Christmas is the time for taking

Public sector workers in Leeds, West Yorkshire Nov 2011.
Source Flickr: Fighting For Decent Pensions

As a South African, one is used to industrial action, so it was strange to see the UK up in arms over a public- sector strike recently.

Some two-million public-sector workers, including teachers, healthcare professionals, university lecturers (including myself) and other civil servants, refused to work as government sought to cut pensions and force workers to work longer. The unions described the strike as the biggest in a generation. Government felt it was futile.

I do not wish to rehash the views of the unions and government, but rather highlight the split in opinion on the strike between public-sector and so-called ordinary private-sector workers such as retailers and workers in companies.

The argument from the private sector was simple: public-sector workers still have pensions, so why are they complaining about cuts and having to work slightly longer to get their, relatively speaking, generous payouts. Private-sector workers generally have no pensions, or their pensions were cut years ago. Currently, the mean average public-sector pension is about £7 000 a year, whereas in the private sector it is £5 000.

But what is mystifying about these arguments is that they somehow imply that what has happened to private-sector workers is right, or that if one sector of society is going to be screwed by big business and the pension companies, then everyone should. Two wrongs do not make a right.

The rich, of course, remain immune to all this. The annual pension of 346 directors from 102 of the UK’s top companies will be £200 000, compared with the average workplace pension of £8 100, a study found recently.

The current pension fight is also the thin edge of the wedge. A recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that, by 2080, the average person will have to work to 74 to get a pension. Further, figures suggest that the public sector may lose 490 000 jobs in the next few years. This will play itself out in the lives of ordinary people.

As the public sector shrinks, for example, waiting times in hospitals and teacher-to-pupil ratios will increase. Despite attempts to portray the public and private sectors as separate, they are also integrally linked. An enormous number of people in the private sector is dependent on the public sector for contracts.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the average family in the UK will lose £2 500 in annual household income, compared with three years ago.

So this is not about the public sector versus the private sector – this is about government choosing to support the very rich at the expense of ordinary people.

Bankers, who caused this crisis, continue to steal from taxpayers unashamedly. Directors’ pay rose by 40% last year. A total of £4.2-billion will be paid out in bonuses to bankers this year in the UK.

The Royal Bank of Scotland, now 84%-owned by taxpayers, is still intending next year to pay its top bankers £500-million in bonuses. Last year, the bank made a loss of £1.1-billion and paid out £950-million in bonuses. The top 100 bankers received over £1-million each.

Taxpayers are paying for these bonuses. So when nearly five-million people are told their pensions are going to be cut, including teachers, social workers, soldiers, firefighters and the police, it makes perfect sense they are angry, especially when they have been paying their contributions to pension schemes in good faith.

Now is the time to work together. But instead of the working public uniting to say enough is enough, different sectors of society are hurling abuse at each other. This is akin to having an argument on the deck of the Titanic about who is going to be affected the most when the iceberg hits, while the super-rich row off in the lifeboats.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 16 December 2011 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Lessons for combating stress

University is meant to be educational and I did learn a few academic things while I studied at university. But there were also other life lessons I learned. One of these popped into my head again recently as I struggled with an unwieldy workload.

The lesson came from a comment made some 20 years ago by a professor of mine. This professor, after bumping into me in a corridor, asked me how I was. I said I was feeling drained and had a holiday planned. The professor replied, to my astonishment: “You do know that holidays are for people who do not know how to manage their time.”

Of course, her statement is dubious, and I am sure the occupational health depart- ment of the university would have disagreed, but it has always stayed with me. I have taken the words to mean that, in between any busy schedule, you should find time for a ‘holiday’. This might mean taking five minutes for a quiet cup of coffee, listening to an audio book in your car, or, perhaps, stepping into a museum for 30 minutes if you happen to pass one while rushing somewhere.

In fact, in my more extreme moments and, perhaps, suggesting that some of the madness of my professor has rubbed off on me, I sometimes try to convince myself that I am always on holiday and work is the thing that continually interrupts it.

Nowadays, with roles reversed and me working at a university, I always make a point of asking students how they are in the vain hope I have some effect on their lives too (although I don’t repeat my professor’s mantra). Students, like most of us when asked this question, generally say they are very busy, despite some of them being masters of factoring in relaxation (aka drinking) time into their schedules.

‘Busy’ seems to have become the buzz- word of our age. But being busy has many different meanings. There is also a lot of cache attached to being busy. Saying you are busy is linked with social power. It says you are needed by others and engaged in important activities.

