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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

The Working Day and Working Week

by New Worker correspondent

One of the major objects of the trade union movement has been to secure reductions in the working day. This cause has sometimes been popular with the bourgeoisie as well as workers. When the industrial revolution brought about long hours in the dark satanic mills shortening the working day was a popular cause among Tory landlords, as long as it did not apply to their agricultural labourers. The bourgeoisie also took an interest. While they couldn’t care less about the long hours in the cotton factories, they worried about the effect of railway workers falling asleep at the end of a 16-hour shift and causing death and injuries in the first-class carriages. Even some of the bigger cotton masters occasionally looked kindly on the cause if it could help put smaller rivals out of business.

Variants of the eight-hour day movement (sometimes the 40-hour week movement or the short-time movement) are still needed for many workers despite the fact that Philip II of Spain ordered it in his American colonies in 1594, largely to keep them alive for longer.

Robert Owen introduced it at his factory at New Lanark under the slogan of “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest”, which he pinched from Alfred the Great. In 1889 it was the London gas workers who were the first to secure this right from a capitalist employer.

This was much to the approval of Karl Marx, who observed in Das Kapital that: “By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production…not only produces a deterioration of human labour power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour power itself.” A statement as true today as it was first penned in 1867.

Reductions in hours do not always go down well with the unions. When in 1998 the freshfaced Blair Government brought in Working Time Regulations limiting the working week to 48 hours, it was not just nose-grinding employers who objected, but some workers angry at losing overtime.

For reasons good or bad many workers see overtime as the only way of securing a decent living. The Regulations have an opt-out clause that many workers take advantage of, which makes it something of a dead letter and allows bosses to pressurise workers against their will.

While some workers seek longer hours, such as Just Eat and Deliveroo drivers, a reduction in the working day and working week is now a major union demand.

The London Underground strikes that ASLEF and the RMT transport unions called off last week were cancelled due to the Mayor of London offering a four-day week for drivers.

Other unions are closely focusing on the hours question. PCS, the main civil service union, is also seeking a four-day week. In August it cautiously welcomed rumours that the Government was considering introducing a right for workers to request it. At the same time it warned that this was not to be confused with compressed hours, which involve longer working days, and its demands include a “shortened fourday week with no loss of pay”.

The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had seen the union develop what it called “constructive engagements with management”, indications that the Government is “taking seriously the idea of a four-day week, which has proved popular with employers and workers where it has been trialled in the public and private sectors”, in the words of General Secretary Fran Heathcote.

PCS has also voted to affiliate to the recently founded 4 Day Week Campaign, which helps run workplace four-day week trials. Some small businesses have taken part in these trials, but the Government is not so keen on transforming words into deeds. The Campaign claims 200 British businesses have adopted its policies. None are household names.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner was supportive of the idea last year – but that was before the general election. Civil servants are not always the most popular of workers so the idea gets very few mentions from ministers who will not be keen on raising an issue that the Daily Mail can be guaranteed to denounce.

Indeed, a recent PCS-backed petition at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government calling for a fourday week was recently dismissed, with a formal reply saying the policy “is not government policy or something we are considering”. However the Government has announced it is taking a “hands off” policy as regards the policy of local councils. It told South Cambridgeshire Council that it would not oppose its decision to introduce a four-day week for its workers.

At the same time, the Cabinet Office is clamping down on working from home and has announced that civil servants must spend 60 per cent of their working time in the office, regardless of their work and personal circumstances.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg often grumbled about his staff working from home. Now Labour has followed suit. This demand comes despite a reduction in office space that means staff cannot be accommodated in Government offices without resorting to ‘hot-desking’, which means workers share desks.

Months ago PCS members in the Office for National Statistics voted for “action short of a strike” and have been working-to-rule in opposition to the directive but have not used their mandate to strike.

Last week the same union announced it was balloting civilian staff at the Metropolitan Police. Here again the issue is the imposition of a new hybrid working policy that demands an increase in the time staff have to attend the office, which will increase from 60 to 100 per cent for various staff, a move which PCS says is discriminatory against women and disabled workers.

PCS complain that the existing policy on how many days members work from home or in the office has been in place for several years, with collective agreements in each area on blended working, and that the Met has not provided any good reasons for its change of policy.

Fran Heathcote observed that: “Yet again we are seeing an arbitrary figure chosen to decide how many days a week our members have to come into the office, when they are working perfectly well from home.

“There is no evidence people work better in the office. In fact, the opposite is true because workers are more productive when they have a better work–life balance, not having to commute and able to spend more time with their family at home before and after work. It’s not too late for the Met to change their mind and return to the blended working model that has been successful for many years.”

Unions ought to be wary about working from home. Employers might embrace it in its entirety and provide exciting new opportunities for working from home to the workers in Bangalore and Manila. This has happened to many call centre workers.