Friday, November 26, 2021

Four-Day Work Week: It's Time

SHORT TAKES: Musk Tries To Cheat German Workers; Bezos' Legal Bribes; Farmworkers Pay Hike Would Cost A Biz Pizza; WTO Vax Waiver To Save Lives

Jonathan Tasini

Nov 24

[Hi, all: Happy Holidays… another skipped week last week and this newsletter move to a bi-weekly timetable as long as it remains free—I enjoy sharing ideas and info with you’all but gotta pay the bills. If you want to start supporting the newsletter and my labor, feel free to do so here. As an aside: apologies to all but Substack has one of the WORST software set-ups in the newsletter universe—just incompetent—so I am looking to move this newsletter elsewhere]

LONG TAKE

People work way too hard. Too many days, too many hours—and, for most, for pay that doesn’t cover the bills.

An unintended positive consequence of the COVID19 pandemic—and, certainly, given the human cost, not something we’d wish for—is a bit of an awakening, collectively, for everyone to take a more significant look at the way we work. Plenty of people who earn sub-standard or insufficient wages are saying, “take this job and shove it” and quitting—to be sure, a big slice of people walking out the door have done so in retail during the pandemic because employers don’t give a shit about making sure workers are safe at their jobs, and another slice have just had it with the hours worked in jobs that pay the putrid federal minimum wage.

There’s a bit of growing momentum behind this idea: a shorter four-day work week FOR the same pay.

In the U.S., Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif) introduced a bill earlier this year arguing partly:

Pilot programs run by governments and businesses across the globe have shown promising results as productivity climbed and workers reported better work-life balance, less need to take sick days, heightened morale, and lower childcare expenses because they had more time with their family and children. Shorter workweeks have also been shown to further reduce healthcare premiums for employers, lower operational costs for businesses, and have a positive environmental impact in some of these studies.

Technically, his bill simply reduces to 32 hours from 40 hours the point at which the Fair Labor Standards Act would require overtime pay—with the idea that it would become advantageous to let people work shorter hours. So, his bill is actually a narrower idea compared to experiments in the rest of the world.

Over the pond (subscription):

Atom Bank has moved to a four-day working week for its 430 employees, the largest company to make such a move in the UK since the pandemic forced a rethink about how useful it is to force people back into the office.
The changes, which began at the start of November, reduced the working week at Atom from 37.5 to 34 hours without affecting salaries. Atom said the majority of workers had made the change, but those who continued to work five days would also benefit from reduced hours. [emphasis added]

And the Scottish are plunging into an experiment with a four-day work week buttressed in part by this report from the Institute for Public Policy Research which, tell us:

Overworking is making us ill. An estimated 17.9 million working days are lost
each year due to work-related stress, depression or anxiety in the UK, and rates
have been increasing in recent years (Health and Safety Executive 2020). The
main work factor cited by respondents as causing workload stress is workload
pressures. This is echoed in 2018 workplace survey conducted by the TUC, that
found some one in three UK workers cite “working longer hours/work overload”
as a workplace concern, second only to pay and stress (TUC 2018). The Mental
Health Foundation cite concerns that the effect of increased working hours on
people’s lifestyles is making us less resilient to mental health problems and
damaging mental wellbeing (Mental Health Foundation 2021). It’s clear that
long working hours and overworking is a workplace safety concern.
Shorter working time stands to improve our wellbeing, and our experiences
of work. Reducing excessive working hours directly reduces the number of
occupational accidents within workplaces, as well as the ‘psychosocial risks’
workers are exposed to, such a work-related stress and mental illness (ILO
2019). As we open up a conversation about how we might work in a future
wellbeing economy, we should look to design new ways or organising work
that offer greater agency to workers, and flexibility by default.

And the report also shows how popular, duh, this idea is:

We will soon see what one company thinks after a one-year experiment:

Unilever will give the push for a four-day working week one of its biggest boosts yet when the consumer goods group launches a year-long trial of the practice in New Zealand.
The company behind Lipton tea and Dove soap will from next week start paying its 81 staff in New Zealand for five days while letting them work four.
After 12 months, Unilever says it will look at the lessons the experiment offers for how the rest of its 155,000 employees work. [emphasis added]

This is really hard to argue against. Among the side benefits: a shorter work week means less stress on the planet because people will commute to work a whole lot less.

