shorter work hours

By Sydney Ghazarian - Labor Network for Sustainability, August 17, 2023

Welcome everyone! My name is Sydney, I am an organizer with the Labor Network for Sustainability, and I am honored to facilitate tonight’s Solidarity Call for United Auto Workers Union, which is currently bargaining for a fair contract with the Big 3 Automakers- Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. 

What makes tonight’s call so special is that it’s a solidarity call by and for the climate movement because we recognize that UAW’s fight is our fight too.

What I love about the climate movement is that we are fighters. And our fight has spanned decades and across generations, and for the last several years, hundreds and thousands of us have rallied, door knocked, made calls, and done sit ins and direct actions to fight for a Green New Deal– which is a society-wide mobilization and just transition to decarbonize the economy while repairing historic harm and creating millions of high-paying, union jobs.

And I want to be clear: Without us fighting for a Green New Deal, there would be no Inflation Reduction Act and its historic investments in clean energy. But we also know that the IRA is not a Green New Deal, and falls desperately short of the Green New Deal’s vision of the world we are trying to build. Rather than massive investments in the public sector, frontline communities, and good, green, union jobs that uplift working people, the IRA invests primarily in private corporations– often the same ones responsible for perpetuating the climate crisis in the first place. 

Unlike the IRA, the Green New Deal understands that the implementation of climate policy, and how resources are distributed to achieve it, are key to ensuring climate justice and ensuring that millions of people are equipped to take that leap of faith away from fossil fuels and into a green economy. 

By Julia Conley - Common Dreams, August 15, 2023

The president of the United Auto Workers on Tuesday called on U.S. President Joe Biden to use his position of power to help ensure a just transition to electric vehicles—pushing for a major investment in green technology that would also guarantee that workers in the U.S. can earn a decent living in the evolving auto industry.

Biden's actions on the electric vehicle (EV) front, Shawn Fain toldThe Guardian, have been "disappointing."

It has been a year since the president signed his signature climate and jobs law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes incentives for car companies to ramp up manufacturing of EVs and for consumers to purchase them.

The law has paved the way for the "Big Three" automakers—Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors (GM)—to build EV battery plants in joint ventures with companies such as Samsung, SK On, and LG Energy Solution, but the federal incentives and loans have been given to the firms without the guarantee of fair pay and working conditions for the people who will work in the plants.

By Marick Masters - The Conversation, August 7, 2023

The United Auto Workers union, which represents nearly 150,000 employees of companies that manufacture U.S.-made vehicles, has been engaged since July 2023 in the labor negotiations it undergoes every four years with the three main unionized automakers.

By late August, it still wasn’t clear that the UAW would agree to a new contract with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis – the automaker that manufactures Chrysler and 13 other vehicle brands – by their impending deadline. The contracts expire at 11:59 p.m. Sept. 14.

The union’s leaders skipped the traditional handshake ceremonies it usually holds with these automakers, which are often called the Big Three or Detroit Three. The union instead held grassroots photo-ops: UAW leaders greeted rank-and-file members at one Ford, one GM and one Stellantis factory. On Aug. 25, the UAW announced that 97% of its members had authorized a strike “if the Big Three refuse to reach a fair deal.” It’s a major milestone.

I’m a labor scholar who has studied the history of UAW collective bargaining with the Detroit Three. Given that the UAW is making major demands at a time of rising union assertiveness and ambition, I believe it’s reasonable to wonder whether U.S. automakers will be the next industry to face a strike.

In 2023, there have been strikes by screenwriters, actors, health care workers and hotel staff, as well as vigorous organizing by workers for warehouse and delivery services at Amazon, UPS and FedEx.

By Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, July 25, 2023

David Sandoval remembers when he and his co-workers had a whole 72 seconds to assemble their sections of each seat for the Ford F-150, back when he started at a Michigan parts plant in 2004.

Today, 60 seconds is the deadline managers give each team racing at a dozen stations: to bolt the frame together, lay electronics, add heating and cooling gear, set cushions, and attach trim. Robotic lifting arms help on only one or two steps; handheld tools and elbow grease must do the rest. Each crew is told to clear 680 seats in a 10-hour shift.

That harsh speedup makes it small wonder that repetitive motion injuries are piling up for U.S. auto workers, while the Big 3 auto companies—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler)—posted $250 billion in profits in just the last four years.

On September 14, union contracts expire for 144,000 Big 3 workers. A company-wide strike at one of the three looks likely, especially after United Auto Workers members elected a reform slate to lead their union. The new president, Shawn Fain, has pledged a contract campaign and a strike–if needed–to end wage tiers, and to put workers at the wheel of the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).

To understand how that contract fight starts from conditions on the shop floor, Labor Notes interviewed workers at each of the Big 3 companies and an independent parts supplier.

From the Midwest to the South, auto workers say that their plant managers have seized on the pandemic and the EV transition to push an unsafe work pace, longer shifts and more of them, and divisions between workers. Meanwhile, some company executives are threatening layoffs and are openly preparing for a strike by stocking inventory and hiring temporary workers.

