“In chapter ten of Capital, Volume 1, Marx chronicles the various ways that capitalists and states worked to extend the working day as much as possible, from the mid-fourteenth century up through the mid-nineteenth century. The reason was simple: the longer the working day, the more capitalists could exploit workers because after paying workers a subsistence wage, all labor done for the rest of the day was a surplus for the employer.”
“Retail workers reported that in order to get more hours or more desirable shifts they sometimes had to compete with coworkers to sell a certain amount, or sign up the most people for store credit cards. In this way, they were battling with each other just for the ability to work and earn more.”
““Flexibility” is promoted as a win-win plank of neoliberal labor market reform. Policymakers and employers argue that rigid labor regulations keep employers from remaining competitive in a fast-paced global economy, and prevent them from providing quality customer service. In theory, flexibility sounds good to employees too — particularly those who have to take care of children or elderly parents, who want to work from home, or hold part-time jobs. In reality, flexibility has meant breaking unions and deregulating — or rather, reregulating — labor markets in ways that benefit employers at the expense of workers. Employers have more ability to shift the costs and responsibility of the employment relationship onto workers through practices like “just-in-time scheduling.””
“The problems of too few hours and lack of schedule control will become more pronounced as the global labor force experiences greater precarity and more “flexibility.” Employers will likely keep pushing for more just-in-time scheduling as a way to convert labor from a fixed to a variable cost, from a formal employer–employee relationship with responsibilities to an informal one with no legal restrictions or promises of work.”
“Clearly, the labor market is out of balance, as some workers are working too much and others too little. The fight for schedule control should also be a fight to redistribute work hours and shorten the average workweek. This would help spread labor around more evenly, and should allow more space for workers to determine their shifts.”
“Anna Coote of the New Economics Foundation argues that we need a thirty-hour workweek because it “will help solve a lot of connected problems: overwork, unemployment, overconsumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other and simply to enjoy life.” And research shows that a shorter workweek can actually increase productivity, which means that some of the costs of raising wages could be offset.”
“The International Labour Organization found that during the Great Recession, some countries experienced skyrocketing unemployment while others did not. Those that had lower unemployment were ones where countries introduced or encouraged shorter workhours rather than lay-offs. This policy, called Kurzabeit in Germany and work-sharing in others, offers benefits or incentives to employers who offer work-sharing and/or penalties to those who terminate employees.”
“Work-sharing policies also involve giving workers the right to request a shorter workweek, amending benefits to eliminate a minimum hours requirement, and increasing the minimum wage and social welfare benefits so that a shorter workweek is more affordable. Austria, Belgium, France, Japan, Turkey, and Uruguay are some of the other countries that have experimented with variations of shorter workhours and work-sharing. The concept here is schedule control. But the schedules we choose are obviously heavily dependent on the wage we earn. So beyond schedules, workers want more voice in how to prioritize their demands. Not every worker will want the same thing and therefore the ideal is worker voice and organization, so that employees can debate and decide amongst themselves what they would like to demand from employers. Ideally, we would have flexible jobs that allowed each of us some degree of choice over the hours we worked, the schedules we set, and the work we did. But this won’t happen through good human resource policy. Instead, we need democratic, worker-run workplaces.”