92. WORKING ON HOLIDAY: Am I Really About To Defend Dominic Raab?

As usual, Philosophy Unleashed “went dark” over the summer.  We do this during every school break - half terms, Christmas, Easter and Summer - because I very much believe in the importance of taking breaks from work.  However, during the summer the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan.  Governments fell, refugees fled, and international citizens were evacuated.  Here in the UK, however, the person responsible for dealing with such international upheaval, the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, was on holiday on the island of Crete at the time of the Taliban victory and, being on holiday, had insisted that he not be bothered by any work issues while he was away.  The collapse of the Afghanistan government, therefore, was dealt with by junior staff in his absence, causing significant scandal for Raab at home.

While there are many issues that arise from this whole situation in Afghanistan - the fact that Raab is just the latest member of this government to be embroiled in a scandal that may have cost people’s lives and yet maintains the Prime Minister’s “absolute confidence” in them despite the demonstrable incompetence; the now proven futility of the unjustified and immoral twenty years war in Afghanistan, and the arguments such futility raises about all armed conflict; the American response from President Joe Biden as a textbook illustration of what Noam Chomsky has described as “change of course” which reveals the true Imperialist aims behind the supposedly humanitarian propaganda upon which the war was ostensibly based back in 2001; and the interesting ethical questions raised by the Afghan government’s approach to the Taliban’s threat - surrendering quickly to avoid further unnecessary bloodshed despite doing so leading to probable violence and repression, especially against women - the issue I would like to consider as we return for the 2021/22 academic year is, surprisingly, given my usual vocal opposition to all things Tory, whether Dominic Raab actually did anything wrong by staying on holiday while Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.  Or, more broadly, whether holiday should mean holiday - a total cessation of work - even when your work brings with it important responsibilities.

Such inquiry is far from theoretical.  I am, after all, writing this post myself in the final weeks of my own summer holiday.  Although not technically “work” as I don’t earn a living (or even cover the costs) running this philosophy blog, as my day job is teaching philosophy, and I am writing today’s post - doing philosophy - two weeks before it goes online precisely because it will free up that first weekend in September so I can do the work necessary to be ready for returning students September 6th, it certainly feels like work.  I am not doing it for fun, but rather to fulfil an obligation and ensure I can carry out my teaching responsibilities when work does resume.  Furthermore, as a head of department, I have also had to be on call for any issues arising from the release of our students’ GCSE and A-level grades throughout the summer holiday.  Thankfully, there have been no issues requiring my attention, and a lot of work was done before the break to mitigate the need to get me involved were any of the grades appealed, but had the school called me up I would not have been surprised and, grudgingly, I would have helped out to do whatever was needed.  Usually, during a normal examination year, at least one day of the summer would be taken up with results analysis of some sort, and both GCSE and A-level results days necessarily pry me away from having fun.  At its most extreme I remember my wife and I (she’s a teacher too) up late in a San Diego hotel room and realising that, although the middle of the night to us there in America, it was morning in the UK, and the two of us using the hotel WiFi to see how our students did.  

And then there are the student emails.  Though I’m happy to ignore the ones that don’t require an urgent reply, sometimes time is of the essence, even if it is inconvenient.  I helped a student sort out their university options from Da Nang in Vietnam once, and this summer I have had several messages that required a response even if it did eat into my holiday time.

On that reading of things the argument seems fairly clear.  We take a break when we can, but responsibilities are responsibilities.  Just as a holiday might be cut short by a sudden family emergency because the responsibility of dealing with it trumps the desire to relax (and probably makes relaxation impossible), when your job entails some responsibilities for something it may mean that your time away from your work will always come with the caveat that the responsibilities remain.  Just as I can’t ignore the email that might affect my student’s university placement or might require an urgent safeguarding response, Dominic Raab can’t just sun himself on a beach in Greece while people’s lives are in danger in Afghanistan. 

But…

Ought that be the case?

I said earlier that I had worked hard before this summer to mitigate the need to contact me over the holiday on any grading appeals.  My school put a lot of effort into ensuring that every decision we had made was supported with good evidence, double and triple checked for accuracy, and that the evidence was available, organised and understood by someone whose job it actually was to deal with appeals during the summer.  It could well be that every single one of my students appealed their teacher assessed grades, but I wouldn’t need to find out until September because, if they did, the files were there to deal with the appeal throughly without me.  That was the whole point of me doing that work.  And to be honest, the students over the years who have got in touch about university stuff over the summer have been students I’ve chosen to help, but didn’t have to help.  Again, there are members of staff whose actual job it is to be available during the summer to deal with such things.  In each case I have helped, it has been a choice, not a responsibility.  Even in the safeguarding situation - once the email was read, I did have an obligation to take some action…but reading the email in the first place was my choice.  Some students names popping up in my inbox during the holiday would have been ignored, whereas that one was, by choice, read.

