2005: Workers' rebellion - Employers, abetted by the government, have made work so unpleasant and unattractive that millions have started to "casualise" themselves. Janet Bush reports

As I was writing this on a train from Devon, where I live and work, a fellow passenger asked me what I do. I gave him my stock response - a vague, girly wave of the hand, accompanied by: "Oh, this and that." A friend of mine who decided to leave his job as a high-powered TV producer (to do as little as his finances could stand) found such questions so awkward that he took to saying he was an ontologist. To save you looking it up in the dictionary, as I did, ontology is "the study of being". One person asked if he took private patients.

We are just two members of a growing army of people who no longer engage in full-time, waged employment. In all the complex cross-currents of today's labour market, there are certain discernible trends and these include a rising number of part-timers, contract workers and freelancers; people who work at arm's length from their offices, at home or on the road; those who have chosen to "downshift", opting for less remuneration and "more time sovereignty", as the jargon has it; and the many who are self-employed. It is now something of a truism that the usual nine-to-five office job is disappearing; what is more contentious is how many of us have changed our working lives voluntarily, and how many as a result of coercion. Is the shifting labour market a threat or an opportunity, leading to a deepening servitude (and impoverishment) or joyous emancipation?

The semantics - "flexploitation", "quasi-employed" - suggest that part-time, casual work is a bad thing, foisted on workers by companies looking for cheap, flexible labour without expensive extras such as sick pay, holiday pay and pensions. And numerous studies have shown that job insecurity makes people more prone to illness, both physical and mental. Yet The Joy of Work? by Nick Isles, published by the Work Foundation last summer, found that full-time workers are more dissatisfied than part-timers and that the self-employed are by far the happiest.

Technology, the study suggests, has not freed us but tightened our shackles, because it has enabled "anywhere, any time" contact between employers and employees: we are expected to be on tap and available 24/7. Work has definitely be-come more intense and pressured. Research by Michael White at the Policy Studies Institute and Stephen Hill at the London School of Economics has found that work is taking up more of people's waking hours, and job satisfaction is falling as a result. In their study, 27 per cent of people surveyed in 2000 said that they had less time to carry out their family responsibilities than they would have liked, up from 21 per cent eight years earlier.

If anything, public policy has entrenched this "intensification" of our working lives. Despite its legislation to promote more flexible working for parents of young or disabled children, new Labour has also treated paid work as nothing less than a route to personal salvation. Everyone is being cajoled into paid employment - single mothers, the disabled, the long-term unemployed - because that is what constitutes social citizenship.

This effort to promote employment opportunity for all has much to justify it: unhappiness and stress are most prevalent among the unemployed. Yet as Robert Taylor, media fellow at the Economic and Social Research Council's Future of Work programme, points out, another public policy trend "suggests limitations need to be placed on the length of time that we spend carrying out paid work in the interests of both employees and companies". In a nutshell, employees are increasingly working long hours, are more stressed and have less leisure; but as far as employers are concerned, workers are often an expensive nuisance - computers are cheaper, more reliable and more pliable.

Faced with global competition, companies have sought umpteen ways of reducing their fixed costs, putting us on fixed-term contracts, outsourcing us, winding up the in-house pension scheme, asking us to work from home where we can use our own electricity, and then spying on us in case we are slacking. There is a burgeoning industry in developing "spycams" and "network monitoring software". One website peddling its wares puts Big Brother to shame: "Imagine an employee left alone in their office or cubicle. What do they do once you are gone? Do they perform work like they are supposed to? Or do they play games and perform other non-work-related tasks? As an employer, you can easily monitor employees within your network."

While companies have stripped down our working lives to the basic model and then treated us like malingerers, neoliberal governments from Margaret Thatcher's to Tony Blair's have urged us to be more self-reliant and less dependent on the state to provide for us. Our little fists are being forcibly removed from Nanny's apron strings (but rapped with a ruler if we smoke or eat fry-ups) because of an ideological belief that the private sector allocates resources more efficiently than the public sector and that individuals are more motivated if they choose how to spend their own money. That message - Messrs Howard, Letwin, Milburn and Blair, be warned - has failed entirely to inspire; most of us think we are being screwed, not emancipated.

Yet there is a voluntary shift towards self-reliance, and it is often in revolt against big business and government, not at their behest. We are "casualising" ourselves. According to the market analysts Datamonitor, roughly 2.6 million Britons are "downshifters": people who have chosen to trade some of their income for a better quality of life, spending more time with their families and issuing a quiet two fingers to the rat race. Downshifters, sometimes classified as "post-materialists", are expected to swell in number to 3.7 million by 2007 (12 million across Europe).

Not all these families are growing organic vegetables and running B&Bs. A furious amount of work goes on outside the world of formal employment, not least by a growing army of self-employed entrepreneurs (including lifestyle coaches who reportedly charge up to £500 an hour for phone advice on downshifting), many of them in the countryside. Townies may have been led to believe that rural Britain is populated exclusively by posh people who chase foxes on horseback and poor people who work in kennels looking after the hounds. In fact, the countryside has a growing number of small businesses, 71 per cent of which have internet access, 10 per cent (and rising) broadband. It is they, not the large corporations, who are creating the lion's share of new jobs these days.

The key, in any case, is not where we live - the suburbs are a hotbed of downshifters - but how. It is, above all, being in control of the work we do and therefore of our lives. We are revolting against the tyranny of the job. A Wall Street financier once asked me what I thought was the main difference between working in New York and London. I told him that, in New York, working long hours was seen as evidence of success; in London, working long hours was a sign of failure.

There was (and is) an element of wishful thinking to that judgement; many people still have no control and continue to be exploited. In his Work Foundation paper, Isles reckons that some 15 per cent of the workforce - ie, four million people - are very unhappy with their jobs and that these tend to be the low-skilled. Even less happy are the unemployed or economically inactive who want a job - poverty is foul even in the prettiest village. Public policy should be geared to equipping these people with the skills and confidence they will need in our post-industrial future, when machines will take over many of the tasks we now perform.

Flexibility cuts both ways, however. It is we, the workers, who are grabbing some of the benefits, and employers who are on the back foot. Because it is the high-skilled and entrepreneurial who tend to leave, companies have no choice but to put effort into making work more enticing and that, it is hoped, will gradually benefit everyone. Flexible hours? Of course. Paternity leave? No sweat. Profit-sharing? Naturally. Spycams are out; "trust" is in. In the first paper published by Microsoft's Tomorrow's Work programme, a long-term study of work in the digital age, Dr Carsten S0rensen examines the hit that productivity takes when remote workers feel they are being subjected to surveillance and not treated as trusted grown-ups. The penny has finally dropped: mutual trust is the mantra. Can Microsoft now tell that to our government?

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