One of the main reasons why books such as Catch 22 and 1984 make such mediocre films, is because celluloid struggles to capture the books’ preoccupation with the ways in which language can be used to subvert meaning and rationality. We don’t always have to lean on the bookcase to see how this works. It’s been evident recently in the coverage of the massive growth of zero hours working worldwide, although they have now been banned in New Zealand. There are now up to 1.5 million people on zero hours contracts in the UK and the adjective most commonly associated with the practice in the media coverage has been ‘flexible’, despite the fact that from the perspective of the majority of the people working on such contracts they are anything but. It’s yet another example of the subversion in our use of the term flexible working. It’s Doublespeak; an expression which means something completely different to, or indeed the opposite of, the thing it is describing.
We are now at the point at which the meaning of the word ‘flexible’ in this context is often inverted. A number of recent surveys of the ways in which we work have highlighted the implications of flexible working and the integration of workplace technology into our lives. While we should take most surveys from businesses with a pinch of salt, when they all point in the same general direction, we can assume that their results are broadly correct. So here are just seven of the ways in which flexible working may have actually made our lives more rigid.