Office life used to have its pleasures as well as salty pain
Perhaps the youngsters who want to ‘quiet-quit’ have it right. Why tether yourself to a master-slave work regime? But then again, pressure can be, for good or ill, a way of life.
To describe what we once had as a work “culture” may be stretching it.
If you define culture in its scientific context, as in an ideal place to grow bacteria and yeast, then we’re getting a little closer to the mark.
In the mid-1980s (yes, Gen Zers and millennials, there are people still alive who actually worked in an office in the mid-80s, and if still you’re unsure about what an “office” is, check with AI), our workplace, by today’s standards, almost enters the realms of science fiction or fantasy.
Newspaper offices are by their very nature chaotic and bizarre because they’re often filled with chaotic and bizarre people, as in those who choose to live a life capturing, interpreting and disseminating the daily news. Every day. Then every year, into infinity.
In the media world, now and forever, pressure is not something you just come across in a bicycle tyre or use to cook rice. It can be, for good or ill, a way of life.
But back in the days of big hair and shoulder pads (and that was just the men), it was completely normal for virtually everyone, for example, to be smoking cigarettes at their desk.
Office smoke was so thick you’d need a pair of garden shears just to get to the canteen.
People smoked in the canteen too. The only difference was that the canteen smoke was infused with the aroma of boiled frankfurters and cabbage. On stew day (was it a Thursday, or was that shepherd’s pie day?) there was one lady behind the bain-marie who laboured in such humid conditions that as she lowered her head to ladle your stew onto a plate her perspiration ran down her narrow nose and dripped freely into your gruel of beef squares, potatoes and gravy.
Still, she always served you with a smile, damp as it was.
We had one sub-editor who’d worked out a brilliant way of literally sleeping on the job in short increments. He’d prop himself in his chair, light a cigarette, hold the cigarette as it rested in the ashtray, and nap behind a pair of sunglasses until his gasper burned down to the filter. You’d swear he was studying with great intensity the story before him on his rustic computer screen instead of power-napping. He was a very heavy smoker.
At lunch, half the office disappeared to nearby pubs, bars and restaurants ostensibly for something to eat that didn’t contain human sweat, but as a wise old reporter once said – there’s a steak in every glass of beer. Ours was a peculiarly carnivorous office.
Incredibly, too, there was a bar fridge at the back of the office near the old police radio scanner, full as a goog with cans of ale. And a suite of couches where someone invariably crashed overnight. Pressure can be a ruthless companion.
There were fun and games, too. Once every year the women of the office held their Best Male Posterior Award, a prestigious honour that did not have the word “posterior” in its title but a descriptor that rhymed with class.
Life in the office was such a blur in those days that the passing of an old journalist on staff barely registered. His ancient and dusty suit jacket remained on a coat rack near the bar fridge for years before anyone realised he wasn’t coming back. We all thought he was on holidays.
How times have changed. Back then “politically correct” was a term for an elected official with impeccable manners.
It was all mad and messy and fun and made work a pleasure.
Which is why recent reports of office workers in Japan dropping dead from stress is not just shocking but almost inconceivable.
This is nothing new in Japanese culture. It’s labelled karoshi, or sudden death by overwork, and it has its equivalents in South Korea (gwarosa), China (guolaosi) and other countries. Its symptoms include strokes and heart attacks due to mental and physical exhaustion. Some victims, too terrified to be seen away from their desks due to an office culture of extreme work pressure, have suffered from malnutrition.
Japan seems to be the global leader in karoshi. Back in 1988, around the time we were getting our posteriors judged in a smoke-filled office at the bottom of the world, one in four Japanese employees worked on average more than 60 hours a week.
In 2013 an International Labour Organisation study into karoshi reported that one Japanese employee of a snack food processing company worked up to 110 hours a week and died from a heart attack aged just 34. (Given a week has 168 hours, is it any wonder?)
Now modern Japanese workers are striking back.
A recent report in The Japan Times said that up to 45 per cent of young, full-time employees were now adopting a work pattern called “quiet-quitting”, or “doing the bare minimum to meet their job requirements”.
According to a new survey by job-matching company Mynavi, almost half of workers aged in their 20s declared they were quiet-quitters, focused more on a lifework balance and turning their backs on generations of Japanese workers who readily accepted that grinding yourself into a fine powder was part of the job.
Mind you, I would hazard a guess that the average Japanese quiet-quitter’s minimum working week would comfortably exceed our 1980s output.
Still, fed-up Japanese workers are taking to social media and airing their workplace grievances.
One, who calls himself Salaryman Tokyo, uploaded a video of his ridiculously endless working day on YouTube. He begins his commute to work at 7am and by 7.15am a caption reads: “Feeling so sleepy.” The captions keep coming. “Here we go again.”
He wonders why everyone has to go to work “at the same time”. He misses his train. Catches another one. He gets off. Connects to another train. He arrives at the office at 8.53am. “Let the games begin.” He finishes work at 8pm. “Feel so exhausted.” On the walk home he muses: “Recently I gained some weight. Don’t have time to go to gym.” He cooks his dinner at 11.30pm. (Steak, eggs and onions. “Onions got burnt,” says the caption.) And says “good night” at 1.15am.
It’s so depressing I want to grab him by the hair and drag him back to the 1980s and give him a good, stern lecture about life being too short to let his work consume and define him while giving him a good, solid feed on Stew Thursdays in the office canteen. (I can already see his caption: “Tastes too salty.”)
Salaryman Tokyo is not alone.
In 2021 the World Health Organisation and International Labour Organisation analysed loss of life due to long working hours for the 2016 calendar year and found that 745,000 people across the globe died of strokes and heart disease after working on average more than 55 hours per week. That was a 29 per cent increase from the year 2000.
Perhaps the youngsters have it right.
Who needs an office? Why tether yourself to a master-slave work regime? Why burn out needlessly like Salaryman Tokyo?
Or to put it in a way that even we, the children of the distant 1980s, can understand, why pursue a life where you’re always burning the onions?
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