BrewDog co-founder James Watt has said the UK is ‘one of the world’s least work-oriented countries’, in defence of his criticism of people’s obsession with work-life balance.
Last week, Watt, who stood down as chief executive of the Punk IPA brewer in May 2024, said in a video on social media that he thinks “the whole concept of work-life balance was invented by people who hate the work that they do. So if you love what you do, you don’t need work-life balance, you need work-life integration”.
He appeared alongside his fiancée, Georgia Toffolo, a social media influencer who appeared on the reality show, Made in Chelsea.
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Toffolo, who runs a raw dog food company, said the couple were aligned on “a lack of work-life balance, but in a really beautiful way”.
She added: “We do things that we find incredibly fulfilling and we also have a supportive other-half that loves that high-octane obsession with what we do.”
This week, Watt said that people are saying they “would like to murder him with a hammer”.
He said the video went down well on LinkedIn last week, with almost 2 million views and the vast majority of the responses being overwhelmingly positive. But on other platforms where it went viral, including Instagram, the amount of abuse he received was “off the charts”.
In a post on LinkedIn yesterday, he said he didn’t think the video was controversial at all. “What does it say about our society when a post extolling the virtues of hard work gets met with this kind of furious backlash?” he asked.
“As a nation, we love to joke about the French being lazy, but the reality is that our output per hour is 13% lower than theirs.
“And I’ve heard countless international leaders say that the UK’s work ethic just doesn’t stack up against other nations, especially the US.”
He cited a 2023 study by King’s College London’s Policy Institute found that Britain is among the least work-oriented countries in the world of all 24 nations that featured in the research.
He also referred to a 2024 paper by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, “Why isn’t Britain getting richer anymore?” which analysed the UK’s decline in productivity.
Watt added: “Now, this isn’t to say nobody in the UK works hard—I know that millions of you do and are relentlessly grafting every day. And it’s also not to say that people have to adopt my personal philosophy on work-life integration.
“But since when did it become mainstream to hurl vile abuse at somebody sharing their approach to hard work? And if we can’t have a civil conversation about work ethic without descending into personal attacks, how can we expect to compete on the global stage?”
A year ago, BrewDog faced a backlash after the company said it would no longer pay its staff the voluntary “real” Living Wage, and would only pay the statutory national minimum wage. This followed accusations in 2021 of a “toxic culture” at the company.
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