Rachel Cox, Socialist Party Southern Region organiser
Many young workers in Britain today face enormous challenges. It is becoming increasingly hard to find work as bosses are becoming increasingly nervous of losing profits in the face of rising inflation and an unstable world. All of this has led to around 732,000 16 to 24-year-olds being unemployed. If they were all in one place, they would rank as the 8th largest city in Britain, larger than Nottingham. In total, 957,000 are what is known as NEET – not in employment, education, or training – around the population of Glasgow!
If you went to university, in many cases you enter the job market today with a student loan that is growing faster than it can be paid off. And that’s even if you can get a job at all. Across all age ranges, 700,000 graduates are unemployed.
To those hundreds of thousands of workers and youth, as well as their family and friends watching them struggle, one thing is becoming increasingly clear – something is fundamentally broken.
With nearly a million young people unemployed, workers in Britain work 42 hours a week on average, some of the longest hours in Europe, according to TUC data. Why not share out the work?
The Socialist Party calls for a 32-hour week with no loss of pay or worsening conditions. And with the right to flexible working, under control of workers not the employers. Workers could choose to work a four-day week, or work shorter days to fit more conveniently with childcare and a child’s school day, for example.
A recent trial of the four-day working week in the UK found 39% of employees were less stressed, and 71% had reduced levels of burnout at the end of the trial. But not only would it improve existing workers’ lives, it could also be used to create more employment opportunities and boost production that could be used for improving services, building council homes, and more. Unsurprisingly, it would be extremely good for workers.
So, could Britain actually afford it? The short answer is yes, quite easily. In 1974, faced with high inflation and government-imposed pay restraint, the miners went on strike. At the time Britain mostly ran off coal power, and with no new coal coming in the Tory government was forced to use reserves. As part of this, the Tories brought in a three-day, 24-hour working week in order to weaken the union’s leverage, and revealed far more than they meant to in the process. During the strike, across the rest of industry, 80% of existing production levels were maintained in a reduced working week, with productivity per worker being half of what it is today!
In the end the miners won out. The Tories called a general election asking “who governs Britain”, and lost. The miners won pay rises from the Labour government that followed.
Less work less pay?
In the capitalist media, on the BBC or in the Financial Times, there are occasional articles praising the four-day week as leading to improved productivity and profits. Around 10.9% of workers reported working a four-day week in one ONS study, these tending to be in the private sector – jobs such as in tech and marketing. What it didn’t say is whether or not this was without loss of pay, or simply working the same number of hours just squeezed into four days.
For example, London Underground bosses have recently been pushing for a change to driver shift patterns, billing it as being the introduction of a ‘four-day week’. In response, members of the RMT union have voted to strike. The first strike dates were suspended for further talks with the bosses. During the strike ballot period, the union was pointing to what the changes would mean: “Longer more extreme shifts and less block leave. 9.5-hour shifts that can be shifted 2 hours each way with a day’s notice, increased weekend working, more time on the handle within each duty, earlier starts and later finishes with night turns drastically reduced, reduced walking and prep time, attacks on block annual leave with only one rostered summer week off every other year.”
The most successful companies and capitalists are more than happy to crunch their workforces to gain the competitive edge over others, some do it through compression of days, but ultimately extracting as much labour time as possible per worker is the root of capitalist profits.
This logic extends to the system as a whole, and the policies of the capitalist parties such as Labour – currently governing for the bosses in Britain. While the move to a shorter working week without loss of pay would undoubtedly make Starmer more popular, it’s a calculation of politics and economy. After all, the reason nearly a million young people are NEET is because it would be unprofitable to employ them. The existence of a pool of unemployed labour helps keep wages lower across the economy.
The introduction of a 32-hour working week without loss of pay would likely make individual workers more productive. It would also be a boost to workers’ hourly wages – and that would be a hit to the capitalists’ profits. What’s more, a successful struggle to achieve it would risk boosting the confidence of the working class to struggle for more. A shorter working week without loss of pay won’t be won except through struggle.
The call for a shorter working week has been a key demand of the labour movement for many years. All the way back in 1817, Robert Owen, one of the early socialist thinkers, coined the goal of “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest”. In the landscape of 10 to 16-hour days, this became a major pillar of the labour movement in the 19th century.
