“The figures Watt quoted do not actually prove his own argument, but that did not stop the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Times & others… his mainstream media misinformation will be treated as fact by anyone who wants to blame workers for Britain’s economic woes.”
Steve Howell challenges BrewDog co-founder James Watt’s claim that people in Britain have a poor work ethic
BrewDog co-founder James Watt had such a bad reaction to his claim that people in Britain have a poor work ethic that he deleted his original post on Instagram and uploaded a new one bemoaning the “furious backlash” he received for “extolling the virtues of hard work”.
The outcry was hardly surprising. Twelve months ago, he gave all his beer company staff a 10% pay cut by ditching the independently-calculated ‘real living wage’ and putting them on the government’s minimum wage. Unite the Union’s hospitality group understandably responded this week to Watt’s work ethic comments by highlighting his fondness for sunning himself in the Maldives.
But let’s set aside Watt’s hypocrisy for a moment, and examine his claim that a poor work ethic is to blame for Britain’s low productivity. To back this up, he cited, firstly, a 2023 Policy Institute survey of attitudes to work in a mixed bag of 24 countries and, secondly, Office of National Statistics figures on productivity in the G7 group of advanced economies.
Watt based the work ethic part of his claim on the Policy Institute survey table below showing that the UK came bottom for the percentage of people who said work was important to them.
The most obvious thing about these results is that the great majority of people in all 24 countries see work as either very or rather important. But look closely: the other striking thing is that richer countries generally tend to have proportionately more people who do not see work as important. In fact, of the nine countries in the world’s top ten for GDP (India not being included in the survey), seven are in the bottom half of this ‘work ethic’ table.
On the face of it, this survey suggests that if a lower proportion of a country’s population sees work as important it is more likely to be rich. Put another way, Watt has directed us to data that could be taken as evidence of the opposite of what he’s been saying.
Obviously, however, there are other factors at work. It could be, for instance, that rich countries have such an affluent middle class that many of them can afford to say that work is not so important. But even in those rich countries, most people (73% in the UK, 80% in the US) still have the same view of work as almost everybody in the Philippines and Indonesia.
Watt compounded his first misuse of data when he then quoted the ONS data below on productivity to link France having a larger proportion of people saying work was important to them with French workers having a higher output per hour than workers in the UK.
This seemingly proves his point until, for example, you see that Italy has even lower productivity than the UK yet is higher than France in the table above for the proportion of people seeing work as important, or until you notice that the US has high productivity but is near the bottom of the work-is-important league table. There is, in fact, no correlation between a high proportion of people saying work is important and high productivity.
So, the figures Watt quoted do not actually prove his own argument, but that did not stop the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Times and others quoting them without context or caveat. And, soon, this mainstream media misinformation will be treated as fact by anyone who wants to blame workers for Britain’s economic woes.
Ironically, Watt inadvertently got nearer the heart of the question in a separate post last week on Twitter when he said: “If you want to drive growth, you should ask the people who actually create it. Like entrepreneurs, founders and business owners.”
Think about that. One minute he’s blaming workers for Britain’s lack of growth, the next he’s claiming it’s bosses like him who create it. This is trying to have it both ways: if the bosses are going to take the credit for growth, surely, they should take the blame when there isn’t any?
So, which is true? Clearly, in general, it is workers who create the wealth. They go out every day to provide the services we use and manufacture the goods we consume. Watt, on the other hand, did not make the beer BrewDog sold.
But workers need the means – the tools and the technology – to create wealth. For that, in a capitalist society, they are reliant mainly on their bosses, whose performance in Britain has long been lamentable. As the graph below shows (and it really is the last one), British capitalists have a terrible record when it comes to investing in growth.
If you compare the third table with the second one, there is a clear correlation between the high levels of investment relative to GDP of the USA, Germany and France and their high levels of productivity. But here’s the statistical health warning: the economists who produced this graph have omitted the other three G7 countries. Of them, Italy – like the UK – has both low investment and productivity, while Canada and Japan have high investment but low productivity.
So where does that leave us? Firstly, there is absolutely no correlation between the two sets of data – attitudes to work and productivity – from which Watt quoted selectively. Secondly, there is a correlation between investment and productivity in five of the G7 countries.
In the article from which I’ve taken the investment graph, University professors Jagjit Chadha and Tony Venables argue that the UK’s “chronic” lack of investment since the 1990s is the main issue. They say:
“Investment lies at the root of economic growth and prosperity. When an economy channels funds into capital, it creates the building blocks for a higher level of productivity in the future (…) The UK economy has suffered from chronic levels of underinvestment compared with those economies that have delivered larger improvements in living standards over the past 25 years – such as France and Germany.”
Given Starmer and Reeves are floundering on their promise to deliver growth, they would do better to listen to evidence-based advice than rush up the cul-de-sac suggested by Watt. The media, meanwhile, might want to ask Watt and other British capitalists why they spend less of their profits than their G7 peers on investment and more of it on dividends and buybacks for their own consumption. It is their attitude to work that should be in the headlines.
- Steve Howell is a journalist, author and former political adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. You can follow him on Twitter/X and subscribe to his Substack The Rest is Bullshit for regular updates and analysis.
- This article was originally published in The Rest is Bullshit on 16th January 2025.
