/spiritz/media/media_files/2025/01/21/x8Fvm64gDnYHCDXcm9oI.png)
BrewDog co-founder James Watt has called the UK “one of the world’s least work-oriented countries.” This statement comes 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 that “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.”
In the video, he was accompanied by his fiancée, Georgia Toffolo, a social media influencer who appeared on the reality show Made in Chelsea. Toffolo, who runs a raw dog food company, commented that the couple was aligned on “a lack of work-life balance, but in a really beautiful way.” She elaborated, “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.”
While the video went down well on LinkedIn last week, with the vast majority of the responses being overwhelmingly positive, on other platforms, the amount of abuse he received was “off the charts,” with netizens even commenting they “would like to murder him with a hammer.”
Watt, this week, put up another post on LinkedIn maintaining that he didn’t think his video was controversial. “What does it say about our society when a post extolling the virtues of hard work gets met with this kind of furious backlash? As a nation, we love to joke about the French being lazy, but the reality is that our output per hour is 13 percent 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 said in the post.
He cited a 2023 study by King’s College London’s Policy Institute that found Britain 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. “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?” the post further read.
This isn’t the first time the company has made controversial headlines. A year ago, BrewDog faced similar 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 the company’s “toxic culture.”