1919-2019: CUT HOURS - NOT JOBS OR PAY!

A century ago, a mammoth crowd of 100,000 marched on Glasgow’s biggest ever May Day. An even more impressive 100,000 rallied in the substantially smaller city of Belfast.

At both mass rallies, motions were carried in solidarity with the Russian socialist revolution, still fresh and inspirational to workers on these islands - as the Bolshevik government fought off 21 invading imperialist armies, hell-bent on overthrowing their attempts to reconstruct society on socialist lines.

Revolt on the Clyde and the Lagan 

But the scale and power of these workers’ rallies was more than an outpouring of international solidarity. It was primarily fuelled by the momentous mass strikes and struggles just weeks before (in January/February 1919) when 100,000 on Clydeside and 60,000 in Belfast challenged the rule of the employers, government and their armed state, seizing temporary control of production, emergency services, to a degree transport. In Belfast, they formed their own, united Picket Peace Corps of 2,000 strikers, which established workers’ law and workers’ order for the two-week duration of a virtual general strike. A terrified ruling class feared socialist revolution, mobilising the media and police to try and bludgeon the strikers into submission. When that failed, they hesitantly resorted to use of troops to break the strikes.

What makes this glorious chapter of workers’ history so richly relevant in 2019 is the issue that Belfast and Glasgow workers fought on in 1919: they threw down the gauntlet with the clear-cut, unifying demand for a shorter working week, without loss of pay.

They dreaded mass unemployment, as hundreds of thousands of demobbed soldiers returned from the imperialist First World War. Equally, they revolted against the joyless drudgery of a 54-hour week, which lengthened further during war production. Matching the needs both of workers suffering the tyranny of endless work, and those facing the starvation of mass unemployment, Belfast workers downed tools, demanding a 44-hour week without loss of pay; on Clydeside it was the Forty Hour Strike.

The heroic exertions of these workers were undermined by national union treachery, ruthless deployment of military force by a terrified capitalist class, and tactical mistakes by the Strike Committees. However, they won a record-breaking seven hour cut to the working week in both cities – without loss of a penny’s pay. 

Order the pamphlet here: 

https://scottishsocialistparty.org/product/1919-revolt-on-the-clyde-and-the-lagan/

Shorter Working Week – Without Loss of Pay

The demand for a shorter working week – but, critically, without loss of earnings - is as urgent today as 100 years ago, if not more so!

It should be vigorously fought for by the socialist and the trade union movement, with thorough preparation in workplaces and union forums, out on the streets, in collective bargaining with the employers, and through political struggle. Which is why I’m proud that my own Usdaw union branch, Glasgow no.1, is proposing precisely this policy and course of action at the Usdaw national conference (ADM), with the aim of then taking it into the wider trade union movement – just as we have the parallel policy of a guaranteed 16-hour minimum working week.

Why? Just as in 1919, when workers took mass strike action to cut long hours of drudgery and simultaneously mop up mass unemployment, so too in 2019 we need policies to combat agonisingly long hours for millions, along with solutions to the dread of mass unemployment through automation - the ‘fourth industrial revolution'. 

Longest Hours in Europe

If capitalism was a person, it would be declared clinically insane. Whilst at least 3.8 million workers in the UK suffer insecure and short-hour contracts (with the attendant poverty pay and mental ill health), over 3.3 million work more than 48 hours a week. And 500,000 of them put in 60 hours or more!

It’s official; full-time workers in the UK work the longest hours in the whole of Europe. An average of 42.3 hours a week; 2 hours more than the EU average, and 4.5 hours more than Denmark’s 37.8 hours.  

Scotland’s last population Census recorded 39% of all workers - 984,000 – worked between 38-48 hours a week. Even more disturbing, 295,000 Scottish employees toiled for more than 49 hours... a century after our forebears fought and won a maximum 47-hour week!

Other sources show at least 54,000 people in Scotland chained to their work for over 60 hours a week.

But surely things are getting better? Well, very recent research for the British TUC found the number working over 48 hours has increased by 453,000 since 2010 – a 15% rise in ‘over-employed’ workers. And going back to the European averages for full-timers, Britain’s working week has only shortened by 18 minutes in the past decade. At that rate - assuming no reduction in hours worked in other countries - it would take the UK 63 years to catch up with the EU average!

The long hours culture that blights family life for millions isn’t even good for the economy. Danish workers have the shortest week in Europe but are 23% more productive than Britain’s. German workers have the shortest annual hours in Europe but are the most productive. 

Tiredness from overwork can kill

Burnout Britain

Exhaustion, stress and burnout are the increasingly common hallmarks of working life for workers – side-by-side with millions of others suffering poverty, anxiety and mental health problems as a result of mass under-employment and job insecurity. Numerous medical studies have linked overwork with heart disease, diabetes, stress, depression, and a five-fold increase in the risk of strokes.

