On Tuesday, June 10, Britain finally signed to the European Working Time directive. This is a piece of EU legislation that established a maximum working week of 48 hours. Not a particularly radical directive, one would think, when many workers and unions are already fighting for a 35 hour week. However Britain insisted in opting out of this directive, ever since it was passed in 1993. The New Labour government maintained this policy after it came to power in 1997. It seems that Britain has a particular "long hours culture" that must be "respected".
But on Tuesday, Britain finally signed to the EWT directive. Maybe New Labour came to its senses and for once sided with the workers … Think again. In fact New Labour managed to amend the EWT to allow workers to work up to 65 hours a week! You see, some other European countries were pushing for an end to the British opt-out of the 48 hour limit, since about a third of all British workers are now working longer than that. So the solution was to maintain the 48 hour a week limitation, but to allow "the social partners to find flexible arrangements" which in effect would allow workers to work longer, but "only" up to 65 hours!!
Britain's Business Secretary John Hutton was quite pleased: "This agreement means that people remain free to earn overtime and business can cope during busy times". But even this 65 hour week limit is flexible, because it is averaged over three weeks, so a worker is now free to work 75 hours one week (!!), and then 60 hours for another two weeks.
And they say Marx is out of date and old fashioned! This is what he wrote in 1865: "The working day, however, has, by itself, no constant limits. It is the constant tendency of capital to stretch it to its utmost physically possible length, because in the same degree surplus labour, and consequently the profit resulting therefrom, will be increased," and he added, "A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation."
Words that are today as relevant as they were 140 years ago when they were written.
