RUTH SUNDERLAND: When we snooze, we lose

Lazy Girl Jobs – ones that don’t involve stress, long hours or interfere with your lifestyle – are the social media craze of the summer.

I’m a bit late to the trend, I know, but my excuse is I’ve been working too hard to keep up with TikTok.

The phrase Lazy Girl is deliberately provocative. Apparently, it’s not really about laziness at all, but is a critique of the epidemic of overwork blighting Britain and leading to mass burnout.

Perhaps someone should tell the Office for National Statistics. Looking at the latest labour market figures, the idea Britain is in the grip of a crazy workathon is for the birds.

The only ones who are overworked are a hard core of conscientious employees left to pick up the slack left by their lazybones colleagues. A far bigger problem for the economy and the fabric of society is that too many of us in the UK are not working at all.

Trending: Lazy Girl Jobs – ones that don’t involve stress, long hours or interfere with your lifestyle – are the social media craze of the summer

Nearly nine million people are economically inactive – neither in employment nor looking for work. That is a shocking one in five of the working-age population.

Many have valid reasons, but those figures do not suggest a nation worn to the bone by relentless toil. Hundreds of thousands quit work in the pandemic.

The number claiming they are long-term sick this summer is 545,000 higher than it was in the equivalent period of 2019, before Covid. That is a total of 2.5million people saying they are too ill to work.

On top of this, the pandemic saw more than a quarter of a million taking early retirement. Virtually every employer I meet says they are struggling to find staff, or to persuade many of their existing employees to do the work needed. One chief executive of a FTSE 100 firm told me he needs his staff to come back into the office but cannot persuade them.

Senior managers, he says, have become entrenched in working from home and so have no moral authority to tell their juniors to return to the office. He describes it as the single biggest barrier to the growth push he wants to achieve.

Staffing problems are holding back many entrepreneurs.

Instead of lolling under the duvet like a Lazy Girl, at 6.20am last Tuesday Candice Mason of Masons Coaches was wide awake and telling the BBC how she could not recruit enough drivers.

When she raised their pay by 20 per cent as an incentive, they cut back their hours to improve their work-life balance. Drivers now do an average of 45 hours a week, down from 56 pre-Covid. As a result, it will take four years longer for her firm to come back to pre-pandemic levels. No doubt many businessmen and women would tell a similar story.

The Lazy Girl Job movement – if that is not too energetic a term – is tongue in cheek but it seems to have struck a real chord and that is depressing. As someone who survived the macho world of Fleet Street in the 1990s, I find it a shame that young women, who have so much potential and so many more opportunities, are being told on social media that career ambitions are uncool and futile.

One reason given for the reluctance to strive is it feels pointless.

Homes remain out of reach for many young people due to high property prices and they don’t believe they will ever receive a decent pension. But there are rewarding jobs for the taking. Employers in every field from engineering firms to tech businesses to finance are keen to hire bright young people, particularly young women.

Productivity has been poorer in the UK than in comparable developed countries since the financial crisis. There are many and complex reasons for this, but a flimsy work ethic cannot be helping.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk