‘Labour isn’t working.’ So ran the headline of the Conservatives’ brilliant poster campaign back when UK unemployment was at a post-war high. Today’s headline should probably read: ‘Labour is working too hard.’

In fact, depending on the survey you read, Britons work between 3.5 and 5 hours longer per week, per person, than any other nation in the EU. This has led to an epidemic of depression, stress-induced disease, lower levels of parental engagement, relational breakdown and diminished productivity and creativity – and that’s just the managers.

David Cameron’s recent call for a greater focus on General Well Being (GWB) than on GDP is both brave and welcome, but sadly the detail of his speech (to Google, this May) reveals a failure to understand, or more likely to admit, to the complexity of the issues involved.

Listening to him, you’d be tempted to believe that flexible working hours and improved child-care provision are the cure. Certainly, greater flexibility would help many; but the reality is that our core culture of work and remuneration is corrosive, exploitative and damaging to the social, emotional and, long-term, to the economic fabric of our nation.

Hundreds of thousands of people are in dead end jobs and are paid less than allows them to live reasonably well within reasonable travelling distance. Millions work longer hours than is legal, while head-hunters privately admit how much harder it is for someone over 45 to get a new job. Christians are not immune, as LICC’s research has shown. This is a slave new world.

Importantly, our double-income, long-hours culture is not primarily driven by lust for Lamborghinis but, for most people, by the daunting mathematics of trying to pay a mortgage on one income. And this won’t change until someone can make a business case that works for PLCs on a quarterly basis. So far, while there have been wonderful examples of privately held businesses in which work and life are not contradictions in terms, it is hard to find a major PLC for whom that is the case – however flexible their working hours appear to be for a minority of workers.

For Christians, there is wisdom for the road but no easy answers; it is, however, perhaps no accident that the word ‘sabbath’ means stop. And that’s no bad place to start.

Mark Greene

additional resources

'Wealth is about so much more than pounds, or euros or dollars can ever measure. It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being.' Read David Cameron's full speech to the Internet search-engine behemoth Google - at politics.guardian.co.uk.

Which Cameron really means business? Article from timesonline.co.uk.

For a critique of the speech from the Observer, visit politics.guardian.co.uk.

A short article by Lord Layard (a professor at LSE) on work and happiness, posted at bbc.co.uk.

'Labour isn't working' - see the classic poster at politics.guardian.co.uk.

Roffey Park has been researching the work/life balance for several years. For a summary of its work, visit www.roffeypark.com.