Oisin Duncan, North West Socialist Party
The effects of austerity have forced many workers into dealing with bigger workloads for real-terms pay cuts. Teachers in secondary schools are working 54 hours a week on average, and in the NHS, junior doctors and nurses are asked to pick up the slack as sub-safe staffing levels pile more work on the remaining workforce.
No wonder these workers have been on strike. Imagine working essentially an extra day every week, only to be told by your employer that your pay will not rise with the highest rate of inflation in decades.
Public sector workers’ mental and physical health is being sacrificed as they are expected to make up for thousands of vacancies. The huge impact of these workers’ strike action is a very real demonstration of the value of the work they do.
Workers in Britain worked an average of 42 hours a week in 2018, two hours more than the European average, according to figures from the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Meanwhile millions live with the insecurity of low- or zero-hour contracts. A quarter of the UK workforce currently works part-time.
For many workers such as teachers, overtime is unpaid. For others, it is contractual or so-called voluntary. Many workers will have started a job and immediately been presented with a piece of paper to sign, opting out of the working time directive’s 48-hour weekly limit. Those on insecure limited-hours contracts face the constant threat of hours being cut.
A 32-hour working week without loss of pay, and with flexibility on our terms not the bosses, has the potential to transform workers’ lives. Particularly those struggling to fulfil caring roles on top of full-time work, such as parents. A full-time nursery place for a child under two costs on average £14,836 a year.
Already many parents are forced to work shorter hours with less pay, or leave work altogether unable to afford childcare. In many cases navigating a delicate balance of childcare availability and cost, the cost of commuting, and eligibility for help with benefits.
A number of studies have been conducted in various countries looking at the possible effects of implementing a shorter working week without loss of pay. A recent pilot in the UK coordinated by Autonomy, in which workers remained on full pay with a “meaningful reduction in work time”, found that staff reported feeling happier and closer to their loved ones.
Of the 61 companies that participated, together employing around 2,900 workers, 56 are continuing and 18 plan to make the change permanent. The largest firm surveyed had around 1,000 staff but they were an outlier, two-thirds of the firms in the study employed fewer than 25 people. In Britain, the vast majority of workers are employed by companies with more than 100 employees.
The study’s authors appear to attempt to make the case to employers that it is in their interests to adopt a four-day week. Bluntly, it’s not. And the capitalists know it.
Their profits are maximised by extracting as much labour time as possible from the worker, while giving up as little of the value they produce in wages.
Just as workers are needing to struggle for pay rises, as they are in the strike wave, a struggle needs to be waged for reduced working hours too.
If the capitalists had it their way, workers would work for longer, for less pay. In fact, this is the trend in the teaching profession and others.
Under capitalism, individual bosses strive to increase their own profits, but also compete with each other for a share of the market. Any capitalist convinced by the report’s arguments about “improvements in hiring, absenteeism and resignations”, that made the change to a four-day working week without loss of pay, would find itself at a competitive disadvantage.
This does not mean a shorter working week without loss of pay is impossible, just that it is in the interests of the workers, and against the interests of the bosses. As Friedrich Engels explained in his pamphlet ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, the class struggle can be boiled down to the struggle over the working day.
In the 19th Century Engels analysed the concrete struggles of trade unionists in industrialising countries for paid overtime, an eight-hour day and weekends. And it is the need for workers’ struggle against the bosses that is missing from the Autonomy report.
The demand for pay to keep up with inflation has dominated the ongoing strike wave. But key aspects of many of the disputes have involved the struggle over the working day. In the Royal Mail dispute, bosses intended to impose annualised hours, with postal workers working longer hours at busier times of the year, and later start and ‘last letter’ times. Weekend working arrangements have been a feature of the RMT union’s dispute on the railways.
A motion at the PCS union Annual Delegates Meeting takes up the issue, and the TUC adopted the demand for a four-day week in 2018.
Teachers in the National Education Union (NEU) are currently striking over pay and funding. Socialist Party members in NEU, including those on its executive, continue to campaign for national action for a ‘national contract’, taking up the issues of workload and working hours.
Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in 2019, then shadow chancellor John McDonnell, speaking at the Labour conference, committed the party to “reduce the average working week to 32 hours within a decade”.
There is no front-bench opposition MP now calling for anything along those lines. The trade union struggle for a shorter working week would be strengthened by a workers’ party prepared to fight in the interests of the working class against the capitalists.
The capitalist bosses won’t be persuaded by ‘rational’ arguments to forgo their short-term profits and concede a 32-hour working week without loss of pay. Most will complain such measures are unaffordable, to which socialists say ‘open the books and prove it!’ Nationalised, democratically controlled by the working class, the big firms can be run on the basis of a 32-hour working week without loss of pay and with future pay linked to inflation, not to maximise profits for shareholders.
History has shown that under the pressure of workers’ struggle, industrial and political, the capitalists can be forced into making concessions. But to make substantial, lasting improvements to workers’ lives – inflation-proof pay rises, a 32-hour week without loss of pay, access to free high-quality childcare, and more – means a struggle for socialist change.
