Scribblings

The Way We Work

Enough of politics for one week. Not that there is not much to talk about. I see Keir Starmer is again talking about the UK trying to cherry-pick the European Union’s Single Market. That is not going to happen in a month of Sundays. And not because there is every chance Starmer will not be the UK prime minister by the end of this year. EU member states simply will not agree to it, despite what some unnamed diplomat is quoted in either the Financial Times or the Guardian as saying. Like the Euromillions, the rule is simple. If you are not in, you can’t win.

Mind you, the Daily Express is having none of Britain sneaking back closer to Europe. A recent front page said that it was time the UK had a “Proper Brexit”. Maybe no one has told the Express headline writers that the UK has had a “Proper Brexit”. It is no longer a member of the European Union. It has left. That’s what Brexit was about. The UK leaving the EU.

What the Express really means by a “Proper Brexit” is that since leaving, the UK has not implemented a suite of right-wing policies that would further impoverish the country, on top of the up to 8% of GDP that Brexit has already cost it, and further isolate it from its continental neighbours.

But as I say, enough of politics. If you are looking for something to do this weekend, and the weather wherever you are is not great, you could always go to the cinema and see Melania, the $80 million documentary about Melania Trump, the wife of Donald Trump. Mind you, from press reports, there is every chance you could find yourself alone in the cinema. It would seem that the documentary, if it can be called that, is not the winter blockbuster it was hoped it would be. As they used to say, it is a movie that will go “straight to video”, that no one will either buy or rent. No doubt, Trump will claim it was one of the greatest movie releases of all time, but the money taken at the box office does not lie.

Instead of politics, what I want to scribble about this week is a news item that caught my attention about working life.

Factions in Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Party (CDU) are at loggerheads over calls by the business wing of the party, mainly representing small businesses, to ban the legal entitlement that employees have to work part-time. Those arguing for the ban say that those wanting to work fewer hours should need special permission to do so.

They argue that, as the economy is suffering from a lack of skilled workers, no one should have a legal entitlement to do what they refer to as “lifestyle part-time work”.

“Those who can work more should work more,” Gitta Connemann told the news magazine Stern, which obtained a leaked copy of a proposal which is expected to be passed at the CDU’s general conference in Stuttgart next month, at which point it would become official party policy. The party’s leader, Friedrich Merz, recently commented that the country’s prosperity will not be maintained “with a four-day week and work-life balance”. Work not for yourself and your family, but for your country, would seem to be the logic of their position.

The call has been rejected by Denis Radtke, the MEP who leads the social wing of the CDU, and is close to the trade unions.

Currently, every employee in Germany has a fundamental right to part-time work, with many, particularly women, often needing to do so for reasons relating to childcare or looking after elderly relatives. It is the same everywhere, which largely explains why there is a 12% gender pay gap in the EU. Taken as a whole, women work fewer hours than men.

Radtke accused the Connemann wing of getting things wrong:

“Such a restriction amounts to putting the cart before the horse,” he told journalists. He said he would like to see more people who were in part-time work enter or return to full-time employment, but that for many it was perceived as a trap, with employers often unhelpfully inflexible over the hours needing to be worked, people getting paid less and facing restrictions over career development.

Radtke said childcare and care of elderly people had to improve in order to create the conditions for those who wanted to work to do so. But restricting the right to part-time work to caregivers or parents would mean defining the level of care and age of children up to which such care was necessary, when “this can and should be decided by every family individually”, he added.

Now it is not often that I would find myself on the same page as Denis Radtke, but I have to agree with what he says here. I have little time for those who fetishise the 9/5/5 work week. That is, working 9 to 5, 5 days a week. In the office, the hospital, the hotel, the factory, or wherever.

The 8-hour workday, 5 days a week, is a social construct. There is nothing written anywhere which says it is a permanent law of nature.

It is worth recalling that Henry Ford introduced the 5-day, 40-hour workweek for his factory employees in September 1926, changing the standard from a 6-day to a 5-day week, creating the modern work-free weekend. Others soon followed. Before that, the only day off for most workers was Sunday.

In June 1936, the Popular Front government in France, led by Léon Blum, passed a law giving workers two weeks of annual paid holidays for the first time. Whatever about the United States, no European country now limits holidays to just two weeks. The balance between work-time and non-work-time are social and political decisions that vary from country to country. There is no “right balance”, no right answer. What you consider to be the right working time regime is a value judgement, and value judgements are driven by what you value. Europeans value leisure time. Americans seem to think differently.

Personally, I believe in maximum working time flexibility, where possible. Covid showed us that remote work can be just as productive as office-based work, eliminating wasteful daily commutes. I am mindful that remote work is not possible for everyone. I estimate that only about 40% of the workforce can work remotely; the rest have to be at their place of work every workday. But remote work is just one form of work flexibility. Other forms are available for those who have to turn up and be on site.

We will also have to think creatively about the organisation of work as AI crashes, tsunami-like, through our systems. For now, I am not persuaded that AI is all it proponents say it is, and the danger of an AI bubble bursting is all too real, but it is here to stay and will change things one way or the other.

My point is this. The way we work, how we work, and the times at which we work are social constructs. What we once constructed, we can knock down and reconstruct. We should not be afraid of change. And the answer to today’s problems is not a return to some mythical past where everyone worked full-time.

And while we are at it, we should also talk about the age of retirement. I am not one to suggest that people should work until they drop; they should be able to stop work at a reasonable age and have a decent retirement. On the other hand, people should be able to continue working for as long as they feel they can work, if that is what they want to do. We will have to discuss this anyway as the population ages and the birth rate drops.

To put it simply, we need to think about the flexible working life and personal choices within a framework of flexibility. Rigid regimes will not work in tomorrow’s world.