Cut the Working Week to Share Out the Work

Our economic system urging both parents to work causes immense damage to children. 20 per cent of young people aged 18-24 are unemployed in the UK, a far higher rate than for the rest of the age range (16-64), which was 8.4 per cent. In the US, the unemployment rate of 16-24 year olds was a staggering 53.4 per cent! Yet the government continually increases the retirement age forcing the elderly to work in the expectation that they will die without ever collecting a state pension, while the youth have zero prospects. Does this make any social sense? It will leave a generation of young people wasting their youths struggling to find work, while the elderly have to work to avoid pension poverty.

It is all part of the One Percent's strategy of bringing on a Third World wage economy by driving people to accept low pay or face losing their jobs in factory closures and switches to the Third World. This was proved by a report from the UK Labour Force Survey which found 5.3 million workers put in an average of 7.2 hours of unpaid overtime a week last year, worth around £5,300 a year per person.

What is needed for social and economic fairness is, first, for the rich One Percent to cough up more of their accummulated wealth—in short, for them to pay their whack to alleviate a crisis brought on by their own greed. Then, second, for everyone else the available work should be shared fairly. A shorter flexible working week would provide more free time, allowing parents to spend more of it with their children, and teenagers more chance to get work skills. 20 hours a week seems a sensible sort of level, but the whole idea flies in the face of orthodoxy. If wage rates remained the same, many people could not afford it, so other changes would have to be made. Readjustments have to be made—increasing pensions and reducing the retirement age, allowing jobs to be released for the young to get essential work experience.

One idea touted for long is that everyone should get a state allowance—rather like the UK Child Allowance—replacing multiple benefits, then those who would rather not work, the elderly, the infirm, yes and those content not to work but live on a low income but be able to develop their personal skills, be educated better, become artists, musicians, develop their own businesses They need not be employed, leaving them free to do as they wished, while those motivated by remuneration could fulfil their own ambitions. In this increasingly technological world, we all, governments too, have to get used to the fact that when robots are doing the work, employment will be at a premium, but businesses and the economy still requires people, employed or not, to be able to spend. Robots do not. Without spending power no one can buy, and no one can make money serving robots!

Managers Make Staff Work Harder with Less Reward

Unless you are a banker, one might add!

King’s College London and law firm Speechly Bircham have surveyed 550 senior personnel of firms, with a combined workforce size of more than two million, to discover the state of human resources in the UK. It highlights the problems faced by employers, as they struggle to find ways to address gender pay inequality. They are unprepared for forthcoming changes to the retirement age, and are facing greater workplace unrest as austerity measures, longer working hours, stress and a skills shortage take their toll on the workforce. Richard Martin, Partner and Head of Employment at Speechly Bircham, said:

This sends a clear warning to employers. The combination of increased workplace conflict, longer hours and rising stress levels is a potent cocktail that could lead to a significant rise in tribunals and industrial action, if not properly addressed.

Despite our last survey showing that UK employers regarded employee engagement as their number one priority, reported levels of employee engagement have fallen. Skills shortages are worsening and the rigid cap on immigration means that employers are left with few tools with which to plug the skills gap. Only a small percentage of businesses have any measures in place to deal with pay inequality despite the Equality Act looming.

Perhaps most worrying is what can be read between the lines of the survey about employee wellbeing and engagement. At a time when employers should be focusing on re-engaging with staff and repairing the damage caused by the recession, staff are instead being made to work ever harder, without reward. An economic recovery built on working reduced workforces harder and harder is clearly not sustainable and could lead to major problems for employers—particularly in the public sector.

The gist of the report is:

• More than 50 per cent of firms reported an increase in working hours, while pay rises and bonuses are being withheld. Longer working hours correlated with increased absence, sickness, stress-related problems, and more grievances. Increasing working hours causes workplace unrest and higher staff turnover.
  
• 42 per cent of respondents employing non-EU workers reported that the immigration cap is affecting their business adversely. One in three businesses have an bigger skills shortage compared to last year when it was 22 per cent. Where there are skills shortages, staff turnover is increasing and more working days are being lost through sickness and absence.
• Deteriorating employee relations, high stress levels and workforce disputes appear endemic, particularly in relation to bullying, harassment and relationships with line managers.
• 46 per cent of respondents said that stress-related problems have gone up, while 30 per cent had seen grievances increase over the past year. Organisations that noted higher levels of stress showed a direct correlation with higher levels of sickness absence.
• In 2011, 40 per cent of respondents expect worse employee relations, 42 per cent expect higher stress levels and 29 per cent see rises in employee grievances.
• Most firms say they have equality of pay but admit they do not have any ways to check it. 84 per cent claimed no material gender pay inequality, but only a third had any means to monitor gender equality of pay.
• Most businesses are unprepared for the scrapping by law of the compulsory retirement age from April 2011. 78 per cent of respondents still had a retirement age of 65, and another 5 per cent had some other compulsory retirement age. Only a third of organisations thought it was an issue.
• Downsizing of workforces remains largely unchanged and flexible working continues to increase. 70 per cent were still having to make compulsory redundancies in 2010, hardly any improvement on the 72 per cent who downsized in 2009. Flexible working continues to be a popular workforce strategy in difficult conditions, with 36 per cent of respondents identifying an increase in the use of these arrangements.
• Macho management remains the fashion, even though poor relations with staff are the biggest source of grievance, formal grievances arising from employee relations with senior/line managers for 40 per cent of firms.
• Though job design, employee participation and procedural fairness have more impact on employment than supposedly more effective leadership and management, macho management continues to retain its appeal among management.