By Dan DiMaggio - Labor Notes, May 18, 2023

Contracts covering 150,000 auto workers at the Big 3 will expire on September 14, and the new leadership of the United Auto Workers is taking a more aggressive stance than in years past.

“We’re going to launch our biggest contract campaign ever in our history,” UAW President Shawn Fain told members in a Facebook live video.

Fain took office in March after winning the union’s first one member, one vote election. Running on the slogan, “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers,” he and the Members United slate swept all the positions they ran for, giving reformers a majority on the international executive board.

While the union has vowed to take on tiered wages and benefits, job security, and plant closures, the transition to electric vehicles (EV) looms especially large.

Since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last August, companies have announced $120 billion in investments in domestic EV and battery manufacturing. The Act includes big tax credits and incentives for clean energy and EVs.

Ford alone is investing $11 billion in a new EV assembly plant and battery factories in Tennessee and Kentucky. The Biden administration wants EVs to make up half of all new vehicles sold by 2030.

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - The Valley Labor Report, May 8, 2023

By Kerry Taylor-Smith - Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, March 9, 2023

World’s largest trial finds four-day week reaps environmental and health benefits.

Trial suggests that 91% of organisations will continue with a four-day week as employees are happier, less tired, and adopt more pro-environmental behaviours

A four-day working week with no loss of pay could reduce the UK’s carbon emissions by 127 million tonnes – the equivalent of removing the UK’s entire private car fleet from the road - and could help the country meet its binding climate targets.

The world’s largest trial into a reduced working week involved over 60 companies and almost 3,000 workers; it found a four-day week could reduce commuting time by around half an hour per week and slash energy usage in the workplace.

“While definitive estimates of carbon impacts are nearly impossible to put together, we do see encouraging trends on a number of dimensions in our trials: reduced commuting time, reduced commuting by car, people reporting more pro-environmental behaviours over the course of the trial, and absence of a significant travel rebound. These vary a bit across the completed trials but not by a lot,” said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College and lead researcher at 4 Day Week Global.

Environmental consultancy, Tyler Grange participated in the six-month trial; they reported a daily productivity increase of 22%, and a 21% reduction in the number of miles travelled by car by cutting out unnecessary meetings and travel.

By Isabelle Ferreras - Green European Journal, September 14, 2022

With digitalisation and shocks like the Covid-19 pandemic and extreme weather, the world of work is changing rapidly. But this transformation should not become an inevitability that workers must passively endure. Rather, it should be a democratic process shaped and decided by workers themselves. On the sidelines of the European Trade Union Institute’s Blueprint for equality conference, we sat down with Isabelle Ferreras, who has co-authored a new book calling for a re-organisation of the economy, to discuss democratising work in the 21st century.

Green European Journal: Digitalisation and automation are transforming how we work. How do you see the new face of work?

Isabella Ferreras: What is most notable about digitalisation is the loss of work’s physicality. As soon as jobs adopt technological tools that allow remote or computer-assisted working, workers cease to come together in the same place. In Marx’s analysis of the first age of industrial capitalism, the concentration of workers in factories was an important factor in the development of class consciousness. It enabled the working class to shift from what he called a “class in itself” to a “class for itself”. The opportunity to come together in one place, at a frequency imposed by industrial capitalism, meant that workers could get to know one another, take their breaks together, talk to one another. They realised that they shared very similar lives and problems that needed shared solutions.

The digitalisation of the economy individualises the experience of work. You might find an engineer based in Delhi, another in Boston, and a third who is subcontracted to write some lines of code from South Africa or Ukraine all working on the same project. All these people interact via an online platform, without getting to know one another and without the opportunity to realise that they are all part of the same “work investment” necessary for a business. By work investment, I mean all the workers required to successfully produce something or provide a service.

So the fragmentation of work, brought about by digitalisation, leads to a less social experience of work and, in the end, a loss of power for workers?

As this fragmentation has taken root, workers have grown more aware. Workers aspire to something else. We can see this in two ways. First, since the pandemic, there is a massive rise in people changing careers because they aspire to more meaningful work. There was a real misery for “non-essential” workers slaving away in front of their computers, stuck at home with this interface. In the hope of keeping their workers, some British companies have embarked on a full-scale experiment: the biggest ever trial of a four-day working week has just begun in the UK. About 50 businesses are implementing it, offering a better work-life balance for the same salary. Workers are expected to be just as productive over four days and gain a better quality of life.

Second, businesses are going to great lengths to improve job satisfaction. This is essentially a retention strategy whereby companies work to increase job satisfaction so that employees remain loyal. Employers are giving workers more say in decisions that affect them, such as combining working from home and the office.

