Working shorter hours is the only way in a world in which competition continues to become fiercer by the day, and in which the center of production is soon going to shift from the West to the East.
This is the conclusion of a study on “The Global Crisis, Flexicurity and Working Shorter Hours in European Countries and Turkey” By Dr. Seyma Ipek Kostekli.
It is awell-known fact that employment and unemployment constitute a multi-dimensional issue with a long and complex past. A lasting solution to this problem lies essentially in completing reform of the labour market. Reductions in workingtime have the potential to make a significant contribution to lowering unemployment.
(the full text of Kostekli’s study you canread on :http://uaces.org/documents/papers/1201/kostekli.pdf )
The mathematical-statistical (kind of econometric) part of this study displayed the following relationship (based on statistical data on the labor market in Turkey for a specific period): “…Accordingly, if workers in Turkey had worked from one to five fewer hours perweek there would have been a need for some five hundred to two and half million workers as follows:
44 hours instead of 45 497.000new workers
43 hours instead of 45 994.000new workers
42 hours instead of 45 1.514,000new workers
41 hours instead of 45 2.011,000new workers
40 hours instead of 45 2.508,000 new workers
This means that reductions in working time are extremely important for alleviating the fossilized structural dimension of unemployment in Turkey.” I would add: in Turkey and everywhere else, globally!
An article of "The Guardian" published in roughly the same period, offers roughly the same solution to the global crisis (the full text of this article you can read on:http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/03/why-americans-should-work-less-way-germans-do )
“The most important point to realize is that the problem facing wealthy countries at the moment is not that we are poor, as the stern proponents of austerity insist. The problem is that we are wealthy. We have tens of millions of people unemployed precisely because we can meet current demand without needing their labor.
The US and European economies were close to full employment in 2007 due to demand created by housing bubbles in the United States and across much of Europe. These bubbles then burst, substantially reducing demand. As Krugman and Layard point out in their statement, one remedy for this loss of demand is for government to fill the gap. If the private sector is not prepared to spend enough to bring the economy to full employment, then the government can engage in deficit spending to make up the shortfall.
But there is another dimension to this issue. It's great for the government to generate demand insofar as it can productively employ people.This means either providing immediate services, like healthcare and education, or in investing in areas that will provide future dividends, such asmodernizing the infrastructure or retrofitting buildings to increase theirenergy efficiency. However, it can also employ people by encouraging employers to divide work among more workers.
There is nothing natural about the length of the average work week or work year and there are, in fact, large variations acrosscountries/professions/etc.. The average worker in Germany and theNetherlands puts in 20% fewer hours in a year than the average worker in the United States.This means that if the US adopted Germany's work patterns tomorrow, it would immediately eliminate unemployment.
Of course, it is unrealistic to imagine such large changes occurring overnight, but governments can certainly attempt to encourage employers to shorten work weeks and increase vacation and other paid time-off.
In fact, this is the real secret of Germany's post-crisis recovery. Germany's growth has been no better than growth in the United States since the start of the downturn, yet its unemployment rate has fallen by 2.0 percentage points – while unemployment in the United States has risen by almost 4.0 percentage points. The difference is that Germany encourages firms toreduce work hours rather than lay off workers.
More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world's major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s. And the reason is simple: we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s. These ideas, long since disproved, involve profound errors both about the causes of the crisis, its nature, and the appropriate response.
These errors have taken deep root in public consciousness and provide the public support for the excessive austerity of current fiscal policies in many countries. So the time is ripe for a Manifesto in which mainstream economists offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of ourproblems.
Our “system” CAPITALISM IS an economic system that is inherently crisis-prone.It is driven by forces which cause it to be unstable, anarchic andself-destructive. This is as true today as it was over 150 years ago, when Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels described capitalism in the Communist Manifesto.
Indeed, today’s world of wild stock market booms and slumps, recurring layoffs and long-term unemployment, corporate scandals and power blackouts, seems to fit their description better than ever before. The present economic downturn is no exception. The United States is currently in the middle of the longest period of job losses since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Understanding the drive toward crisis is central to Marx’s analysis of capitalism and to his arguments for the possibility and necessity of revolutionary change. For Marx, the existence of inequality or poverty alone is not what turns workers against the capitalist system. These problems have always been a part of the everyday workings of any "healthy" capitalist economy. Of greater social and ideologica impact is the insecurity, instability and ruin that economic crises periodically inflict on the lives of working-class people. And so in Capital, Marx argues that capitalism
"dispelsall fixity and security in the situation of the laborer…it constantly threatens...to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and...make him superfluous. We have seen... how this [class] antagonism vents its rage... in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working class, in the most reckless squandering of labor power and in the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social calamity."
In short, crises mean that the very functioning of the capitalist system cannot guarantee even the crumbs that are thrown to the worker. Crises have an impact on the capitalists’ fortunes as well. They break up what Marx called the "operating fraternity of the capitalist class" and produce an all-outfight for survival between capitalists themselves…
For Marx and Engels the only solution was democratic economic planning–socialism. Marx and Engels did not believe that capitalism would produce socialism of its ownaccord:
"withinthe capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process... they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness.... It follows...that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment [wage] high or low, must grow worse.... [T]his law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole."
However, under current human realities, socialism also proved to be ineffective solution to improving human wellbeing. Therefore we should at least try applying some of socialists’ ideas with the hope that they might work somehow within the realities of market economy.