Stuart Woollard, Managing Director of King’s HRM Learning Board and co-author of the survey report, says the survey…

…should worry all business leaders and HR directors as the results question the sustainability of current strategies to keep workforces performing at the required level. Organisations must carefully consider the likelihood of erosion in employee productivity, work quality and performance as a consequence of lean workforces and additional working hours. With an apparent leadership/management disconnect with staff, firms may also not realise the nature and extent of the problems ahead.

Organisations that are able to understand and alleviate employee anxieties and provide effective ways to counter the impact of high pressure work environments will ensure that they retain more engaged and productive workers, making a route through the economic uncertainties far clearer. There is evidence in our survey that those firms who are able to implement effective HR strategies that drive higher levels of engagement may find that these initiatives will differentiate them in terms of organisational performance.

Anyone looking on with a critical eye cannot fail to wonder why bankers need huge bonuses to motivate them to work, but people doing something useful, making things we need in a factory, or distributing them, whether laborers or skilled technicians, need to be threatened and bullied according to the continuing fashion for macho management. The macho managers haven’t the wit to realize that cutting and cutting staff levels, and forcing people to do more for less, while refusing to train the staff in the skills they, and we, need is destroying our potential for surviving. Moreover, the more people have to work and the less they have to spend and the less leisure time in which to spend it, the less will be bought. It forces us into depression. In short, our governments and the management they represent could hardly do worse.

Promises, Promises: Return to Principle Labour!

Industry and its employees are paying the price for a crisis brought on by the bankers. A loan to save 900 skilled workers from the dole cost a mere £4m, a single banker’s bonus! If taxpayers’ money can be used to bail out the banks, it should also be available to help vital industries. Yet the government persists in enforcing its old dogmas, as if nothing had changed.

Why try to force people who are ill or disabled or workshy and old people over 65 to work when there is not enough work for those who are able bodied and want to work? If there is not enough work for everyone, why not reduce the working week? If there is not enough work to go round, why did Labour help fix 48 hours as the minimum working week by refusing any amendment to the Brussels Working Time Directive. In doing this, the Labour government ignored its own party conference and the policy of both the trades unions democratically and publicly agreed through the TUC. It also defied the stance of most Labour and Socialist members of the European Parliament in an earlier vote in Strasbourg.

The Labour Party was founded by the trades union movement, and reduction in working hours was the aim of the first trades unions. Long hours and abject working conditions meant an early death for working people, including children. Strike pay was the only benefit that the first union offered, and reducing the hours of labour was, “the whole aim and intention of the union”, Will Thorne said. The eight hour day became a basic principle of trades unionism. The primary cause of trades unionism was not higher wages but shorter hours.

The first victory of British trades unionism was at the Beckton Gas Works in London’s East End—the replacement of a twelve hour day by eight hour shifts with no loss of pay. Since then the struggle to humanize work and change the economy has been long and arduous. For a century, the trades unions won significant reductions in hours through their struggles and sacrifices. By the seventies, the demand was for a 35 hour week. But the subsequent victory of the Thatcherite Tories and Blair’s Thatcherite New Labour—just when people thought they were voting for the rejection of Thatcherism—paved the way for the working week to rise from the 1980s onwards.

If the first British trades unionists knew shorter hours helped in the struggle against unemployment, the sons and daughters of clergymen, pseudes and shopkeepers constituting Blair’s and now Brown’s New Labour party simply do not get it still. Its decision to stick with a 48 hour week is a goad to all those who think the UK Labour government’s neoconservative, nineteenth century policies need to be fought with a campaign to reduce working hours in the face of rising unemployment.

Their slogan should be, “Shorter hours for better life”. Long hours preclude a good quality of life, cut down family time, erode away leisure time. And long hours of work are a health and safety issue. Health and safety at work should not be left up to arbitrary local negotiations between trade unions and employers, any more than burglary should be left up to the burgled and the burglar, to use Richard Leonard’s words. Both are matters of public interest, and so are a government responsibility in a civilized democratic society.

Paying workers dole money because they have no work at all for months or years makes no sense. What is required are loans for businesses that cut the working hours of their staff to avoid short time working, or going to the wall. Industry needs money, so credit from the banks has to be forced, if banks are determined to stay divorced from their prime purpose. Their prime purpose is not to devise pyramid selling schemes that allow dealers to get rich quick through the bonuses they pay each other. It is to lend deposited money at modest interest to entrepreneurs.

The nation has put cash into the banks to save them from their own folly. It is time to see it coming out again, in loans to industry. Workers are footing the bill for bankers’ blunders, but the money extracted from ordinary people’s pay should not be a long time commitment. The banks must be made to pay back what they have so far been given apparently unconditionally. They can only do it without stimulating an identical crisis, by returning to prudent business methods.

Too many Labour ministers have no knowledge or interest in the history of the party they represent. They are ignorant of any of the principles that motivated the party, and have opted instead for self gratification, and ingratiating themselves with US plutocrats and Russian oligarchs. They have forgotten that they were elected to serve working people, those who create wealth, not those who own the means of doing it, and certainly not themselves for personal gain.

Labour must return to principles, but since it lost all pretence of democracy in the Blair years, it has to be doggedly pushed and even threatened by the unions, which now represent not only blue collar workers but large numbers of middle class white collar workers, technicians, teachers and civil servants. This great trades union Leviathan has to get rolling again. It means members have to snap out of the lethargy induced by the borrowing boom of the Blair years. It was not a golden age but a tinsel age. Like Blair himself, it was all false.