Remember the tragic death last Christmas of 23-year-old junior doctor, Lauren Connelly, in a car crash after a 12-hour night shift? Even after that tragedy, Scottish Health boards still had rotas of over 90 hours a week – 104 hours in Glasgow. And we had the undercover journalist who filmed Amazon workers falling asleep literally standing up, during a 55-hour week, with relentless, impossible targets. Glimpses of the curse of long hours on workers’ wellbeing.

Add to that the grand theft of wages through unpaid overtime - the equivalent of working for absolutely no pay until 1^st March this year!

And the employers’ robbery of statutory paid holidays – which unpublished government (ONS) figures reveal steals £3billion a year off workers who are dragged in to work when they should be on paid leave.

Plus the growing proportion of our lives taken up commuting to work, as capitalist employers ‘rationalise’ and centralise their workplaces; rocketing housing costs drive many further away from their place of work; and chaotic, privatised public transport shoves motorists into lengthening traffic queues, polluting our planet - and lengthening the working day (unpaid), by an average of 24 working days last year!

The demand for a shorter working week is an urgent answer to those devouring their lives at work – living to work, with little time for anything else - and for job-creation for those impoverished by the chronic under-employment of zero and short hours contracts, or simply unemployed.

Make Automation a Blessing, not a Curse

It’s also at the heart of the answer to one of the biggest challenges of the 21^st century: the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ of automation, Artificial Intelligence and robotics. The scientists argue over the scale of impact on jobs, but all agree this threatens mass displacement of people in jobs as varied as retail, manufacturing, transport, fast food, logistics, office admin, carers, nurses, paralegals – even doctors, writers and composers!

New technology should be a blessing, a means of escaping endless hours of often unfulfilling work; a way for humans to be liberated into expanding their interests, skills, family and social life, participation in the democratic running of communities, workplaces and government. But under the rule of capitalism, the rule of profit, this new wave of technology is a dystopian nightmare, with the real and present threat of mass unemployment and impoverishment. For example, it is widely predicted that one million of the UK’s 3 million retail jobs could be obliterated within 10 years. 

Drive For 35!

An immediate, all-too-modest demand for a maximum working week of 35 hours – without loss of pay – would itself free up millions of new jobs, based on the obscenely long hours endured by several million UK workers (3.3 million on 48+ hours, for starters).

It would be good for workers’ health, physical and mental; reduce accidents at work, caused by fatigue; reduce sickness and absenteeism; and as several experiments here and abroad prove, it would boost productivity.

The CWU last year won a deal that will cut the working week for 120,000 Royal Mail workers from 39 to 35 by 2021, with the first hour reduction already implemented – without loss of pay. 

We need a generalised, immediate ‘Drive for 35’ across the unions.

We already have the technology to retain or boost output of goods and services whilst cutting the working week much more radically than that, for instance to a 4-day week, and a 6-hour day. That's in stark contrast with 1.4 million people working all seven days of the week right now, in Britain 2019! 

4 Days’ Work for 5 Days’ Pay

A 4-day week would not only enhance the quality of workers’ lives, and facilitate childcare (especially benefiting women, and encouraging more men to share caring and domestic responsibilities), but also reduce the damage to workers’ wallets and the environment, by slashing commuting times.

But reduced hours must be without reductions in earnings. With the odd, bizarre exception, workers aren’t chained to their jobs because they’re incurable workaholics. They work endless hours for two main reasons: to try and survive on the rotten hourly pay rates that have been systematically imposed to boost profits, and out of fear of losing their job, in a world of rampant job insecurity, leading to the modern phenomenon of ‘presenteeism’.

In 2018, the TUC found 81% of workers want to reduce working time; 45% of them want a 4-day week. But if it means an equivalent cut in wages, how can working people afford it?

Capitalist employers often use short-time working and layoffs – with equivalent cuts in pay – to offload a crisis in their business onto the shoulders of workers who have produced their profits for previous years. Or simply slash hours – and pay – to increase workload and turbocharge their profit margins – as the multi-billion Tesco's and ASDA are currently doing. That’s decidedly not what we mean by a shorter working week. 

The battle for an 8-hour day was at the heart of the international workers' movement & May Day since the 1880s

Gigantic leaps in technology make a 6-hour day eminently reasonable 

Cut Hours – Not Pay!

The socialist and trade union movement should make far more of an outcry for policies like 4 days’ work for 5 days’ pay, and a 6-hour day for 8 hours’ pay.

This would be a radical redistribution of wealth – from profit to wages. That’s precisely why most capitalist employers will resist, in the belief that such rational, humane change to the nature of work would take a slice off their profit margins.

