ETUC denounces the myth of a generalisation of longer working hours
According to John Monks, General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), “In two weeks’ time, several tens of thousands of European workers will go out onto the streets of Brussels to demand more and better jobs. However, Europe will not create many more jobs if people that already have a job are forced to work longer, as some employers and even governments would have them do. And with workers chained 40 hours a week or longer to their jobs, job quality will fall and stress levels will rise."
Since the summer of 2004, two new fairy tales have been born in Europe. One is that in major countries, all workers and trade unions have agreed to put in longer weekly working hours. The other one is that working longer hours will create more jobs.
A report from the ETUC shows that both claims are wrong:
Agreements that simply increase weekly working hours remain limited and cover only a small fraction of all workers. What is more frequent are agreements that seek to balance flexibility in working time arrangements with other issues such as increased job security or more training for workers, for example.
There is a clear employers’ agenda at work here. Many of these balanced agreements are being completely misrepresented in order to blackmail workers elsewhere. For example, both in the Netherlands and in Belgium, employers have been claiming that all German workers have returned to a 40 hour week, without additional pay. This is simply not true!
Studies in Germany (Citigroup) and in the Netherlands (Centraal Planbureau) demonstrate that longer working hours do not create additional jobs. As common sense dictates, longer working hours imply higher production and mean simply maintaining existing jobs. And since more demand does not come out of the blue, longer working hours destroy employment, push unemployment up, trigger even more wage moderation and bring the economy closer to the edge of deflation.
Even the gloomy outcomes of these national studies are too optimistic. If, as some propose, longer working hours became a reality for all workers in Europe, then the extra export demand coming from improved competitiveness would not materialise.
Europe should not respond to the challenge of ‘business on the move’ by opting for the ‘low road’ of lower wages and longer working hours. The ETUC report also identifies sustainable collective bargaining practices that opt for innovation, productivity and re-adjustment:
Dutch collective bargaining practices on ‘smarter’ working .
Swedish and Finnish re-adjustment agreement for retrenched workers in company restructuring.
German IG-Metall agreement on (paid!) longer working hours for those workers involved in innovation activities for which there are bottlenecks on the labour market.
Annex: ‘Myths and facts about working longer hours in Europe: A note from the ETUC’
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