In order to effectively understand, explain and critique capitalism we need to develop Marxist theory, and apply it to the global capitalist world that we find ourselves in today. In particular that capitalism goes through various phases. Previously, there was the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, and now we are moving into the knowledge revolution. This means that more value is being created from intellectual labour and that this valueis then embedded in intangible goods/commodities. This is in contrast to value being created from manual labour and becoming embedded in tangible goods/commodities. This clearly has repercussions for labour itself. Labour is the core of capitalism, but today, in the developed world as we move into theknowledge revolution, there is a greater expenditure of intellectual labour and less expenditure of manual labour.
So, how does the length of the working-day differ for the intellectual labourer, in the knowledge revolution, as opposed to the manual labourer in the period of the industrial revolution? Obviously, both forms of labour are needed, but in the knowledge revolution there is a greater expenditure of intellectual labour and less expenditure of manual labour. First of all, there is a need for workers to be far more flexible in the knowledge revolution. In the industrial revolution, the emphasis was on 'graft' and physically hard work. The more physical expenditure that the labourer could exert the better - more products could be produced, such as cars and washing machines. This manual labourer created value and some of this value would then be turned into profit, which meant that companies could succeed and capitalism could thrive. In this way it appeared to be a system that 'worked'.
It is important to appreciate the fact that value and profit are different. Increasing the amount of manual labour is quite straightforward (in comparison with intellectual labour). If the manual labour is fit and nourished then he/she can work very hard for a certain period, which means that new value can easily be created.
So, inregard to manual labour, it is just a matter of making a decision in regard to an appropriate length of the working-day - say, 10 hours, then the manual labourer works for this period, and creates value.
However, with the intellectual labourer the picture is not so straight forward. Ideas can materialise at any time of the day or night. The intellectual labourer might have a vested interest in not divulging some of his/her knowledge and ideas within the company, preferring to take them home, and utilise them for another purpose. If a manual labourer is not labouring, the manager can see this very easily, and insist that they work harder. But the knowledge worker? Are they sitting there thinking up something wonderful to benefit the company, or are they just dreaming about their forthcoming night out, or a football match? Many workers surf the net. It is difficult for a company to keep track of whether this is being done for the benefit of the company or for the labourers' individual benefit.
Knowledge assets often reside in, or stem from, people. People cannot be owned, unless we return to a form of slavery. Google’s policy to allow people 20% of their time to pursue their own independent projects is well known. Can you imagine your boss granting you permission to do whatever you want every single Friday? There's only one catch: you do have to stay in the office. Can you imagine what you'd be working on at your desk if you had that kind of freedom? This is exactly the goal behind Google's "Innovation Time Off". Google, head quartered in California and well known for their informal work environment, decided to take a seemingly-contradictory approach to boosting employee productivity: give engineers nothing to do for eight hours (or 20% equivalent of their time) on aweekly basis.
The results? This unique employee motivational tool, accompanied by a perk-filled corporate work environment, has led Google to the very top of Fortune magazine's list of best companies to work for multiple times. The results certainly are in the numbers: with over a billion daily search queries on Google, there's no doubt we've all benefitted from world's brightest engineers being given 20% of their time at work to improve processes and efficiencies.
The concept of giving workers more “free” time does work! There are many examples as in the sphere of “intellectual” business where “freedom” can boost creativity and in the sphere of manual labour as well where simply by shortening the working day/week of individual workers, this can boost demand for “new” workers, which in global scale can boost global demand, and improve economy performance.
Working time is really crucial because by amending the schedule of people’s everyday life, this actually has the potential to change the world we live in! You need to understand that real change is a change in structures. If we just try patching things up, keeping the previous structures, then, nothing can be achieved. However, changes must be carried out peacefully. Apparently a growing number of economists conclude that the thing with the structure-effect (but still peaceful) is change of working time.
As working times are reduced, the worker must be guaranteed income security just as the employer must also be guaranteed cost security. And the way to do this lies in government financing of any reductions to be made in wages. Of course societies need to bear the initial costs of employing more workers however the benefits might be immense such as a totally new world with less (almost zero) unemployment!
Governments might be the agents who will divert public money to finance shorter working periods for individuals however it is the private sector that supplies money (pays taxes) in all market economies. Therefore the real source of finance for such a global project should be taken out of private profits. Whose profits that might be? Definitely not mine or yours, or some other bloke with a small business! Of course that should be taken out of the “largest pockets” available… oligarchs, monopolies, corporate giants, etc.
According to Oxfam International (article Published: 19 January 2013http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressrelease/2013-01-19/annual-income-richest-100-people-enough-end-global-poverty-four-times ) the $240 billion net income in 2012 of the richest 100 billionaires would be enough to make extreme poverty history four times over. With a simple calculation we can see that just a half of these annual profits can provide at least 4 million new well-paid jobs around the world.
The idea of taking money from the rich so as to help the poor has deep roots however this has no effect when you thrash over again and again the old straw. A change in the whole system is required, however, also, a bloody, violent revolution is not a solution to the problem at all..
On the subject of employment, which topped the list of our most pressing problems even before the crisis, we must take the measures necessary for demonstrating the desired success in a timely fashion and finally break down some of the existing taboos.
Today as in the past the world is undergoing radical changes. And the most important change is in the areas and centers of production as the developed countries of the world rapidly move away from old styles of production. We are therefore compelled to think long-term and to engage in planning.
Shortening the length of the average work day/week/year can be the universal remedy for the crisis we find ourselves in today.
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