And the balance between work and other aspects of people's lives is increasingly important. "We're working longer hours, we're working irregularly, we're working in the evening, we're working at weekends. And the balance that we strike between those obligations to the workplace and to other dimensions of our life have become centre stage." (Will Hutton)

While some people manage to get a good work/life balance, most find it much harder to achieve. Dr Susan Himmelweit, an economist from The Open University, discusses this issue:

"One group who often can get a good work/life balance is people who work for large organisations whose jobs are not particularly skilled and where the organisation is well-meaning. Some of the big retailers for example, where often the shifts are flexible. The second main group is people who have skills their employers really need, and they often have to go through an individual process of negotiation but can in the end get quite good terms.

It's less easy to categorise people who do have difficulties in negotiating measures that would help their work/life balance. Very often it's the attitudes of their immediate managers that's most important more than the overall employer's policy. In some cases managers have really put themselves out in order to help a particular employee to work against company policy . In other places, where an employer has a very good work/life balance policy allowing people to ask for part time work, for example, people will not ask for it if their own manager is unsympathetic."

What's more, the work/life balance point changes as individuals progress through their working lives. Angela Ishmael, from the Work Foundation discusses these life cycle changes:

 

"In UK business culture, people have been brought up to think of work as separate from their lives, and not understand the relationship between the two. One of the things that we're trying to get people to see is that they are very much part and parcel of the same thing. Organisations, in terms of building in flexibility, need to understand that as people go through their natural life cycle, their need and their relationship with work changes. For example, whilst organisations have been very good at providing child care and early years facilities for women, what they haven't been so good at recognising is that men are parents too. And people have other life cycle changes which leads to changes in their relationship with work, for example they may have caring responsibilities for elderly parents. "

Is worker happiness an achievable aim? Will Hutton, at least, is optimistic about the future:

"I think we've now reached the point where there's sufficient critical mass of opinion amongst employers and amongst the workforce that the time has come to take these ideas on board that actually the flexibilities about how you organise your working life need to be a worker right, so that you can have much more autonomy over your working time. I think we're going to move from the right to ask for these privileges to the right to have them. I think without doubt that we're going to have them in the next ten or fifteen years."

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