Knowledge workers make a living by dealing purely with ideas and information.

The term has only been around for 50 years. Writer and management expert Peter Drucker first used knowledge worker in his 1959 book "Landmarks of Tomorrow".

Drucker modestly said he was only the second person to use knowledge worker. He said it came from Fritz Machlup a Princeton economist.

Either way, Drucker popularised knowledge worker spending years expanding on the original idea and its wider implications.

Today's knowledge worker

Knowledge worker is widely used today. While people generally understand the term's meaning, there is still misunderstanding about its exact definition — even among knowledge workers.

Some think knowledge worker only applies to people working in information technology or elsewhere in industry using tools created by IT workers.

IT workers are only a subset. Anyone who makes a living out of creating, handling or spreading knowledge is a knowledge worker.

This covers a wide range. Teachers, trainers, university professors and other academics are clearly included. Writers, journalists, authors, editors and public relations or communications people are all knowledge workers. Lawyers, scientists and management consultants can also all be described as knowledge workers.

Educated workers

One key difference between knowledge workers and other white-collar workers is the level of education and training. Some knowledge workers don't have a formal tertiary education or high-level training – but they are a minority.

As a rule, knowledge workers have at least a university undergraduate degree, but that's not always the case.

Older knowledge workers may have fewer formal qualifications. That's partly because higher education was less available when they started out — and, anyway, university isn't the only path to knowledge.

Another reason is practical experience counts for a lot. But the key here is knowledge workers
each have a personal knowledge store they apply in their work.

Knowledge workers are well paid compared to other groups of workers – some are extremely well paid. Some knowledge workers join unions, but they are not usually organised in that sense.

This can lead to forms of genteel exploitation: few knowledge workers get paid overtime yet most are expected to voluntarily work for considerably more than the basic 40 hours a week.

Knowledge skills are mobile

Knowledge workers are more mobile than industrial workers. They can take their expertise elsewhere at the drop of a hat. This happens all the time.

An employer who abuses knowledge workers' professionalism is likely to see their most important assets walk out of the door one evening and never return. This applies as much today as it did when there were more jobs around.

Few governments have come to terms with the implications of having a highly mobile, highly educated, knowledge workforce. Just as knowledge workers can quickly find a new employer if necessary, most can move freely between countries. Any nation that doesn't look after knowledge workers can expect – over the long-term – to lose them.

This applies in New Zealand, which operates a progressive income tax system that, at times, appears deliberately designed to alienate knowledge workers. To understand this, compared the marginal and absolute rates of income tax paid by most New Zealand knowledge workers, they are noticeably higher than in most competing nations.

When I wrote the first draft of this post (it originally appeared in a different format in 2001) the same could be said of Australia. Since then Australia has moved to correct its tax system and is attracting 40,000 New Zealanders each year, most of those emigrants could be classed as knowledge workers.

In the 1960s there was a lot of talk about a 'brain drain'. If anything the flow of knowledge workers migrating to more benign economies is accelerating.

Drucker distinguishes between various classes of knowledge worker.

High-knowledge workers include professional groups such as doctors and teachers deal mainly in the realm of the mind while the knowledge technologists work with their hands and brains in the IT industry, medicine and other areas. Although both categories of knowledge worker are growing, the bulk of growth comes from this second group.

Many of us work in the part of the economy where there are no jobs, just clients and projects. We market our services, try to find interesting opportunities and finance our larger interests with the revenue. We’ve been out of the hierarchy for so long that it’s become unappealing.

John Sumser writing on the joys of being unemployable explains life as a modern knowledge worker.

Sumser say knowledge work rarely aligns with jobs and companies haven't yet got their heads around the idea of employing people for projects.

We're moving to a world where people work on a series of short, independent gigs.

The New Zealand Herald reports workers who stay after a round of redundancies suffer as much stress and anxiety as the people who lose their jobs.

I doubt this is always true.