I generally use the term ‘busy’ more when I am stressed. At these moments, I am often not very focused and I tend to waste a lot of time by writing lists, which just make me more anxious about what I have to do, often immobilising me. According to Jared Sandberg, who took time to research people like me, about “30% of listers spend more time managing their lists than [they do] completing what’s on them”.

It seems that when I am at my ‘most busy’ is when I have lost perspective on what really needs to be done. For me, the proof of this lies in the build-up to a proper holiday (not one of my little in-the-middle-of-day ‘vacations’, as my professor suggested). When I plan to leave the office for a few weeks, every task on my list seems the most important thing in the world. Invariably, not everything gets done. However, one week into the holiday, what seemed really important a week before miraculously seems less significant.

Therefore, I have concluded that managing your time is not merely about organising tasks; it is about getting the tasks into perspective. It is partly a state of mind. But developing a healthy attitude to what is important and what is not seems to require time and space for reflection.

So, perhaps, my professor had a point after all and we all do need continuous ‘stress holidays’. This would benefit both our health and our productivity, and work would surely benefit from a regular dose of perspective. My New Year’s resolution is to take more regular breaks – so, right now, I am off to work on a list of actions needed to make this a reality.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 28 January 2011 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Let’s face it, holidays are strange

Photo by Vicko Mozara on Unsplash

Currently, I am on a northern hemisphere summer break, although I should say an alleged summer break. There are two reasons for this. 

Firstly, in Ireland and England, there is no summer. Summer is something you know everyone else is having while you sit in the rain, trying to remember what sunshine feels like. The easiest way to deal with this lack of summer is to travel abroad, but this is costly in these credit crunch days. So I find myself sitting at a British family resort trying to learn the difference between light showers, squally showers, rain and heavy rain. Secondly, I must admit, I also struggle with the whole concept of a holiday.

It is not that I am one of those grumpy people who do not like holidays. I love them – it is the idea I find weird.

People not only work to pay bills, but also so that they can have a break from work. Apparently, to enjoy your break, you cannot simply have a break – we are all so conditioned that we must do something with it. This something is called a holiday. Holidays cost money. So, in other words, you work to get money to pay others for the pleasure of not working. This strikes me as logical as banging your head against a wall because it feels good when you stop.

Of course, one option is to choose not to work at all and then go on holiday, which then means you are paying others to add something to your otherwise empty schedule. But being unemployed is not a comfortable state of affairs and makes buying time at a holiday resort rather difficult. The result of this is that it makes those of us who are employed happy enough to continue to pay not to work.

There are further problems. If you choose to stay at home on your break, now dubbed the ‘staycation’, it feels as if you are not on holiday. And if you choose not to stay at home, and if you are not lucky enough to have a second home at the beach or in the mountains, your choices are limited. Either you have to book a holiday home in some remote spot, or you have to sell your soul to a hotel group.

In exchange for money, hotels are happy to provide you with all the structure you need in your day to prevent you from feeling too far from work. They also promise endless entertainment from belly-dancing classes to parasailing and, unlike an isolated holiday cottage, guarantee your children can get to interact with others in play parks and swimming pools. This, in turn, helps your child learn valuable social skills.

For example, this holiday, my two-and-a-half-year-old son learned that one should never trust anyone, especially someone who wants the same toy as you. This valuable lesson was brought to him by a covetous toddler who attached himself to my son’s cheek with his teeth in an unprovoked playground attack. This left us wishing we had opted for the isolated holiday cottage.

For me, this sums up the core dilemma of holidays. Either you have to share purpose-built spaces and activities with others who might turn out to be little Mike Tysons, more interested in biting off ears than cooperative play, or you have to seclude yourself from the world, losing the advantage of having someone else laying all the entertainment you need at your doorstep.

So there is no perfect holiday, only moments of bliss and disaster. Every holiday has its price, whether it is inclement weather, a nasty souvenir bite, a little bit too much isolation, or too many structured activities that leave you exhausted and in need of another vacation. I long to find the balance, but I just don’t have enough free time to find it.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 22 August 2008 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

Been Away in the USA

I have been travelling over the last while. Was first at a conference at Notre Dame entitled Peacebuilding after Peace Accords. Thereafter took a short road trip from Chicago to Boston through the strange country of the US, via the Finger Lakes, Adirondack mountains and Vermont. As always it was full of surprises, very beautiful and a place one cannot simply put into a pigeon-hole. Constantly one runs into some of the nicest people on earth, which is always hard to reconcile given the countries foreign policy, but here is hoping for some changes in 2004....my brief sojourn tells me this is what most people want...