Even the exam results and result analysis was always more about curiosity and time-management than obligation.  In theory I could have always waited until September to find out how my students did, I just didn’t want to, so usually checked the exam board website the minute results went live.  And there was no expectation to analyse those results until mid-September at the earliest when I would meet with the Headteacher - I always just felt more interested in doing it when the information was fresh in my head.  By mid-September’s meeting I would no longer care enough (because exams remain a terrible indicator of anything important) and frankly just wanted the pointless task out of the way so I could focus in the new term on more interesting things like teaching.

Bluntly, after all the mitigating work done before the summer, if my school had contacted me during the summer regarding a student grade appeal, I would have been annoyed.  I might have even felt ok about ignoring the call for a while or putting things off for a few days, knowing that everything they needed was there and they just probably weren’t looking properly.

So are we being a little harsh on Dominic Raab?  After all, while we might not feel impressed at the thought of a junior under-secretary dealing with a major issue in lieu of the secretary proper, that doesn’t actually mean the issue isn’t being dealt with.  Our feelings about the situation might just be prejudiced by our perception of the job title.  If well briefed and prepared, the whole point of leaving someone to do your job in your absence is that they can do the job.  If I leave a babysitter with my kids while I go out for the night, while the babysitter is not the same as a parent, for those few hours they do the job fine.  I’m sure that if there were an appeal about my students’ grades I would be able to explain everything we did a little bit better than someone having to figure out my decisions from looking at my files…but once they figured it out the information they gave would be the same, and has been left in such a way that it can be fairly easily figured out.  Perhaps whoever was substituting for Raab in his absence did everything Raab would have done anyway?  Maybe they were even better than Raab at the job?  (Sometimes you hear a class cheer when it is announced that they have a substitute teacher instead of their regular class teacher, and many a talk show host’s career has been launched by their brief stint replacing a famous host on vacation).  The point is - if sufficient mitigations were in place and the responsibility could still be fulfilled without him, shouldn’t Raab, or anyone, be able to take a break without any obligation to work?   

The concept of a “work/life balance” is a fairly popular way of conceptualising the idea that our work should not be our entire lives.  The reason workers and unions fought for paid holiday time, and why time away from work forms one of the human rights listed on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration is that, as Marx most famously put it, most work we do is deeply alienating, not to mention physically and mentally exhausting.  To deny ourselves so fundamentally without reprieve is a recipe for ill health.  The lack of such time away from work is one of the central maladies of the economic inequalities that plague our society.  That a working class person, holding down three low-paid gig economy jobs, can’t afford to take time away from the everyday hustle required to pay the bills in the way the comfortably paid person on a salary can should be a cause for action, not merely resentment.  Holidays should be available to all if we want a healthy and happy society because it is simply mentally untenable to do nothing but work all day every day and part of the reason “work/life balance” joined our vocabulary was because of the increasing encroachment of work on our everyday lives.  Out-of-hours emails and apps which ping and notify us of things we can’t just ignore until tomorrow blurred the lines between being at home and being at work.  Even if the intention is that our colleague doesn’t do anything about the email until the morning, if seen, it’s already in their head and, if it’s something they need to sort out, is taking up space in their thoughts that distract from the necessary decompression of ending the working day.  We understand that such encroachment is a problem, and sympathise with the violation perceived when a boss emails at 10pm, long after you’ve left the office.  So what is different if the boss emails during the working day on a day you are not meant to be at work?  A day that you are on holiday?

If the answer for Raab is merely one of optics - that it doesn’t do to have the Foreign Secretary reclining on a sun lounger as the world burns - then perhaps the problem isn’t with him, but with us?  Given a different kind of social expectation, the story could have played out very differently: usually the person who would deal with events such as those occurring in Afghanistan would be the Foreign Secretary, but he was on his annual holiday when the takeover took place and so his designated deputy dealt with the issue instead.  No scandal, just unfortunate timing.  To that version we might even add: now that his holiday is over, the Foreign Secretary is well rested and refreshed and ready to deal with the ongoing fallout of the Taliban taking control in the region.  Thank god for the timing of his holiday - it would be terrible for an exhausted Foreign Secretary to be dealing with this crisis!

But…

Again, maybe it isn’t so simple?