Redundancy is never fun. Having your livelihood snatched away, facing a mortgagee sale and wondering where the next meal is coming from is about as stressful as things get.

As someone who has been in both positions, I can speak from experience on this.

Nevertheless, the Auckland-based researchers do have a point. Things are extremely stressful for people left when companies trim their staff numbers. Not least because they'll have to cope with extra work. And, as the story points out, they'll be wondering who is next for the chop.

Staff who stay suffer from stress – National – NZ Herald News.

The ultimate insult. You're sacked, but your boss asks you to train your cheaper replacement.

Terri Dreismeier writes about this in Omaha Workplace Examiner: Oh, by the way, would you train your replacement?

Dreismeier writes;

In 2004, computer programmers working at Boeing were downsized and replaced with foreign workers. Employees were told that “offshoring” was necessary to reduce costs and streamline services. But in a painful twist, several of these programmers were asked to train the replacements. Managers basically requested these dedicated employees to dig their own unemployment graves

What would you do? And if you were a manager would you have the nerve to ask your employees the same question?

Next time you drive through the CBD late at night, notice how many offices are brightly lit.

• A handful might house call centres, newspapers or IT operations; businesses that routinely work night shifts.
• Some might be lit for cleaners.
• Others are empty but lit. There are companies who light their offices at night as a gesture of solidarity with global warming deniers.

Yet even from a moving car you may spot a surprisingly large number of people who are still working.

The last time I drove through Auckland I noticed workers and this was at around midnight. I know from experience that the situation is similar in cities around the world.

People work longer hours

Of course, long hours are not unusual for knowledge workers. They are common among younger people in their late teens and early twenties. But it happens right across all age ranges.

Surveys show that the average working week for a full-time employee in New Zealand is now around 44 hours. Twenty percent of employees regularly work more than 50 hours a week.

New Zealand isn’t different from other countries.

Given a sizeable section of the workforce still works shifts or fixed hours and that there are still many clock-watchers who race out of the door at 5.00pm or 5.30pm this means that for committed workers the average working week is considerably longer.

At a guess I’d say readers of this column are more likely to average 48 hours a week.

But that’s only an average. Some work more.

Work marathons are not a problem

I’m certain we’ve all pulled the occasional marathon work session or two. Over short periods these are not a problem.

However, over the long-term, if excessive work hours are not strictly controlled they can lead to serious health issues and other major problems in the workplace. Not to mention grave conflicts with those increasingly rare parts of our lives that happen away from work.

Things aren’t as bad today as they were at the height of the dotcom frenzy, but there are still plenty of people who habitually work 12 to 16 hour days. And many people in cities like Sydney or London  have long commutes before and after work.

Most people who work long hours do so because of real work pressures – for example you may struggle to meet deadlines. This is fine if it happens rarely. Frequent long hours are usually a sign that something is badly wrong at your workplace. It shows your employer is not playing fair with staffing levels. And that means you are exploited.

Twisted workplace culture

We’ve all seen companies that demand or extract long hours because of a twisted culture. I’ve certainly worked in places where there has been some complicated game of chicken going on, with employees competing to show management who is the most loyal and dedicated worker by staying in the office later and later.

Of course these employers might argue that there’s a severe skills shortage so existing workers need to do more. There’s an element of truth. However, abusing something rare and precious is a perverse way to run a business.

No doubt some employees feel pressure to work long hours to save their jobs in a recession. And yes, there are employers only too willing to exploit this fear.

The knowledge worker credo says that you don’t have to put up with that kind of nonsense. Even in a global recession. In the good times there’s always another employer who needs your skills. So if your employer pressures you to regularly work excessive hours – and in my opinion excessive hours is more than 50 hours a week sustained over a long period – then you have every reason to walk. Even in the bad times you can  find a better deal.

The last time I touched on this issue I received angry and abusive email from readers who think looking after oneself is strictly for sissies. So we’ll all doff our caps in reverence to the sheer manliness of the hardened macho types and remind ourselves of two truths about long hours.

