I think Norway was able to cut unemployment and had no negative change in working hours, because it had large oil/gas revenues from the north sea, and these were put back to the economy. You'll find that in most other places no such chance occured, in the US and in the UK working hours/week have grown longer, same as overtime, paid or unpaid. Employees have in fact less and less control - if they ever had any - over the structure of their working hours, and it is the same if they are self-employed in a small business. I wonder how you think you are able to achieve any change within the capitalist framework that needs to make more and more profit, which means, that cut in working hours and funds for education of employees leaves less money for the shareholders. Eva Hello! I have been away for a long time now. And I will go on writing about the things that I used to write about. I have written several times about the plans to transform at least 10% of the paid working hours of everybody into education. There is now a study or report about this work on the web, for those who read Norwegian. It is to be found at URL:http://odin.dep.no/nou/. It is nou1997:25, and called "Ny kompetanse. There is a paper version of this report too. The report is made by a group established by the government. I have got it, but I have not yet read it. Among other things must new types of pedagogy be developed that is different from those used in traditional school. The leader of the Confederation of trade unions, Yngve Haagensen, says that this will be one of the most important issues at the collective bargainings this spring. In many European countries they go for shorter work weeks. In Norway the trade unions say that only parents with children and other persons that take care of people who cannot make it on their own ought to have shorter work weeks. The ordinary thing shall be that the workers take more and more control over their own working time by transfering it to time for education and development according to their own wishes. Looks nice to me! What do you think? Should the workers go for shorter workweeks or try to take control over their paid working hours and use them for their own learning and development? This will be coming slowly. The idea about this came at a time when the unemployment rate in Norway was up to 10%, but today the unemployment rate is hardly 4%. One reason to this idea was to create new jobs for the unemployed, but today they are rather few. But that does not mean that this idea is put away, only that the implementation might be a bit more slowly. My old email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] is gone. It was a BBS that I was running as a hobby to learn about Linux, but today I only see that computer a few times each month, so I have closed that BBS down. All the best from Tor Forde email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
