Carryfast:
Let’s get this right they want to introduce a 32hr week but they’ll expect the same if not more amount of work done in the shorter time by the same workforce.
All that with an unemployment rate varying between 15%-30%.
It sounds like the idea of supposed minimum wage based on a 9 hour shift so long as you get 120 drops done in the 9 hours.
From what I understand, Royal Mail workers (say) have always been able to achieve at least 120 drops in a shift. They did this with better organisation and investment (in particular, with more depots, and with monopoly coverage of a geographic area).
Working faster isn’t a reduction in the working week.
Hiring more workers to share the work load is.
More work done by each employee in shorter time is good for who exactly.Other than the employer wanting to minimise their labour force to maximise the labour supply to minimise wage, employee admin and NI contribution costs.
So the employees show that they can do more work in a day.It’s obvious what happens next just like retirement age increases.They’ll put it back to 40 hours + per week at the faster/higher daily work rate expectation.It’s a time and motion scam obviously in the employers’ favour.
I don’t disagree with the mentality you attribute to British management, but the principle of shorter hours is exactly that people are more productive during shorter hours.
Most people can walk further than they can run, but two people running a relay will get far further in a given shift of work, and be happier for it because they’re exerting themselves for a while and then resting or doing something else of their own choice, instead of trudging on at a snail’s pace all day every day.
Traditionally what bosses have feared is that this arrangement reduces unemployment (and thus raises wages and reduces the rate of exploitation).
But unemployment itself is recognised to impose costs on the community, not least in social security and poor relief, public health due to squalor, and in criminal justice due to the chaos ensuing from idle hands who can’t afford any lawful leisure. There are also costs imposed on schooling, as the state bids to ensure that children still grow up to be minimally fit for work (despite living around adults who are assigned little to no work or income in this scheme, due to their status as part of the reserve army).
And long-term unemployment often leads to people ceasing to compete for jobs, or even ceasing to be in a physical, mental, and moral state to be competitive. So after a while this strategy starts to fail in the bosses’ own terms, because are they really threatening to replace the existing worker with the bow-legged youth straight from a Dickensian novel?
I remember doing some work on agency once, and to make up the numbers we had a guy who regaled us with a cheeky smile about how many bridges he’d hit in his career. I have to say in all honesty that he looked like a product of the prison-to-wheels pipeline. I stood back for my own safety whilst he and the pointy-shoed driver trainer re-enacted what seemed to be scenes from the Chuckle Brothers.
The other concern which the state has is that, whilst the exploitation rate may be high, overall productivity is starting to fall - in other words, the bosses are successfully taking larger slices, of pies that they are causing to shrink. There is now widespread belief that the vast majority of jobs are “bulls*** jobs”, deadweight roles that exist only for want of better economic organisation and infrastructure investment in whole sectors.
A dramatic increase in productivity will be achieved mainly by automation and rationalisation in a way that will send unemployment soaring, unless something is done to both share the remaining work and accelerate consumer demand (to soak up the fruits of the extra productivity). Shorter working hours offer a way out because what is lost to the inefficiency of employing twice as many people, will be regained both from their higher hourly productivity in work, and from the moderately increased leisure time which they will likely seek to fill with consumption.
The spectre of a labour shortage (and wages soaring relative to productivity) also will not materialise, in this analysis, because the jobs that are filled by twice as many workers working on short time, will be offset by total layoffs elsewhere in routine jobs that used to require long hours but require no hours at all following automation and rationalisation.
You may ask why things can’t just stay the same as they are, or continue in the same fashion, and this is for two reasons.
Firstly, market capitalism is increasingly being seen not to work in its own terms, with the rich taking larger slices of smaller pies, with the financial sector now on permanent state life support, and most aspects of life being seen to slowly deteriorate. Reproduction too is in crisis, largely on account of youths spending their teens and 20s struggling for financial security, and then finding that maintaining any sort of career is incompatible with child-rearing. Misanthropic Green types may cheer the latter point in particular, but this could all eventually cause collapse on its own, as all sense of collective life and purpose runs out of steam.
But secondly, China’s state-managed economy is soaring through every difficulty, and presenting both an ideological alternative and a military threat, just as the Soviets did from the 1920s. This menaces the West not just with the prospect of slow collapse under the status quo, but with sudden revolution or conquest.
I suspect we are now living through the early stages of what will later be clearly seen as “rearmament”. Capitalism is now rearming against an economically superior ideology, and is slowly returning to post-war concerns about productivity and effective economic organisation.
I think in due course we will also see a return to concerns about ideological resilience and public trust, with vaccine conspiracies acting as the canary in the coalmine for just how little confidence people have in the word of the authorities or rich philanthropists.
We’ve lived through a period in which every ounce of trust vested in an organisation or institution, is seen as a margin for economic exploitation or an opportunity for political or behavioural manipulation, and I think increasingly this will be linked to a crisis in public trust in authorities and the cause of widespread paranoid and deranged thinking.