Aside from the fact that’s debatable (given the potential for increased productivity), it’s not really the point. We can’t afford a system that condemns millions to working longer than the 47-hour week that was conceded in the teeth of mass workers’ revolts a century ago. We can’t afford to continue with a system that is wrecking the health of millions of workers and adding to pollution of the planet.

We need a society where an adequate, decent wage is earned in a far shorter working day, week and year, freeing up time for the pursuit of real democracy and human fulfilment. But it won’t be gifted to us by a benign class of capitalist vultures. The events of 1919 demonstrated the brutal lengths their class predecessors were prepared to go against the Forty Hour Strike.

We need to take our inspiration from the readiness to struggle displayed by masses of workers in Belfast and Glasgow a century ago.

We need to battle to cut hours, not jobs or pay, harnessing all the marvels of 21st century science for the benefit of people and planet, not profit for the plunderers.

These demands should become the battle-cries on and beyond May Day 2019, standing on the shoulders of the (extra)ordinary workers’ struggles of 1919.

MAY DAY, MAY DAY: INDEPENDENCE, SOLIDARITY, SOCIALISM

- we have nothing to lose but our chains!


Workers celebrating socialism and internationalism on May Day events will doubtless be subjected to the annual ritual of Labour politicians making nauseating declarations of their undying devotion to the working class, international solidarity and socialism.
These chancers don't even blush as they make speeches that totally contradict what they practice all the rest of the year.
They fail to explain how introducing what became the Bedroom Tax under a Labour government - and Labour's refusal to pledge its abolition for a clear 6 months after it was imposed - helped the cause of workers' unity. 

They won't be highlighting Labour's track record of retaining the most vicious anti-union laws in Europe - with Tony Blair boasting about it! - for their entire 13 years in government. They won't want us to recall that it was a Labour government that dragged us into bloody imperialist wars as they prattle platitudes about internationalism.

NEW LABOUR HEIGHTS OF HYPOCRISY 

But this year sees an added layer of hypocrisy from Labour politicians, as they do their damnedest to block democratic self-government for the working class majority population of Scotland.
The Better Together fear factory is funded by Tories and Tory-supporting big business tycoons. £1.3m was donated to them by 19 such multi-millionaires on the eve of Xmas - hoping it was a good time to bury bad news!
The exposure of CBI Scotland as open funders and advocates of continued misrule by Westminster reinforces the message: the chief exploiters and enemies of workers' rights and socialism are at the heart of opposing Scottish self-rule.

LABOUR'S 'SOCIAL JUSTICE'!

But they need to subcontract out their dirty work to Labour to have any chance of fooling enough working people into voting NO. That's why 'United With Labour' was set up, fronted by the likes of Gordon Brown. That figleaf has been blown away, exposing the naked collaboration between Labour leaders and the Tories, with Brown most recently using the toxic, Tory-funded Better Together to tell us we will get 'social justice with Labour by voting against independence'.
Only victims of extreme amnesia could fall for that line. 

Remember the 'social justice' we enjoyed under Brown, Blair and Alastair Darling's Labour governments of 1997-2010?! Rampant privatization, including attempts to sell off Royal Mail; the worst levels of inequality since 1863; announcement of 100,000 civil service job losses; successive assaults on benefits; introduction of student tuition fees that exclude working class people from higher education; wholesale school closures to cut costs at kids' expense; threats to jail Glasgow city council strike leaders by the Labour council; a government - in the exact words of one of its central leaders, Peter Mandelson - that was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", whilst poverty stalked the land for millions. Not to even mention the wars, or Trident.

SICK JOKE

And Ed Miliband has made it plain a Labour government - even if we assume they're elected in 2015, which is far from certain - will stick to Tory public spending cuts; backed the Tory cap on benefits but refuses to cap private landlords' rents; will not renationalise even the railways or Royal Mail, let alone the rip-off energy companies or the banks; and has absolutely no intention of repealing the vicious anti-union laws. They use weasel words about stopping exploitation under zero hours contracts, but point blank refuse to abolish them.
So voting NO to democratic control over who governs Scotland and then praying for a Labour government at Westminster that offers social justice is black comedy, a sick joke.

WORKERS' UNITY AND INDY

But the most insulting lie peddled by Labour leaders - one which their Tory pals know they couldn't get away with uttering - is that independence threatens the unity and solidarity of the working class and their trade unions. The theme that workers in Scotland have far more in common with a worker in London or Liverpool than with a laird in Scotland.
Those of us campaigning as socialists and trade unionists for independence welcome lectures on workers' unity and solidarity from Labour politicians a lot less than the proverbial Grannies welcome tutorials on the art of sucking eggs!

Workers and socialists in Scotland have nothing in common with the Brian Soutars of this world, any more than with the Richard Bransons. Both make a fortune out of the privatization of transport by successive Tory and Labour governments. And we have everything in common with bus drivers or railway workers, regardless of whether they're from Perth or Poole, Lothians or Liverpool, the south west of Scotland or the south west of England.

