Campaign news

OPINION - Time for a 20 hour working week

16th December 2016

By Barry Ewart

Susan Watkins in a piece in the New Left Review (September/October 2016) makes the excellent point that capital seems to want everything for free.  If you think about it we pay our taxes for education and health and capital is presented with educated and healthy workers for free!  And it is mainly state-led public investment supported R&D that is delivered to capital for free (including the computer) and we even subsidise our employers by paying our own fares to work or in buying cars and paying for petrol to get there, so perhaps a left wing democratic socialist alternative should offer some things for free too such as free public transport (and another member at a branch meeting recently suggested we could have congestion charges to also help to pay for this?). 

But with what may be coming with driverless cars, robotics, driverless trains, trams, tube trains and possibly even ships steered by computers (and if Amazon gets its way the end of check out staff in supermarkets) I think it is time for the left to seriously consider 20 hour working weeks or so with good pay for all to free time poor working humanity.  Someone also suggested a while back that perhaps a whole new industry could be created (doing what perhaps human beings may be best at) as ‘empathy workers’ (professional friends) and this may address issues such as loneliness in society and could help re dementia and adult social care but this is dependent on working class/working people making new technology work for us instead of working people serving big business (it is the labour of the working billions which really creates the wealth and makes societies work).

At present we have a Tory Party (and Right in most countries) PRETENDING to rule for working people when in fact everything they do is for the rich and powerful.  It could be argued that the Tory Party here in the UK are setting citizens against citizens (neighbours against neighbours) to divide and rule!  They do this here concerning working class welfare whilst the more invisible upper class welfare state flourishes with tax cuts for: millionaires, corporations, private landlords with multiple properties, hedge funds (hedge funds gave the Tories £50m before the last election and the Tories and Lib Dems gave £145m of tax cuts to hedge funds)  tax relief for the rich on practically everything including public schools and of course increased tax relief for grouse moor owners (who some critics claim drain more of their land to make more profit and some claim this adds to flood water seeping down to the towns and villages below).

So our job is to put the political arguments and to articulate to working people what is really going on and to make the invisible rich visible as they are distant from most peoples’ lives.  We need to fight austerity which the Tories say will be here until at least 2021 and fight low pay with the IFS saying that wages are also likely to be static until then too!  And of course we need to fight for bread and butter issues like the NHS, poverty, adult social care, education etc.  We further need to fight for state-led public investment (which will also feed the private sector supply chain) and for more democratic public ownership with staff and communities having a say plus for serious taxes on the rich and corporations and it would also help if left wing democratic socialists were fighting for similar things in every country.. We also need to work with global partners to shut down the illicit offshore banking industry and some estimate perhaps over 50 trillion dollars is stashed there by the rich to avoid giving to the community and imagine the good we could do with this globally?  We could fund solar panel farms around the world and solar panels on the roofs of the poor to harness the free energy of the sun to help address climate change (and why not throw in free laptops so the poor through MOOCs - (free) massive open on-line courses can try to educate themselves out of poverty) etc.

So left wing democratic socialists here and globally need to offer diverse working class/working people hope and in the UK we also need to make May’s Masque of Pandora slip!