Idle Worship of St Monday
More than four-fifths of employees have called in with pretended sickness just to have a day off, according to a new survey.
More than four-fifths of employees have called in with pretended sickness just to have a day off, according to a new survey. And 66% of those who lied did not feel any guilt. These, according to a Press Association report in Tuesday's Guardian, are the findings of a study by the Manchester-based employment lawyers Portfolio Payroll and Peninsula (Ever heard of them? You have now.) The survey polled 927 employees and 1,634 employers.
That won't do, I'm afraid. If we're going to take this seriously, we need to know who conducted the survey for PP & P, what methods they used, and whether the guilt of the 80% who admitted to having malingered was established by their own testimony or by the testimony of the group as a whole, employers as well as employees. It would also be useful to know the margin of error on even the best-constructed sample of just 927 employees. There's a further question worth asking too, which we'll come to later: does this most of all happen on Mondays?
It is worth stating the possible imperfections of this exercise since it's just the sort of information likely to figure in sermons on the state of the British workforce that will shortly be preached from the pulpits of the rightward end of the Anglican church and throughout the born-again Conservative press. Yes, of course it is all very wrong. Yet people tempted to frame such indictments might usefully also ask themselves whether such a mixture of absenteeism and subsequent mendacity would be something new on the industrial scene, or whether the incidence is much what it was in days when Portfolio Payroll and Peninsula hadn't yet got round to commissioning surveys.
The complaint that idle workers, whether or not they're equipped with fictitious sick notes, are a singular blight on productivity is certainly nothing new. "The workman here is generally speaking of a much lower order than the foreigner and is accordingly less efficient," one employer testified to a royal commission. "The average British workman ... generally is more interested in the next football match and the nearest public house than he is in his work ... some trades suffer much from St Monday." That was in 1906. (I found it in an excellent book called Private Lives, Public Spirit, by Jose Harris.)
There were two main explanations for this malaise. Some attributed it to the soul-destroying nature of the work allotted to most men and women - reduced in the new mechanised age, it was said, to a role not much higher than that of automata. Employers were rather more likely to attribute it to the deleterious advance of trade unions.
Yet the golden mid-Victorian age to which they looked back had been making the same complaints. The worship of St Monday had troubled an inspector called Edward White who reported to the Children's Employment Commission of 1864. "In Birmingham," he wrote (but it could have been any of the other great manufacturing cities), "an enormous amount of time is lost, not only by want of punctuality in coming to work in the morning and beginning again after meals, but still more by the general observance of 'Saint Monday', which is shown in the late attendance or entire absence of large numbers on that day. One employer has on Monday only about 40 or 50 out of 300 or 400, and the day is recognised by many masters as an hour shorter than others at each end ..."
And that was long before the spread of trade unions; even before the spread of public addiction to football.
The very name St Monday had the smack of hallowed tradition about it. Though many who used it couldn't have known this, it was traceable back, according to E Cobham Brewer in one of the many works perpetuated nowadays in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, to the time of Cromwell. While Cromwell's army lay encamped at Perth, he says, one of his zealous partisans, named Monday, died, and Cromwell offered a reward for the best lines on his death. A shoemaker of Perth brought the following, which so pleased Cromwell that he not only gave the promised reward but issued a decree that shoemakers should be allowed to make Monday a standing holiday: "Blessed be the Sabbath Day/ And cursed be worldly pelf:/ Tuesday will begin the week,/ Since Monday's hanged himself."
Or as our own day's Billy Bragg put in the chorus of one of his songs two years ago: "I'm a hard worker, but I ain't working on a Monday ... / St Monday's still the weekend to me."
That won't do, I'm afraid. If we're going to take this seriously, we need to know who conducted the survey for PP & P, what methods they used, and whether the guilt of the 80% who admitted to having malingered was established by their own testimony or by the testimony of the group as a whole, employers as well as employees. It would also be useful to know the margin of error on even the best-constructed sample of just 927 employees. There's a further question worth asking too, which we'll come to later: does this most of all happen on Mondays?
It is worth stating the possible imperfections of this exercise since it's just the sort of information likely to figure in sermons on the state of the British workforce that will shortly be preached from the pulpits of the rightward end of the Anglican church and throughout the born-again Conservative press. Yes, of course it is all very wrong. Yet people tempted to frame such indictments might usefully also ask themselves whether such a mixture of absenteeism and subsequent mendacity would be something new on the industrial scene, or whether the incidence is much what it was in days when Portfolio Payroll and Peninsula hadn't yet got round to commissioning surveys.
The complaint that idle workers, whether or not they're equipped with fictitious sick notes, are a singular blight on productivity is certainly nothing new. "The workman here is generally speaking of a much lower order than the foreigner and is accordingly less efficient," one employer testified to a royal commission. "The average British workman ... generally is more interested in the next football match and the nearest public house than he is in his work ... some trades suffer much from St Monday." That was in 1906. (I found it in an excellent book called Private Lives, Public Spirit, by Jose Harris.)
There were two main explanations for this malaise. Some attributed it to the soul-destroying nature of the work allotted to most men and women - reduced in the new mechanised age, it was said, to a role not much higher than that of automata. Employers were rather more likely to attribute it to the deleterious advance of trade unions.
Yet the golden mid-Victorian age to which they looked back had been making the same complaints. The worship of St Monday had troubled an inspector called Edward White who reported to the Children's Employment Commission of 1864. "In Birmingham," he wrote (but it could have been any of the other great manufacturing cities), "an enormous amount of time is lost, not only by want of punctuality in coming to work in the morning and beginning again after meals, but still more by the general observance of 'Saint Monday', which is shown in the late attendance or entire absence of large numbers on that day. One employer has on Monday only about 40 or 50 out of 300 or 400, and the day is recognised by many masters as an hour shorter than others at each end ..."
And that was long before the spread of trade unions; even before the spread of public addiction to football.
The very name St Monday had the smack of hallowed tradition about it. Though many who used it couldn't have known this, it was traceable back, according to E Cobham Brewer in one of the many works perpetuated nowadays in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, to the time of Cromwell. While Cromwell's army lay encamped at Perth, he says, one of his zealous partisans, named Monday, died, and Cromwell offered a reward for the best lines on his death. A shoemaker of Perth brought the following, which so pleased Cromwell that he not only gave the promised reward but issued a decree that shoemakers should be allowed to make Monday a standing holiday: "Blessed be the Sabbath Day/ And cursed be worldly pelf:/ Tuesday will begin the week,/ Since Monday's hanged himself."
Or as our own day's Billy Bragg put in the chorus of one of his songs two years ago: "I'm a hard worker, but I ain't working on a Monday ... / St Monday's still the weekend to me."
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