WAITING FOR WESTMINSTER'S PERMISSION?!

But since when did the unity and class solidarity of workers ever depend on the permission, let alone the encouragement, of Westminster governments - whether Tory or indeed Labour?
When the Tories imposed the hated Poll Tax 25 years ago - where 'a dustman paid the same as a duke' - they didn't seem to think we were 'Better Together": they imposed it a year earlier in Scotland, in a crude attempt to divide and conquer.
Did working class people wait for permission from Westminster to revolt against the Tory tax? Or for leadership by Westminster Labour MPs, most of whom whinged about its unfairness but told us there was nothing we could do to defeat it?
No, working class people, often led by those of us who ten years later went on to create the SSP, organised a mass rebellion that eventually toppled Thatcher as well as her tax. And those of us living in England at the time didn't sit back and ignore the battles being waged by Scottish working class communities during the year when it only applied to Scotland. We built solidarity with the Scottish working class; for instance I organised a contingent of 1,000 people from Merseyside to the first big Glasgow anti-poll tax demo. 

CROSS-BORDER LESSONS IN ACTION

And we learnt from the experiences of the Scots, inspired by their defiance, spreading the mass non-payment campaign to 18 million people. Workers' unity and solidarity was neither dependent on Westminster nor the Labour leadership, and crossed the borders of Scotland, England and Wales.
Why would it be any different when Scottish working class people won self-rule and insisted on radical social and economic change? Surely English workers would demand 'some of the same', encouraged to defy and defeat the dictatorship of the Tories and the dictatorship of capital?

LABOUR'S PHONEY SOLIDARITY

Where were Labour's bogus evangels of workers' solidarity when those of us who founded the SSP organised workplace solidarity tours across Scotland for the 500 locked-out Liverpool dockers, or striking Tameside care workers, or victimized Bristol civil servants? If they'd taken part they would have found not a single worker in Scotland spurned the appeal for solidarity on the grounds these workers were English.
And why would that powerful instinct for solidarity with fellow workers, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, suddenly vanish once the Scottish working class majority won self-government? Is Johann Lamont about to tell us they will be 'genetically re-programmed' to become petty, narrow nationalists, against workers from other countries?


SCOTTISH INTERNATIONALISM

Too many Labour loyalists at the tops of the trade union movement ape these arguments that independence, an end to rule by the UK Westminster elite, would wreck workers' solidarity.
How then do they explain the rich traditions of Scottish workers trekking across the Pyrenees in the 1930s to fight alongside Spanish workers against Franco's fascist dictatorship? Spain has never been part of the UK!
How explain the more recent internationalism of the cream of the Scottish working class in support of South African workers and youth defying bloodthirsty apartheid? Or with Chilean workers slaughtered by the fascist Pinochet regime in 1973 - a government first recognized by Westminster's Tory regime? Or for Danish bus workers, Belfast car workers or Nigerian journalists - each of whom I and others built solidarity for in Scotland?

DIVIDE AND RULE

Genuine workers' solidarity has never stopped at Dover, let alone Gretna Green. And it has never been dependent on the permission, let alone the support, of ANY Westminster governments, whether Tory or indeed Labour.
On the contrary, successive Westminster regimes - including those never voted for by a Scottish majority - did their damnedest to divide and defeat workers' struggles. To name but one example: they privatized and broke up the railways into dozens of separate companies doing the same work. Combined with anti-union laws banning so-called secondary action - in other words, solidarity action! - this was used to legally ban railway workers doing the same jobs on the same tracks from taking action together against victimization, pay cuts or worsened conditions.


TRADE UNION DEMOCRACY

Too many trade union leaders confuse workers' unity and solidarity with their own centralized power over the union, its decisions and its membership.
Those of us who are trade unionists in the SSP have consistently argued for democratic Scottish conferences of elected union representatives to decide on issues within Scotland. But simultaneously we have advocated democratic meetings of elected shop stewards or union reps across national boundaries within the same services or multinational employers. That would strengthen solidarity, concretely, as well as being a huge boost to members' democratic control of their own unions.

INDEPENDENCE, SOLIDARITY, SOCIALISM

Within an independent Scotland we will fight for socialist change - progressive taxation of big business and the rich; democratic public ownership of all services, banks, energy, construction, transport and big industry.
We will argue for majority control by working class people in the running of these industries and services - a model that workers outside Scotland would be inspired to emulate.
And we will champion genuine workers' solidarity, not just with our nearest neighbours, but also far beyond the boundaries of this island - including through elected international shop stewards' meetings.
Scottish independence would speed up the prospects of radical improvements to the lives of working class people - provided we build a powerful socialist force - and thereby assist workers in other countries.
And a final promise: unlike Labour politicians, we will commit to this all year round, not just once a year in May Day speeches!