Hard-working medicine
The Guardian, 6 January 1998

They slaughtered a million chickens in Hong Kong over the new year to try to wipe out a new strain of "bird flu". In this country, they'd probably have given them Lemsip. "What sort of person goes to work with the flu?" asks one of the most recent adverts for the product -- to which it gives the answer: "The one who's after your job." And unless I've missed it, barely anyone has blinked an eyelid at a multi-million pound advertising campaign designed to persuade people to go to work when they are sick.

The people who are trying to sell us Lemsip ("Hard-working medicine", for God's sake) have concentrated a lot of their spending on adverts on the London Underground. So let's hope that the person driving your tube train into work tomorrow morning isn't one of those who was persuaded to go to work with the flu, having first dosed himself up with Lemsip, for fear of someone else grabbing his job. People with flu -- even those who've poured a lemon-tasting aspirin solution into their stomachs -- are not likely to be the most alert when it comes to operating a tube train.

Let's hope too that the man pressed up against you during the morning rush hour, swapping the same air with his fellow travellers on your overcrowded Misery Line, hasn't taken the Lemsip advice either. Influenza, let us all remind ourselves, is an airborne virus whose only mechanism for survival is to spread from one person to another before the body's immune system manages to kill it off. Flu viruses of my acquaintance like nothing better than to go forth and multiply in the sort of warm, heavily-populated environments that you find in, say, tube trains -- or, for that matter, most offices or other workplaces.

Most doctors would tell you that the best thing to do when you've got the flu -- for the benefit of everyone else, as well as yourself -- is to pack yourself off to bed with a hot toddy. They don't tend to advise patients to drug themselves up and then go out and infect as many other people as possible. And if you've got a job with half an ounce of responsibility attached to it, particularly one that involves you in any way with the safety of others, they'd almost certainly look with horror upon any suggestion that you should ignore the illness and carry on regardless.

But this is the New Giving Age in which we are all expected to give our heart and soul (and, it seems, health) for our country. (New country, young country, dawning-of-a-new-millenium country -- fill in your own adjectives here.) Those of you who made it through those nasty, cut-and-thrust Eighties, when no-one's job was safe and everyone was out to better themselves by standing on the back of someone else, may be forgiven for thinking that it was supposed to be different in the caring, sharing Nineties. But you really have missed the point. The people who're running the country today didn't get where they are by staying at home in bed when they were ill -- so why should you?

Suddenly, the whole nation seems to have been infected by an old-fashioned virulent work ethic again. We are richer as a country than we have ever been, yet for some reason we can no longer afford the welfare state that we managed to find the money for when the whole of Britain was in ruins after the second world war. We have more labour-saving devices available to us than at any time in our history, yet we are working longer hours than our grandparents were in the 1950s. They were told that "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases". We're told: "Got the flu? Work it through."

Work, it seems, is the answer to all ills. The government has already decided that the best thing for single parents is to send them out to work (leaving the kids at home to take drugs, presumably). And now they appear to be saying the same about people who get disability benefits as well -- despite the fact that 70% of those on disability benefits are past retirement age and about 70% of those who are not are so severely disabled that they will probably never be able to work anyway. How long before one of the New Labour think-tanks wakes up to the waste of having all those children at school -- learning without earning, as it were. Can't we get them down the pit or up the chimneys during their time off, paying their way instead of poncing off the rest of us?

The truth is that most of us work to live, not live to work. So what's the point of working all those extra hours to be able to afford that smart new car, the main purpose of which is to get us to work in the first place? Or to buy those fast-food meals that we no longer have time to cook ourselves because we're so busy earning the money to pay for them? Is our idea of "prosperity" really one in which we can't go sick for fear of someone else sneaking in behind our back?

Of course, the captains of government and industry will produce all sorts of statistics to show us how much sickness "costs" the country every year. The last figure I saw, based on a Confederation of British Industry survey of 700 firms, suggested that 187 million working days were lost in the previous year due to workers' sickness, costing industry £12 billion.

What nonsense! When someone is off sick, it's usually the people who are still working who bear the "cost", covering for them and doing their job while they're away. Otherwise, it's the person concerned, who has to catch up on the backlog of work on their return. It might be inconvenient, it might delay a few things, it might even annoy fellow workers who think that the person concerned is skiving. But does it cost money? Are fewer copies of the Sun printed if one of the printers has a day off? Does Harrod's sell fewer quail's eggs because one of the counter assistants has gone down with the flu? Do fewer people bank with Barclay's as a result of one of its branch managers being a bit chesty?

The Brave New Britain work ethic is even affecting our leisure time. I don't know whether the same advertising firm that came up with the Lemsip ads also handles The Full Monty account, but the new year adverts for that film even managed to turn going to the cinema into a duty. "If you only make one resolution -- make it No.1," they said about the film above a table showing The Full Monty second only to Jurassic Park among all-time UK box office hits. "Size does matter, so make it the UK's biggest movie -- ever! See it again -- and be part of history. Still showing at cinemas across the country."

Personally, I think you go to see films again if you think they're good -- and go to work if you're feeling well. Oh -- and brandy and lemon is just as good as Lemsip.