All work and no play

Many of us have to work like demons to keep pace in a competitive, globalised world. Jasper Thornton asks what it is doing to us
In a small, ill-lit office in Heliopolis, a young woman is hunched over a computer, like a shrub in wind. Layla is 30, and unmarried. Breathing deeply, she turns to look at the clock. Her eyes are reluctant to focus; after hacking through forests of graphs and thickets of numbers, it is hard to go back. Half- sipped coffee broods coldly in a cup on her desk. Shadows from the evening dark clump on her face. Occasionally the lights of a car hurry across her face; otherwise the glare from the screen is undisturbed. The office is silent save for a shutter, clanging.
Layla will be here again tomorrow, early, then through the day as the sun climbs, aching the eyes, and the office blares with chatter. She will stay until night falls. Sometimes she stays until she hears the early morning call to prayer. Why does she do it?
"Because I must," she says. In Egypt, Layla's story is getting commoner. As globalisation heats Egypt's congealing economic soup, the working practices made famous by corporate America are being stirred into the mix, with uncertain results.
Egyptians educated abroad are among the first to bring new working habits to their home. Tarek Ismail, CEO of Egyptinfo, studied in Canada before working for global law firm Clifford Chance. When he returned to Egypt he was unhappy with what he found. "It is not easy to find people prepared to work hard," he says, with intensity. "People in Egypt are used to an easy life - come in, play around, knock off early. But I expect more." He even frowns on piety: "By all means take time to pray, but don't expect me to pay for it. Why should I pay people when they're not working?" he says. In any case, "Islam says work before you pray. Work is a form of prayer." His employees may not have time for prayer. Ismail devoutly follows the New York working ethic. "I expect my people to work day and night, day and night." If they can't, things are simple. "When I first got here, I fired three quarters of the people. I want only the best." He means it. "I came in to the office once and found some friends of one of my partners using the computers." Ismail says. "I took him aside. They have five minutes to be out of here, or you can go with them, I told him." As he tells the story, Ismail looks up at me through chic lawyer spectacles. He does not smile.
But this may not be machismo alone. Petur Georgesson, the owner of Rising Star Publishing, based in Dokki, also feels that remorseless hard work is needed. For him, constant struggle is the cost of survival. "We are in a competitive society that spares none," he says. "In this world, the strongest, the fittest and the most able alone survive." He looks for employees who feel the same. "My ideal employee would love the company as much as I do. I want to inspire them to strive for excellence." There are carrots as well as sticks. Like Ismail, Georgesson rewards his chosen employees with good pay, shares in the company and wants to introduce health insurance. As he talks, the hands of his wall clock slowly inch around. Soon, it is half past three in the morning. Georgesson strains to think, to wipe his mind of the problems of the unceasing day. But he does. He will "sweat blood so my employees can eat." I ask him whether he regrets that the world is like it is, demanding everything from him. Murkily grinning, he answers. "This is the reality of staying on top, of succeeding in any culture, in any city, in any country on this earth."
Such thoughts scare health professionals. Josette Abdallah, professor of psychology and mental health counsellor at the American University in Cairo, told Al Ahram Weekly that she is worried by mental-ill health associated with overwork. Socialisation skills vanish. Children suffer. Home life fragments. Midlife crises loom. And stress follows. Abdallah has seen plenty of cases of psychosomatic disorders arising from overwork stress. Everything from ulcers to heart attacks; and they are increasing enormously, she says. She advises people to take half an hour to themselves each evening to absorb the lessons of the day and to re-evaluate their life regularly. And if they feel that disturbing sense of dislocation and unreality that overwork brings, they must renew their life. "Changing strongly from a career that is ruining you to one that isn't, is far easier than allowing the insistent pressure of overwork slowly to make your choices for you," she says. Besides, she continues, some have personalities that simply aren't suited to this kind of regime. When asked how changing jobs is possible in a working world that scorns frailty, and where everyone is desperate for any work they can get, Abdallah pauses. "Let us hope the people making policy are compassionate people who feel," she says at last.
Egypt's current labour laws are generous to workers, though a new labour law is shortly due before parliament. Working hours, even in the private sector, are still limited to eight hours a day, (10 in an "emergency"), according to a 1981 law; employees cannot really be sacked. But these laws are patchily imposed. A black market in labour thrives, and extends, unusually, to the high skilled. The "employees" of Nomad International, a failed Egyptian portal, complained recently to Al- Ahram Weekly, that they were never given contracts. Undoubtedly, this was partly due to the need to respond rapidly to a globalised market that can switch faces in a day; workers who are hard to fire or incentivise make an unwieldy sail with which to catch the most favourable market winds. There is also a real feeling, intimated by Petur Georgesson, that the private sector of the Egyptian economy is badly listing under the storm winds of the global economy. Without desperate devotion to the job, enterprises can easily sink. Entrepreneurs tend to accept contracts, knowing that it is safer to flog their employees to work ungodly hours, rather than turn business away and risk everyone ending jobless. As Tamer Said Ahmed, an Egyptian entrepreneur puts it, "if it is possible, it is done. If it is impossible, it shall be done."
This pressure to make Egyptian working habits more American will quicken. A central plank of the strategy of the US aid agency, USAID, is to change how Egyptians work. USAID's strategy document for Egypt 2000-2009 (endorsed by the Egyptian government in its "2017 vision"), endlessly urges businesses to become more suited to the "global economy," and to initiate management "best practice" (by which USAID means American management practice). In other words, high rewards for the successful, redundancy for the rest. For example, the document complains that labour laws make it difficult to "dismiss unproductive workers." But the long- discussed "new labour law will make it possible for firms to dismiss workers." USAID approves, thinking that if firms know they can easily fire, they are more likely to hire. These American management values will soak into the Egyptian business world "through US-base training...conducted by leading US business schools." With the economy so difficult, it is little surprise that employers and workers live in a state of endless nervousness, working like fanatics to keep their businesses afloat and forced to sacrifice their lives to their jobs, whatever the costs in health. Unemployment flays Egypt: 27.5% of 15 to 25-year-olds are without work. The Financial Times guesses that the Egyptian economy is growing at a paltry 3.6 per cent a year. Even 12.5% of university graduates are without work. Those with jobs will endure much to avoid losing them.
Meanwhile, Layla is still at work. She does not know when last she spoke to her parents. Sleep is a foreign word; the few hours she gets always snatched prematurely from her by the pre-dawn alarm. As she types, her hands tremble from veins sluiced with caffeine. "I want to cry," she says. "But no-one has time to care. We work and work and work and work. Nothing else." Her eyes are puffy, her face thin. "I feel so weak, I feel like screaming" she says, and tries to smile. Alas for Layla, her suffering collides directly with the juggernaut of the global economy. If Petur Georgesson is right, and now the globalised "world spares none," woe betide the weak. For Layla's present is all of our future. Whether we like it or not.
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