In France, a survey conducted by the Association Pour l’Emploi des Cadres (APEC) in January 2021 revealed that 9 out of 10 managers are listening much more, building bonds within teams, and empowering employees as a result of the pandemic. This is an opportunity to be seized. On 16 December 2021, the European Parliament passed a historic resolution demanding, among other things, a revision of the European Works Council Directive. In Democratize Work, we call for a collective veto right for workers so that they can influence decisions taken by company boards or works councils.

The opposite trend is the growing physicality of work in the care sector. What does the rising need for care, both for people and the planet, mean for the world of work?

Alongside the trend towards automation is a realisation that we’re going to need more human labour and, let’s hope, not more unrecognised and unpaid exploitation. Taking care of both the planet and other human beings, like through public services, requires more and more work but nobody is talking about paying for this work. Neglecting the remuneration side of care comes from misconceptions about the future of work.

The intrinsic content of all jobs has changed with each technological revolution. But the key issue we must grasp here is that there’s much more work for us to do so that we’re no longer dependent on our energy slaves [the quantity of energy required to replace human labour]. We must also formalise that part of the care sector which just exploits women’s labour. Equalising living standards and giving men and women the same number of opportunities means investing massively in childcare, for example.

By Samantha O’Brien - Rupture, June 9, 2022

“It’s not fair, living this shitty life, the workers said in meetings, in groups at the gates. All the stuff, all the wealth that we make is ours. Enough. We can’t stand it any more, we can’t just be stuff too, goods to be sold. Vogliamo tutto - We want everything”

- Nanni Balestrin

Labour Power

The four-day work week has captivated media headlines internationally, with different countries piloting programmes in the Global North. Seventeen companies have signed up to commit to a pilot programme in Ireland. Thirty companies in the UK are taking part in a new pilot. Workers will maintain one-hundred per cent productivity for eighty per cent of their time.[1] Belgium has given workers the right to request a four-day work week with no loss of pay, effectively condensing their five day work week into four days. This has rightfully attracted criticism, as working time has not reduced, but workers get to maximise their stress levels by working nine and a half hours per day.[2] The central theme of many global campaigns is that the implementation will look different in varying sectors, rosters and working arrangements. The campaign’s main aim is for a shorter working week with no loss of pay and challenging the dominant narrative that long hours equate with greater productivity.[3]

The key demand of socialists has long been a shorter working week with no loss of pay. Karl Marx in Capital describes how the hours that make up the working day mean different things to employees and employers. Workers put in their time to afford the basic necessities in life. Employers buy labour-power, and the value is determined by working time. Any labour-power beyond what is required to produce the necessities of life is surplus-value that employers get for free. It is not necessary for us to work long hours to produce what is needed, but instead employers maximise their profits by taking our surplus value. Marx notes that “the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., working-class.”[4]

There are many examples of struggles over shorter working hours throughout history. The eight-hour working day in the Global North was not granted because of benevolent employers or lobbying politicians, but fought for and won through struggle. In 1856, Australian Stonemasons who were working harsh ten hours days walked off their job and eventually won an eight-hour day.[5] The same story was echoed in struggles internationally, with workers taking a collective stand for their pay and conditions. Eleanor Marx, who was a founder of the GMB Union in 1889, fought and won an eight hour workday for gas workers. On May Day in 1890, she also played a crucial role in organising the Hyde Park protest in London. This protest gathered hundreds of thousands of people with the key demand of an eight-hour workday.[6]

By Robert Raymond - Sharable, May 19, 2022

Studies show that a shorter workweek is healthier for people and the planet — but much of the conversation is focused on its impact on worker productivity or efficiency. This is a big mistake.

With the average worker in the United States clocking 47 hours a week, Americans are among the most overworked populations in the world — in fact, they work more hours per year than workers in almost any other industrialized country. 

Advocates of a shorter work week had a brief moment of excitement in California last month when state Democrats proposed a bill that would have required private-sector employers with more than 500 employees to pay hourly workers overtime after logging more than 32 hours a week. 

Unfortunately, the proposal didn’t make it very far through the legislative bill-making machine before it stalled out in committee. For the foreseeable future, the bill will remain in legislative purgatory. 

However, despite a disappointing outcome, the mere existence of the proposed bill in the state legislature is an important step toward shortening the Californian workweek — something that would be a boon to workers.

There are many benefits of working shorter hours. One that has been particularly compelling to employers is the fact that shorter hours have been linked to increased worker efficiency and productivity. For example, a 2021 study from Japan empirically determined that “when long working hours are reduced, individual productivity increases, and fewer mistakes are made at work.” 

Studies have also shown that working fewer hours actually increases worker happiness — leaving employees feeling more energized and giving them more free time to pursue their interests outside of work. 

I’d hazard a guess that the majority of us would drool over the prospect of fewer hours of wage labor and more hours in our day for rest, leisure, or — as the 19th-century slogan of the 8-hour day movement advocated — more hours to do with “what we will.”

In fact, re-framing this discussion around the needs of labor rather than the needs of employers is critical for getting us on a path towards a healthier, more sustainable world where workers thrive.