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Teen |
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Regular Posts: 62  | http://www.thoughtland.info/2010/09/shorterworkingweek.html Towards the Scottish 30 hour working week Pat Kane Sunday Herald Opinion Essay, Sunday 3rd September, 2010. For those of us with politically romantic temperaments, the news warms the heart. The late Clydeside radical Jimmy Reid's 1972 Glasgow University Rectorial speech is to be made available, in Alex Salmond's words, to “every Scottish secondary pupil”. But First Ministers should be careful what they promise. If you actually read the piece from “James Reid” on the front page of the New York Times, June 20, 1972, lauded as “the most important speech since the Gettysburg Address”, there's a few bits missing on the printed page. Here's one: “If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased...The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with, and in service to our fellow human beings, can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.” Ah, the “leisure society”. Anyone remember that 70s dream? The one where our machines would become so productive and efficient at making stuff, creating energy and connecting us together that our main problem would be too much time on our hands? As we lean forwards into the post-holiday downpour - inboxes brimming, credit cards groaning, houses full of dreck and clutter – some may not be all that pleased to hear their kids are to be filled with such utopian yearnings. What relevance does starry-eyed leftist futurism have to a world of reduced university places, looming public-service cuts, depressed house prices? All the relevance in the world, as it turns out – perhaps too uncomfortably so. There's a topic that isn't covered in Jimmy's otherwise stirringly synoptic speech, and that's any sense of an environmental crisis (something the hippies were just beginning to get militant about in 1972). We can debate about what forty years of “automation and technology” in the developed world have brought us. But one thing's certain: our ideals of infinite economic growth are crashing into the buffers of a finite planet. Groaning about the size of our fun budgets in the face of credit-crunched austerity is one thing. Realising that we have to rampantly deccelerate our carbon-generating lifestyles, so we can even attempt to cope with the permanent climatic damage we've caused, is quite another. The painful truth is that, after Rector Reid's analysis, we took a wrong turning. There's no doubt that “automation and technology” increased our productive powers: indeed, when those technologies made their way to the cheaper labour markets of Asia and South America, they destroyed most of Jimmy's beloved shipyards. But we let the market and capitalism shape the outcomes of all that labour-saving technology [see Andre Gorz's Ecologica], robots and smart systems and all. We didn't convert that productive power into extra free days; and we didn't go off to plumb the depths of our social being like good Greek philosophers (or perhaps like a Clyde-built, autodidact, bon-viveur communist). No, we all too willingly joined the corporations in a spree of marketing-led consumerism. We let our identities be morphed this way and that by advertisers promoting status and aspirational goods, all of them ever-more-precisely fashioned to hit our ever-more-refined pleasure spots. Jimmy's proletariat moved to other parts of the world, labouring in classically grim conditions: and their job was to help us pile up our shameful mountains of passe mobile phones, unrepairable office chairs, teardrop-shaped saloons, shiny superhero toys. Can we begin to let go of this consumerist self? Have we really asked ourself how deeply it's rooted, how much it constitutes us? As Tim Jackson, the head of the recently chopped government quango the Sustainability Commission, said at a TED conference recently, “We spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to make impressions that don't last, on people we don't know”. And all the while, the atmospheric pollution generated as a result of this megamachine of infinite desire has pushed our ecosystem to a tipping point. Climate scientists' consensus is that we have entered a new evolutionary epoch: the 'anthropocene'. That is, an era where our actions determine our climate, rather than vice versa. And there's much to regret about our actions at the moment. There's no point in lamenting our wrong turning – it's too late for that. As Tim Jackson says, we need to start urgently thinking about what “prosperity without growth” might mean. We need to at least try to reduce our carbon output by 85% by 2050, as the UN Climate Council says, in order to hold global warming to a 2ºC increase: if we surpass that, the outcomes are unpredictable and uncontrollable. We will have to look at radical measures to wrest our economies and lifestyles in the right direction. So as a way to rein in an economy of perpetual growth, while maintaining the busy, productive character of our society, why not pick up Jimmy's offer again – and try for a shorter working week? As a brilliant report from the New Economics Foundation suggests, we should remember that quite drastic shifts in social values can take place in quite short time periods. Take the great causes of civil rights and feminism (and environmentalism itself), down to everyday stuff like seat-belt wearing, anti-smoking measures, gay marriage, communicating by email or internet. There's nothing inevitable about the 9-to-5, Monday to Friday working week either – itself the result of centuries of struggle between capital and labour. Structures are always more up for grabs than we think. The environmental benefits of a shorter working week, with commensurately reduced wages, is obvious. “Longer hours raise the ecological footprint, both because of more production, and because time-stressed households have higher-impact lifestyles”, says Juliet Schor, author of Plenitude. “Getting to sustainability will require slowing down the pace of life, which