• First, sustained long hours are not healthy. Period. If you continue to work around the clock you will damage your body. You almost certainly won’t be getting enough exercise. There’s a good chance you won’t be eating properly. And you probably won’t be giving yourself enough downtime.
• Second, there’s a lot of scientific evidence that long working hours are not productive.

We’ll look closer at both these issues another time. For now, ask yourself if all the hours you work are necessary. Even if the only pressures are self-imposed, you might want to evaluate your relationship with your employer in terms of the hours you spend working.

Brian Glick says one-third of British IT professionals work 34 days unpaid every year. I expect that's standard around the English-speaking world, maybe the entire world.

If we accept 40 hours a week for 47 weeks of the year  is the standard, then IT workers do around 15 percent more work than their employers pay for.

Or, put another way, they give employers a 15 percent discount on their salary.

Glick worries about the health implications of this extra workload. Many of those extra hours will be worked late into the night or even overnight. People may turn in seven-day weeks for weeks on end and so on.

I have four more concerns.

• First, the extra hours may score workers brownie points with their managers, but they may not be productive. There's lots of evidence that people's productivity drops after so many hours on the job (different sources quote different numbers here) but take it as read that you won't get as much done in your ninth hour of working as in your first hour.
• Second, tired workers are more likely to make serious mistakes than refreshed ones. Maybe this isn't so serious for IT workers as for say, lorry or truck drivers, but trashing databases and screwing systems is costly.
• Third, by implication unemployed workers, probably friends and former colleagues of those in employment,  would only be too willing to take on some of the burden.
• Fourth, I once had a job in a company where there was almost a competition among staff to see who could work latest each night. It had low morale and a high staff turnover. That was far more costly to the company's owners than stumping up for a few extra employees or contractors.

Previous generations fought long and hard to establish the 40-hour week and annual leave. It would be a great mistake if today's workers threw all that away.

IT workers giving away free time – vnunet.com.

As someone who started their working life in the Northern Hemisphere, one of the hardest adjustments to make is that because Christmas coincides with summer, antipodeans take all their holiday in one big helping.

Or at least they did until the late 1980s.

When I first arrived in Wellington, New Zealand I found the summer break hard to cope with. In those days the city  closed down between Christmas Eve and Waitangi day (February 6).

For six weeks it was nigh on impossible to buy a cooked lunch, get one’s teeth fixed or car repaired.

Trains and buses ran reduced timetables. It was even harder to get anyone to make a business decision. Woe betide anyone who didn’t get their budgets signed-off before December 24^th.

Australia less sleepy

Australia, at least Sydney and Melbourne, weren’t so comprehensively sleepy over summer, but you’d still have difficulty getting in touch with people between Christmas and Australia day. I suspect regional Australia was as shuttered as New Zealand.

Although the politicians somehow still manage to score extended summer breaks, these days Wellington and Auckland start buzzing (albeit at a slightly reduced pace) a few days after Christmas while Sydney and Melbourne barely pause at all. I know from experience bosses pressure many employees, particularly in retail jobs, to work longer hours at this time of year.

Close down

Yet even now many companies and departments close down for two or three weeks. Some newspapers stop publishing, TV channels run reduced schedules and some businesses offer reduced services. It is not the four, five or six-week shut down enjoyed by earlier generations, but there’s a distinct feeling the city is depopulated and the resorts are crowded.

Most Northern Europeans take no more than a week or so around Christmas.

In England, people generally work until December 24^th and are back at their desks by January 2^nd, or maybe the next day if the public holiday falls on a weekend. Scots get an extra day’s holiday for Hogmanay.

Public holidays

Poms typically get a couple of weeks off in their summer along with a healthy swag of public holidays (Bank Holidays) throughout the year. Generally they have enough leave days left over to take a third small break. The French still take a month in mid-year. During August Parisians leave town en masse as invading hoards of plaid-clad American tourists invade.

