of my childless colleagues have places they’d rather be than work at 7.00 pm on a Tuesday night, but feel the pressure from the yawning mass of NEETS and zero hours contracts out there on the employment market breadline to competitively be the last one out the door and thus keep the wolf from it.

The point I’m making is we are all of us incrementally putting in more and more; and increasingly, putting in more for less, a global reality that may well take some uncomfortable adjustment.

With real wages stagnating, and youth unemployment high, companies can cherry pick from cheap, or even free labour as internships in popular industries are abused,  driving down wages and making it harder for everyone to scrape by and earn a crust.

In a free market, society is doomed to be unequal because there will always be someone willing to do jobs that other people don’t want to do, however unsocial, dull, badly paid or unpleasant.  In a global, 24 hour economy where what constitutes a ‘shit’ job is increasingly relative. But until street cleaners become as well paid as diplomats (and frankly, it’s high time they are) there will always be some human beings whose contributions, however essential, are valued less than others. All this, despite the fact that, with the way things are going,  you’ll soon need a masters degree to be a bin man. When will we realise enough is enough?

Humans seem to be programmed to bash their heads increasingly hard against a wall in order to scratch a living, and it’s a sad fact that if you’re not willing to do it, some other mug sure as hell will. If we all just took a breather, none of us would have to work so hard, but the open market is as red in tooth and claw as nature, and immigrants scurry to fill gaps in the market left open by a now socially supported working class.

With the opening of Britain’s borders, an influx of people drawn to Britain’s relative social safety net and relatively high wages will continue to drive down wages at the lower end of the jobs market, and global competition for all jobs means that at the upper end of the scale we’ll be competing against people who are used to a harsher regime of study and work than we sluggish, over privileged westerners are used to.

It’s not just a free market that is putting on the squeeze. Technology isn’t helping either. Speaking as something of a Luddite, my theory is that labour saving devices skew the economy, making us all work harder because we can. Essentially one mundane activity becomes replaced with another in a never ending rat race from which society will never be able to escape, with all of us increasingly plugged in for fear of losing pace in an increasingly ‘switched on’ economy. I may not have to wash my own dishes or my clothes by hand these days, but I sure as hell have to churn out mostly unread documents stuffed with SEO keywords to help webpages rank – and that’s an activity being reproduced in copy mills UK wide as brands compete in the mysterious, ever changing digital back end. Lose pace in this epic game of keepie uppie, and the law of diminishing returns means you’ll swiftly be swallowed into a black hole of debt and ignominy.

It’s the same with cheap credit – it skews the market. There’s always a base market value for anything, so if more people have more money, prices inflate. It’s reckless lending that has caused myriad housing bubbles – the Help to Buy scheme can only push house prices up more as more people can suddenly afford to buy a house, even though they will actually own less of it

It won’t take long before putting in a ten percent deposit will seem a luxury far beyond the ordinary worker’s reach, in the way that paying cash for your home – realisable in the 1930s  for the affluent British middle class when the average house cost £150, has become the preserve of the Russian oligarch, property mogul or fat cat city banker – those that are left.

It was the availability of cheap credit that was to blame for the recent financial crash, the aftermath of which we will probably see for the next 100, maybe even thousand years, if successive short-termist governments ever really bring all spiralling debt under control.

I felt its full force – although I don’t doubt there’s worse to come. My other half,  Tom was a banker after all, but  then, I never did understand the economics that valued his number crunching hedge betting job above that of a doctor’s – except perhaps for the sheer numbers he worked with made his once-inflated salary seem  normal.  In the end, the numbers themselves were fairly meaningless. He lost his job in 2008 and was a year and a half out of work. The world gloated, and I couldn’t really blame them.

However, now we are both on bog standard average workers salaries – we still get child credit as a couple – that’s how bog standard our salaries are! – it very definitely takes two of us working full time to be able to pay a mortgage on a fairly ordinary terraced house in the east end of London. The street where we live is fine, nothing fancy, and we own a newish car – a sensible estate with a scratch on the bumper, for which we had to extend the mortgage to buy. Yet, by many people’s standards, we are considered to have done well for ourselves. But it’s hardly the bastion of privilege that perhaps it might appear if you live over the canal from us in one of the new high rises, or in the community housing opposite, or perhaps, like many of my friends, are still renting at increasingly high proportions of your salary, concerned that you will always be at the whim of a housing market that is being driven ever upwards by forces beyond most of our control.

It’s not news that living standards are dropping after – in the grand scheme of things – a century of relative equality: despite technological advances, deflation, house price rises and population growth, it seems the very things that should be contributing to prosperity are causing its downfall.

As we edge towards a truly global market, there’s a whole lot further to fall, and equality, if that is what we need to aim for for a stable, harmonious society, means a lot that we take for granted as normal aspirations in this country – a house, garden, two kids and a dog, perhaps one parent at home – at least for a bit – will be increasingly out of reach to all but the most wealthy.

On my, what I consider relatively modest salary – the same as a school teacher in their first five years qualified – for all my masters degree and ten years experience –  I am still in the top o.5 percent richest people on the planet. Level the playing field, as we must and the future looks pretty terrifying from where I’m sat.

I pity my children, as they feel the force of a world moving to a global economy: where  human labour becomes cheaper as population grows and ages, and technology improvements makes many mindless jobs redundant, replacing them with  fewer, just as mindless, but for which we must be educated for the best years of our adult lives just to keep us out of the labour force, paying into degree programmes our brains will never access and we must repay for most of our adult lives  once we enter the ‘real world.’

It’s a bleak world view, but then, it’s mid December and I’m burned out by Christmas, filling my children’s heads with fairytales because the reality is too frightening to face. But there’s a part of me that wants to lower expectations year on year, so when they struggle to provide the same festive largesse for their children, can’t make it to their own kids’ Christmas concert, own their own home, or have a fulfilling job, or even a job at all,  they don’t feel so bad about it.