means working less”. But even as a pragmatic answer to economic recession, it's already happening. Go to the home of capitalism, the United States, and what they call “work-sharing” has become a regular response to economic downturn. Nineteen States are allowing workers whose hours have been reduced to claim half their lost wages from unemployment benefit (though this jars with the general tendency of US business to respond to the crash with layoffs). In Europe, the governments of Norway, Italy, Finland, the Slovak republic and especially Germany have tended to adjust working hours, agreeing the shift with other social stakeholders, than just slashing the jobs rolls: Japan and South Korea have also followed this path. On these islands, there are examples of this approach in the private sector. British Airways, Ford, Honda and JCB offered a reduction of work hours, with 86% of KPMG employees agreeing to a four-day week. But mostly in the UK, we have been scared rigid (not least as a result of the recent Beveridge Report in Scotland) by the spectre of mass unemployment, as the Westminster government's budget sees public sector spending cuts as a way to rectifying national deficits. Incidentally, this is a weird moment in the political psyche of the British Isles, at least as amplified through its media megaphones. We shrug our cynical shoulders at the spectacle of super-renumerated bankers and the restoration of City mega-profits. But we also seem eager to subject ourselves for a bout of masochistic jobs trashing, of collective social pain. Is all this rooted in a guilty recognition that we played our own, hyper-consumerist part in the credit crunch? If so, we need to dispel this murk of self-loathing. And surely in Scotland, we can use our autonomy to try to challenge the new economic “commonsense” peddled by the current Westminster patriciate. So certainly one short-term Scottish response to our economic crisis, particularly given that more than half of our jobs are in the public sector, would be to look at an appropriate reduction of work hours, rather than outright redundancy. (Perhaps this could be combined with public procurement aimed at Scottish companies, as suggested by economists Jim and Elizabeth Cuthbert in this paper recently, as a strategy to tackle our overall deficit). A 30-hour week, spread over three or four days - as a norm for public service and flexibly arranged with workers - would undoubtedly address the overall public sector wage bill, while at least retaining current levels of employment. In Utah, where public workers in that state have recently shifted to a ten-hour-day, four-day week, savings have been additionally made in transport and maintenance costs, as well as a reduced carbon footprint. Embarassingly, Scotland doesn't even have the flexibility of an American state in the Union, never mind the powers of a small European nation-state, to respond to a shorter-week wages-drop with more creative forms of social insurance. Nor can we bring any regulatory pressure on the private sector to work-share accordingly (as the French state did with the 35-hour week). So under the current Holyrood settlement, a Scottish experiment in a shorter working-week would have uneven consequences – and undoubtedly, any reduction in wages of public employees who are not already that well paid would be, as it were, a hard sell. And you don't look to the Scottish private sector, characteristically, to show any imagination here. But there is a deeper question lurking here, about how difficult it is to shift public attitudes. Could we ever regard more free-time – branded as, say, the 'three-day weekend' enjoyed by the Utah employees – as adequate compensation for having less disposable income? If economic and ecological crises compelled us to make a significant shift, from spending money to sharing time - would we be happy or resentful about the change? I think it depends what kinds of activities we choose to do, or are offered to do, in these new zones of autonomy. The NEF report makes a bold pitch for a 21-hour work week, as the end point of 15 years of incremental change (21 hours is the average time actually spent doing useful tasks in an employment situation in the UK). They see many of our current anxieties answered by shorter hours. Cash-starved public services? We'll have the time to “co-produce” more of our own social needs, participating with care professionals rather than dependent on them. The crisis in funding pensions? A working week heading towards 21 hours will make jobs less punishing, and thus reduce our need to “retire” from them at the current age limits, maintaining older people's contribution to the economy. (With Scotland's ageing population meaning we expect to increase spending on elderly care from £4.5bn a year to £8bn by the mid 2030s, there's a problem to be addressed here). And all our anxieties about work-life balance, family lives, our children's development? A progressive reduction of work-hours will give mothers, and particularly fathers, the time and space to reconnect with their children and dependents. The NEF's Anna Coote puts the benefits of this rather beautifully: “This might help children to widen their horizons, share responsibility and grow up more easily, as well as bringing adults closer to the simplicity, wonder, and spirited inventiveness we have come to associate with childhood.” Now, free-time doesn't necessarily mean free-lunch. Many sustainability gurus place great store in the idea that a new, more community-based but equally innovative economic system will grow in this extra time (and space). The increased interest in craft production - both as a reaction to disposable high-street goods, and as a satisfying acquisiton of manual skills – fits in well with many freelancers' portfolio careers. But it also might provide the basis for what's called “self-production” in other areas – for example, city farming, house building and improvement, even generating energy. Futurist Jeremy Rifkin sees an entire new energy infrastructure – involving super-smart electrical grids and hydrogen