The British work roughly as many days as Australians and, thanks to recent law changes, New Zealanders. Other Northern European countries work fewer days. Interestingly these other nations tend to have higher worker productivity rates.

In my view, the antipodean habit of having one long annual break over Christmas is not as useful or as productive as the Northern European tradition of taking a short mid-Winter Christmas break and a relatively short summer break. I also suspect the one long Christmas break is easier lost to a demanding job than the two breaks enjoyed by Europeans.

Speaking from a personal, and not a researched point of view, the good thing about Europe’s two or three break system is it enables one to keep fresher. I’ve found that working 11 months then resting for one month is harder than working a few months en bloc and taking shorter breaks. This is particularly true if your work involves creative thinking – and let’s face it, most Knowledge Workers need to think creatively.

A mid-winter holiday

I’d like to see New Zealand embrace Matariki, the Maori winter solstice, as a short mid-winter holiday. It would also be a good excuse for an extra public holiday – New Zealanders go for too long without a break at that time of year. I’m sure Australia can think up a suitable excuse for a similar festival.

With all the talk of 24 times 7 operations, Knowledge Workers are finding it increasingly hard to take any leave at all. That’s  not wise. It hurts your effectiveness. You might not get away from your desk for a whole fortnight at once, but you should try to escape for two or three weeklong breaks during the course of the year. You’ll be more productive for it.

Twenty years ago, knowledge workers and other professionals automatically dressed for success every working day.

Men would mainly wear suits or something similar. Male colours would be either dark blue or sit somewhere on a monochrome scale between light grey and charcoal. Their black shoes would shine and their striped or plain shirts would be crisply ironed. A tie was essential.

Women could use more imagination and colour, but until the mid-1990s formal office clothes were still normal in New Zealand and Australia. This is no longer the case in either country. Things are similar in the UK, Europe and North America.

You still see pockets of smartness. However, these days formal office clothes are the exception. Even companies like IBM, which gained the nickname Big Blue from the colour of its salesmen’s suits, allow non-customer facing staff to dress down some of the time.

Stand in Sydney’s Australia Square or on Auckland's Queen Street at lunchtime and you’ll even see a few suits walk by, but at least half the crowd will be in ‘smart casual’ gear and there will be a handful who are downright scruffy.

For every Italian suit there’ll be half a dozen woolen jumper and for every Chanel two-piece you’ll see a dozen or more items from this season’s Country Road catalogue.

You don’t need to look much harder to spot T-shirts or company logo polo shirt – many sporting a web address. You’ll see running shoes and casual shoes, but not many of the smartly shined variety. Things have changed.

There are theories about what the shift to casual dressing means. Perhaps the clearest message is for investors to start shorting stocks in tie manufacturers.

One conservative school of thought says it’s all about the decline of western civilisation – it’s certainly true that the new dress code applies to most first world economies. If this is true, we’ll eventually we’ll all end up half naked during the summer and rugged up in daggy looking track pants and polar fleece through the winter. There are knowledge workers in Australia and New Zealand already following this more informal dress code.

Another theory says casual dressing has become popular because people need comfortable clothes when they work long and anti-social hours. There’s something in this. Wearing a tight collar for 14 hours is no joke.

A third view is that talent is so hard to recruit these days  companies no longer dare impose dress codes on staff because they fear they won’t be able to replace people. In an article printed some years ago, the Economist came to the same conclusion, but first it put forward an interesting alternative theory.

Although the story was specifically about Wall Street in New York, it observed the same phenomena. According to the Economist, in the absence of developing their own Internet strategies old economy companies have decided that allowing staff to look like workers for new economy firms is the next best thing. “Maybe,” says the story, “creativity is aided by chinos and an open collar”.

The new casual look of the corporate workforce is only one visible symptom of the recent tectonic shift in power. It underlines the fact those of us in the knowledge economy can, up to a point, dictate the terms of our employment.

If your current employer isn’t willing to put up with Mambo shorts and cargo pants then another one down the road will – and will probably pay you more into the bargain.