‘Not a penny off pay, not a minute on the day’
In the 1926 general strike, for example, miners faced attacks on pay, but also attempts to extend the working day. Then, the slogan taken up was “Not a penny off pay, not a minute on the day”.
Karl Marx went as far to say at the 1866 Congress of the First International: “The legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive”, as bosses could always increase hours to eat costs. Additional demands for inflation-matched pay and a jobs guarantee for every worker could have the same effect today in tying the capitalists’ hands and raising workers’ sights.
But while struggles of groups of workers can win gains workplace by workplace, this is increasingly hard. Capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of workers, and on competition. A capitalist boss making concessions to workers faces the prospect of being at a competitive disadvantage. With an extremely weak and fragile economy, globally and nationally, defending existing working conditions from the bosses’ attacks is hard won, and concessions are even harder won still.
We need to generalise the struggle across the trade unions and build a political force that will fight to implement a shorter working week and other demands.
The 2021 Trades Union Congress voted to “launch a public campaign for a three-day weekend/four-day working week, including political lobbying, and an effort to build popular support for the policy – the four-day week/extended weekend should be a reduction in overall hours worked, with no loss of pay.” The Communications Workers Union (CWU) has recently been campaigning amongst its members in telecoms for a shorter working week. And the PCS civil service union presented a case to Starmer’s government as to how a four-day week would make civil service departments more productive and save money. The government bluntly rejected.
The Employment Rights Act, much-vaunted by trade union leaders, fails to even mention a shorter working week. A handful of Labour MPs and one Green did try to add an amendment to create a ‘Working Time Council’ to address the issue, which was rejected.
Working-class political representation
The trade union movement and the working class does not have its own party to fight for policies in its interests, or even a group of MPs which can be relied upon to take the policies of the workers’ movement into parliament.
The CWU was the seconder of that TUC motion and is affiliated to the Labour Party. It doesn’t however, have any real democratic say over the policies the Labour Party and government adopts. It won a vote for renationalisation of Royal Mail at Labour conference in 2022 for example, but that does not make it Labour policy.
CWU conference next month will discuss the union’s relationship with Labour. Socialist Party members have been pushing for the unions to lead in the building of a new mass working-class party. One in which the unions’ millions-strong membership can have a collective democratic say over policy.
The 800,000 initially drawn to Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party showed the huge enthusiasm for a new party. A four-day week without loss of pay was actually a policy put forward by Labour during Jeremy’s time as leader – albeit one undermined by right-wingers inside his own shadow cabinet.
It was a mistake from those at the top of the Your Party project not to make an appeal to the trade unions to get involved and to offer them a say in the newly formed party’s democratic structures.
The election of a new layer of left trade union leaders, and Unite the Union’s decision to further restrict its funding to Labour, point to the intense pressure being exerted by the rank and file of these trade unions on their leaders.
In this May’s elections, Socialist Party members will be standing as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). Over the last few months, we have helped to organised ‘people’s budget’ meetings – bringing together trade union bodies and campaigners to draw up a list of policies a council on the side of the working class and willing to take on austerity could adopt. That could include for example, a 32-hour working week without loss of pay for council employees. People’s budget campaigns could also be used on a local level to demonstrate the need for a new mass workers’ party. After all, if Labour councillors won’t implement our demands, we’ll need a party of our own.
But such a mass workers’ party would only be a stepping stone towards what is needed to permanently improve workers’ lives. Faced with global economic turmoil, and a system in which the economy is owned and controlled by competing profit-driven bosses, the battle over pay and working hours will be a battle that has to be fought over and over again. Join us in the fight for a shorter working week, but as part of the struggle for the socialist transformation of society where these gains can be made permanent.
The Socialist Party says
- Share out the work. A maximum 32-hour working week with no loss of pay or worsening conditions. The right to flexible working, under the control of workers not employers
- End insecure working, for the right to full-time work for all who want it; ban zero-hour contracts
- All workers to have trade union rates of pay, employment protection and sickness, parental and holiday rights from day one of employment
- No austerity through inflation. For all wage rates to be automatically increased at least in line with price rises
- Build a new mass workers’ party, based on the trade unions and fighting for socialist change
- Fight for a democratic, socialist plan of production to meet need – based on nationalisation of big business and the banks under workers’ control and management, compensation only on the basis of proven need
