Memo for distribution in British workplaces. posted by Richard Seymour

Your bosses would like to congratulate you: you are the most exploited workers in Western Europe! It's true. British companies top the list in 'value-added' across Europe by a tremendous margin, and all because of your hard work. It is because you are willing to become more stressed, more susceptible to illness and injury while performing $23bn worth of free work every single year that your bosses can uphold respectable share portfolios while padding out their pension and life insurance policies (not for nothing are most shares in the UK owned by pension and insurance companies).

Do not, workers, think that this means you can rest on your adipose tissue. Tory MP Peter Luff of the House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee has been visting India and says British workers are too lazy to compete. It's all like "we're going home because it's the end of our shift" (except when it's not).

There are a variety of ways in which the hard-working, selfless, conscientious and altruistic British bosses would like to make up for this slackness. First of all, they are desperate to get rid of those final salary pension schemes, even trying to tempt workers way from them with illegal bribes and deception - there is too much cost involved and at any rate, they would rather you worked a little bit harder and put the money into your own private scheme or one of the government's 'stakeholder' plans, and since at the moment savings for retirement are dropping precipitously due to a consumer debt crisis, they figure you'll be happy to put in the hours. The other thing is, they'd like you to have a longer working life in total. The government, obviously under considerable pressure from the CBI (a collection of trim, workaholic ascetics), has decided to renege on even the limited guarantees made to civil service workers over pensions. The government still intends to prolong working lives beyond the life expectancy of a large sector of the working class. The PR men for what is greasily called 'the business community' would like to push the government to go even further - opting out of the social contract, getting shot of the Working Time directive (Blair is dedicated to keeping an opt-out for this), increasing the marketisation of education to meet business needs, that sort of thing. Basically, your boss would be a lot happier if your education was more effective in training you to fulfil the various menial tasks associated with the growing services industry, to valorise your over-worked condition, to expect to be worked into the ground, to think no further than your individual pay cheque, to accept and even enthusiastically call for the very measures that will result in you working longer, harder, for less, and to internalise every predictably baleful effect of this as a personal weakness.

We are the most exploited workers in Western Europe. If Mr Luff has his way, we shall be reducing our wages and working free overtime to 'compete' with Indian workers. How long before our lack of enterprise compared with the dynamic Indonesian sweatshop is bruited?