The argument that all who work hard in a largely exploitative and alienating economy should be allowed a holiday without the intrusion of any work responsibilities (provided that appropriate provisions are in place for those responsibilities to continue to be carried out in their absence) is predicated on several assumptions.  We have already looked at the caveat of requiring competent replacement during our absence, a caveat that anyone working in healthcare during the covid-19 pandemic will be only too aware of as annual leave was cancelled around the world and an “all hands on deck” approach was taken to staffing overwhelmed emergency rooms.  Likewise, during the summer, as the impact of Brexit and covid-related self-isolation impacted food transporters and other long distance drivers, many found themselves filling in for absent colleagues and having to put other plans on the back-burner.  The babysitter should be able to act in loco parentis for an evening, but if the babysitter is sick then the evening’s plans will sadly need to be cancelled.  

But for Raab this caveat was covered.  Indeed, as with all government positions, the figurehead of Secretary of State, in practice, does very little: their staff do most of the heavy lifting.  Other assumptions in the argument, however, could be the cause of our sense of scandal.  We assume, for instance, that a holiday is needed because of prior hard work.  Perhaps our anger at Raab is because of a belief that, on the contrary, he has not worked very hard at all?  Or that, perhaps, this is not Raab’s only holiday that he has taken to relieve his burden?  If Raab holidays frequently, throughout the year, and is seen to be someone who does little of worth in his workplace, then maybe there is an argument that this holiday was unnecessary and the responsibilities of his job outweighed the need for a break from them?  Or if we feel that his prior work over-seeing Brexit was also of poor quality, then this latest instance of dropping the ball might just be one failure too many for us to take?

The problem with all of these approaches is that it turns our need to take a break - something we ourselves will be best placed to judge - into something we need to get the permission of others to take.  Why should only one break a year be taken if more might be needed?  Why should poor performance on a previous, different, job, determine people’s perceptions of performance on this one?  And how on earth do other people really get a sense of how hard we do or don’t work from their outsider perspective?  Work isn’t always obvious.  In fact, the most effortless seeming work takes a lot of work to seem so effortless.  

But fear not - there may be one thing we can base an argument against Raab on (because it would pain me to have to write a Raab apologist piece my first PU back of the new academic year).  

I said earlier how my own work encroachments during holiday came from personal choice.  I wanted to help my students, or know their grades, or plan them something amazing I don’t normally have the time to plan during term-time, and that desire drove me to give up some of my own precious free-time to do it.  Now, this self-motivated drive to work during your holiday is not always to be admired.  Recently, Sarah Jaffe’s excellent book, Work Won’t Love You Back makes a great case for how our passion for what we do is so often exploited by bosses to encourage hours of work without compensation.  Years before that, my own mother, Victoria McKee, wrote Working It Out: A Workaholics Survival Guide and didn’t realise as she wrote it that she was basically confessing in the pro-workaholic polemic to using her love of her work as a way of coping with an unsatisfactory personal life.  Our holidays growing up were always filled with her work, and usually paid for by it.  Mom was a freelance journalist, and it was very easy for her to find a few features she could write wherever we were that would pay off the cost of the holiday, funding the whole trip.  But it did mean she never really took a proper break until later in her life, and only then did she really find happiness and fulfilment.  We can definitely work too much because we love it.  However, provided we remain cognisant of that old idea of “work/life balance”, if we do love what we do, and if we care about our responsibilities, it is just natural that we may sometimes be drawn to work further on the thing we love even when we’re meant to be rejuvenating ourselves and disconnected from our jobs.  

The reason we see Dominic Raab’s continued vacation as problematic is because if he actually loved his work and cared about his responsibilities, he should have cared that there was an emergency unfolding in Afghanistan.  His decision to stay on holiday and ignore it tells us that he simply doesn’t care enough about his job and, perhaps, therefore, that he shouldn’t be doing it.  We would rather have a Foreign Secretary who cared enough to work during their holiday on this issue, than one who could stay on the sun-lounger as many of his citizens sought evacuation.  

It is not that someone has to work on their holiday or should be forced to work on their holiday, but that in certain jobs the right sort of person simply needs to care enough to choose to on those specific, limited and rare occasions when circumstances demand it.  

If a student got in touch with their teacher during the summer and urgently needed some help which may affect their entire future, the teacher is under no obligation from their job to help that student, or even check the email, but if a teacher is the sort of person who would ignore the email, or ignore the student, and isn’t moved to choose to help them, then perhaps teaching isn’t for them?

I guess what I’m saying is that absolutely we should all be free to switch off from work and completely disconnect ourselves from our jobs and take a holiday.  And we should be able to do so even if we have significant responsibilities, so long as appropriate provisions are in place for those responsibilities to continue to be carried out in our absence.  But there are some jobs where it helps to care enough about what we do, and where it seems almost strange not to be moved, in certain circumstances, to choose to do work, even on holiday, if doing so could help another human being in their time of need.  There is no obligation to do so, but if you find yourself disinterested in doing that work when it might be needed, then perhaps it’s time to find a different job?

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.