capture – based on communities' ability to generate their own energy, through more efficient housing and the range of green energy techs. And on the near horizon, something called “distributed manufacturing” will bring the powers of industrial design to your neighbourhood: little advanced production units, or 'Fab Labs', that can be programmed to power-carve any object or component. This could be the next big internet revolution – not just organising bits and bytes, but nuts and bolts too: an open network transferring the expertise that helps us directly shape and build the daily structures of our societies. And at a scale that's hugely less polluting, wasteful and destructive than the industrial plants of the past. The hackers have been anticipating this relaxed, creative, self-determining work-style for the last two decades, in all their immaterial coding and communicating (forging their “play ethic”, if you like). Now this “playbour” is coming to the material world – and not before time. But only if we can seize the time, away from a business-as-usual working life, to explore these options. And only if we have the information, the leadership and perhaps the sense of crisis to push forward the argument. One of the great ironies of the Scottish cuts crisis is the impact of the SNP government's Climate Change Act: in setting the most stringent emission targets in the world, it will cost (according to the Beveridge Report) £8bn over the next ten years to implement. In terms of Scottish commitment to the biosphere, we have already let our conscience be our guide – and it's costing us. So if we have made this grand commitment, how do we align our everyday lives, our talents and passions, with it? Can we go on pretending that it's enough to simply live-to-earn-to-consume, we heedless Glasvegans and blithe Edinbourgoisie, waiting for the next cyclical restoration of business, property values and consumption-as-usual? Or do we gather together our various concerns about quality-of-life and parenting, collective purpose and planetary commitment, and point them at an ambitious but achievable target – the progressively shorter Scottish working week? Again, providing some sublime discomfort for Salmond the oil economist, there's another bit of Jimmy Reid's speech that didn't make it to the front of the New York Times (but which will doubtless be in our kids' online school folders). “To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people.” Will we begin to take real responsibility not just for ourselves, but our children's global future? Can we climb off the Scottish workhorse, and head for other, greener fields? | ||
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| Martin |
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Veteran Posts: 275  | There's a lot of very interesting stuff in this. The whole notion of employment, of course, is quite a recent phenomenon, as is the stark distinction we make between work and leisure. And maybe it's no coincidence that about 10 years ago we suddenly realised that hardly any of our friends were employed in the conventional sense - some were self-employed, some worked part-time. Personally, I think the idea that people need a job to make a living is pretty unhealthy - most of us, with a bit of thought, could find a way of having a good living without a full-time job. That might mean spending more time doing things like growing food, or doing some kind of craft work - things we now considered to be leisure, but not so long ago were very definitely work. But maybe, given that people now do them as leisure pursuits, these are more pleasant types of work than sitting in an office behind a computer, or whatever people do as their job. And one of the consequences of everyone working less (or rather, being less employed!) would be the end of the pursuit of economic growth. That is very much the theme of Tim Jackson and the New Economic Foundation (namechecked in the article Teen posted). There's a lot I don't understand about our apparent need for economic growth. Just for starters, the recent economic "crisis" led to a contraction in the UK economy equivalent to about the previous 3 or 4 years' growth. So, how can that be a crisis? And how come suddenly things we could afford quite comfortably 3 or 4 years ago are being axed because we can't afford them now? Anyway, that's a bit of a digression. If anyone's interested in the economic consequences of transition, I strongly recommend the New Economic Foundation as a starting point - and Penny also found a US group, the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy see http://steadystate.org/ which has lots of good stuff on their website. | ||
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| David Franklin |
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Regular Posts: 80 | I wonder if you have come across this documentary yet? http://www.themoneyfix.org/content/video-money-fix It describes what money is and how it is created and used in our current form of an economy. It also makes it clear that there is a difference between working and having a job. Discussing alternative economies including "Mutual credit". As for the current "recession", as far as i am concerned, it is a situation that has been building since the Yuppie days of the 1980's. Also as the price of oil increased through 2007 until 3rd July 2008, all forms of energy became more expensive. The price of transport fuel became too expensive too quickly, business already running on tight margins found that they could no longer make repayments on their loans or convince a bank to give them more money. Companies folded and jobs were "lost". Combine this with globalisation taking British manufacturing jobs overseas for the past 30 years and you have a situation where tax revenue falls off rapidly. So you no longer have the money coming in that you had 3 or 4 years ago. Last weeks channel 4 documentary "Britain's Trillion pound horror story" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOsqBf5hDjI | ||
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