Marvin Gandall wrote: > But our discussion began, you'll recall, when you > stated (I think on the LBO > list) that the traditional approach of the labour > movement for a "shorter > work week at no loss in pay" was wrongheaded, and > that unions should trade > off some current income for what you somehow seem to > believe will result in > an increase in their future bargaining power.
Yes, indeed, that's my position. And I do support the French 35-hour law, although I'm under no illusion that it was ideal. The French 35-hour workweek was designed to be very accomodating to business. The limitation came more in the form of annual hours than weekly hours so companies could take advantage of 'flexibility' in the scheduling of hours. In fact, many workers -- and doctrinaire leftists -- were unhappy with how accomodating to business the 35-hour law was. As I understand it, the law only prohibited a cut in pay at the minimum wage level, beyond that the details were to be negotiated between companies and unions. The first phase of the law only applied to large employers. I have heard that many of the large employers were quite pleased with the law and its effects on productivity. Bernard Girard is a French consultant to business on implementing the 35-hour week and talks about the successes on his website. Where the strongest opposition developed was in the second phase of the law taking in the smaller employers who didn't see the possibility of productivity gains. Frankly, I think a lot of the opposition to the 35-hour week actually comes from the UK, the USA and international institutions like the OECD, the IMF and the European Central Bank. It's not so much the 35-hour week they're gunning for as the very idea that there is any alternative to labour market 'liberalization', or in plain language, the gutting of social protections for workers. The law has indeed been critically weakened by the Chirac government, but it has not been rescinded. The government wants to maintain the fiction that all they doing is simply giving employees the "freedom" to work more hours if they want to earn more money. But indeed there has been widespread support for maintaining the 35-hour week. It seems to me and to many observers closer to the scene (including Chirac) that the no vote on the European constitution was at least partly to punish the Chirac government for attacking the 35-hour law. > Of course, how feasible a > campaign around this issue would be in the current > context is another > matter. >From one perspective, nothing is ever feasible "in the current context." That is, it's not feasible until a lot of groundwork has been done building a resilient network of advocates and supporters. In addition to the Work Less Party, there is the Take Back Your Time organization in the US, which has, I would say, a very long-term perspective on the campaign. Keynes said in the long-term we're all dead. Well, I say in the short-term we're all slaves to circumstance. Our task, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, is nothing less than to make the continuum of history explode so that the chains of "long-term" and "short-term" lose their power: a tiger's leap into the open air of history. Again WB: "The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude." The Sandwichman __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
