For some time now, sociologists, economists and assorted futurologists have flooded the pages of learned journals and the shelves of libraries with analyses of the continuing decline of industrial and other forms of labor. In proportion to the decline of working time, those social scientists proclaim, the forward march of leisure has become an irresistible trend of the most recent past, the present and, most definitely, the future. Those of us living on planet earth have on occasion wondered about the veracity of such claims which, quite often, appear to stand in flat contradiction to our experiences in everyday life. The work of the Italian sociologist Pietro Basso is thus long overdue and proves to be a welcome refutation of this genre of, to paraphrase Basso, obfuscating hallucinations.

The second paragraph of Basso's introduction sets out in exemplary manner the thesis of his ceaseless labor to expose the hollowness of such social scientific insights. It deserves to be quoted in full: “This book maintains that in Western society, for at least twenty-five years, the average working time of wage labourers has become increasingly burdensome and invasive, more intense, fast-paced, ‘flexible' and long. This is true not only in industry and agriculture but in all branches of social organisation, and is particularly true in that very world of services which has been so aggressively presented as the postmodern El Dorado of light, clean, satisfying work, with short working hours.”(1) In many ways, the ensuing 216 pages of text, plus the forty-eight densely-packed pages of endnotes, are merely demonstrations of this thesis statement. But these pages deserve to be studied with painstaking care. And such efforts will uncover unexpected pleasures.

For Basso, despite the serious nature of his topic, manages to inject a healthy dose of irony into his exposition of the fallacies of so many learned tomes announcing the imminent arrival of a paradise of leisure. But, most importantly, in the process of deconstructing his opponents' views, the author manages to convey a wealth of facts and figures which should raise question marks in the minds of even the most determined believer in the writings of the prophets of the imminent, if not already present, golden age of pleasurable consumption in copious free time. What does Pietro Basso actually say?

Realizing that it would be all-too-easy to ridicule his opponents by looking at laboring conditions in the vast majority of regions of this world, Asia, Africa, Latin America and, especially after 1989, Eastern Europe, Basso concentrates on Western European states. This has the added advantage of avoiding easy countercritiques on the part of those observers who are only too aware of the particularly workaholic atmosphere governing working conditions in two other flagship economic powerhouses of the modern world: Japan and the United States of America. Within Western Europe, particular attention is devoted to three countries seemingly at the forefront of ever-increasing reduction in labor time: Germany and France (where certain national arrangements for the establishment of a thirty-five-hour workweek have been prominently touted) and his native Italy, “the only country besides France where there has been talk in recent years of a law for a thirty-five-hour week.”(173)

In inverse proportion to the amount of learned tomes vaunting the arrival of a society of leisure, serious and detailed studies on the actual conditions in the world of labor are virtually impossible to obtain. Honni soit qui mal y pense. Nonetheless, Pietro Basso manages to compile sufficient data to confirm that, far from experiencing an improvement in working conditions, be it concerning the number of hours worked or the intensity of labor, even in Western Europe, including France and Germany, image and reality are literally worlds apart. The German labor movement's conquest of a thirty-five-hour workweek for metalworkers and typographers has had preciously little impact on average working times in German society as a whole. In industry, in 1997, the average work week was 39.3 hours, in “services” 40.5 and in banking and financial services in particular 41.0 hours. In France, “in 1997 average working time in industry was 39.9 hours per week—1.2 hours more, not less, than in 1987,”(163) Basso states, and in general his book is crammed with useful data which begin to approximate the actual experiences of those of us who have experienced the world of labor in recent decades.

Even in those cases where recent years have seen an improvement in the length of working time, i.e. a diminution, such nominal gains have in almost all cases been more than offset by heavy increases in the intensity of labor. The 1998 French Aubry law legislating a thirty-five-hour week sweetened the deal for the employing classes by allowing for plentiful exceptions and simultaneous massive openings towards further intensification and flexibilization of labor. Anyone studying labor negotiations and agreements in the past decades will undoubtedly agree with Basso who claims that over “the past twenty years the West has been one big building site of flexibility,”(69) compressing ever further amounts of stressful labor into usually at best stagnating numbers of hours worked. It is a sign of the times, the author rightfully asserts, that union negotiations have increasingly shifted from the redistribution of daily working hours to weekly and even annual working time, leaving the door wide open for the maximal daily exploitation of laboring women and laboring men.

Indeed, Basso points out early on, the most recent important international agreement to limit working hours dates back to 1919! The particular dating of this initiative is, of course, by no means accidental. The length of the working day has, above all else, been determined by the ups and down, and especially the peaks, of an elementary fact of social life futurologist predictions of utopia consistently neglect to mention: class struggle. Thus, to mention but one additional important fact, the last significant improvement of the average duration of labour time on a supra-national scale dates back to the late 1960s, and this was a reduction of weekly, not daily hours of toil. In this context it is worth noting Basso's superb deconstruction of Paul Samuelson's “mystified representation”(102) of the evolution of working hours in the United States, where the Nobel-prize winning economist manages to erase virtually all traces of the realities of the severe ups and downs in the seesaw of class struggles between 1905 and 1955 by rendering the secular decline in one continuous, gracefully smooth, slowly descending line.

To close on a slightly critical note: Given the appalling lack of concrete data furnished by national and international statistics offices, it would be demanding the impossible to expect Basso to have eliminated all illusions regarding the veracity of futurologists' claims. Nonetheless, it would have been enormously useful if the author had presented his major data in a more accessible and easily comparable fashion. Much of his data is finely dispersed within the densely-packed pages of his bold exposition. Often, for no fault of his own, the individual data are not strictly comparable, as they are based on conflicting sources. Note here, for instance, Basso's report on the admission of the coordinator of the First European Survey on The Work Environment, published in 1992, that “information on working conditions in Europe ‘often does not exist, or is not accessible' (a curious admission, coming from a government institution—PB), ‘or, if available, is not comparable because of the differences between the monitoring of the various member states.'”(140) Still, perhaps a carefully constructed statistical appendix could have resulted in greater clarity for the nonspecialist reader.

My first three years at Warwick University Ltd. overlapped with the final three years of teaching of a colleague in the office next door, whose career had begun with the launch of this university in the 1960s. In his final years he taught on a third-time, phased-retirement basis. He was fond of standing in my office door with a smile on his face, informing the new arrival that now, with a thirty-three percent teaching load, he taught precisely as many students as he did when starting out working full-time. Basso makes no claim of a tripling of the burden for most workers in the modern world. But perhaps his daring and well-informed exposition will contribute to bring a future generation of social scientists back to the worsening realities of planet earth.