It will make for a much healthier world.

Elon Musk is first among equals in rapacious behavior compared to his other rapacious corporate overlords. One aspect of how much Musk thirsts to run roughshod over the most basic standards of decency is something none of the media in the U.S.—print, cable, or any other traditional platform—have said boo about: a gambit to undercut Germany’s labor unions.
That Musk is anti-union and treats his workers despicably in the U.S. should not be news. In 2018, for example, Tesla was crowned one of the “Dirty Dozen” employers.
True, it’s not hard to be anti-union in the U.S.—I’ve written for a long time about the multi-billion dollar union-busting industry that draws energy from really putrid labor laws that, even when enforced, make it almost impossible to organize workers into unions in large numbers.
Germany is a different story. German workers, through their unions, have much more say in the way companies are run through the German system of “co-determination”. “Works Councils” give workers’ representatives at the “shop floor” level the power to participate in decisions on working hours and firings, among other issues. And in small companies with between 500 and 2,000 workers can hold one-third of a company’s supervisory board seats, with that ratio going up to 50/50 at companies with more than 2,000 workers (a tie at the latter is decided by shareholders).
Musk is trying to thumb is nose at the entire German system. Tesla is soon opening its plant in Gruenheide (near Berlin) and Musk is making every maneuver to undercut the labor system in Germany:
A works council being set up by Tesla Inc. staff at the company's new Gruenheide plant near Berlin risks being unrepresentative as most of the employees hired so far are middle or senior managers, Germany's largest union warned on Tuesday.
IG Metall said seven Tesla employees, none of whom were its members, had called a meeting for Monday to choose a committee to run elections for a works council that would remain in position for at least two years.
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In politics and business, there are a boatload of avenues to get your way through what I call “legal corruption”: pathways that, to the letter of the law, are legal but, on closer scrutiny, are truly corrupt. A big one is, obviously, the vast array of tax breaks for the rich and corporations that are embedded in the tax code—a complex pile of laws bought and paid for by campaign contributions (the corruption).
That’s where charitable foundations come into play. Corporations and rich people can do two things with big donations to tax-exempt foundations: they get a tax write-off AND they buy the allegiance of the beneficiaries.
Which is how you can read this:

Former President Barack Obama’s private foundation announced on Monday that it had been promised $100 million from the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

$100 million is pocket change for Bezos. But, it buys him great access and good public relations. Which is a typical route of the relationship between the elites: set up a foundation and, then, go troll for money from the very rich people who funded your campaigns and/or are looking to get a tax break and access at the same time. Look at the Clinton Foundation and you find the biggest and sleaziest donors include the Saudis, Wal-Mart and a whole host of big banks—corrupt to the core.

Especially on Thanksgiving, it’s a good time to be very aware of the living and working conditions of the farmworkers who play a huge part in putting food on our plates. They are paid piss-poor wages and often live in horrendous conditions.

So, how much would it cost the average consumer to raise the wages of farmworkers 40 percent? The Economic Policy Institute does the math:

How much would it cost to give farmworkers a significant raise in pay, even if it was paid for entirely by consumers? The answer is, not that much. About the price of a couple of 12-packs of beer, a large pizza, or a nice bottle of wine.

And:

Raising wages for farmworkers by 40% could improve the quality of life for farmworkers without significantly increasing household spending on fruits and vegetables. If there were productivity improvements as farmers responded to higher labor costs, households could pay even less than the additional $25 per year for fresh fruits and vegetables.

Read it.

Early this year, I wrote about how Big Pharma is killing vast numbers of people by controlling the COVID19 vaccine codes, and, thereby, limiting the supply—and driving up the price—of the vaccines. A recap: all these drug companies get *lengthy* monopoly protections for medicines and tests, and the technologies used to produce medicines and tests, through bad trade laws.
The specific rules of the road fall under the World Trade Organization (WTO) and are called “Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights” (TRIPS). For months, a massive global campaign pushed to get a waiver for the vaccine codes, especially to benefit lower-income countries where less than 7% of people have received a first COVID shot.
The U.S. stood in the way during the Trump Administration. After Biden took office, there was an initial public statement in support of a waiver by the United State Trade Representative.
But, no action has followed. And people continue to get sick and die.
Next week, November 30th, the WTO has a high-level meeting and there is a global campaign to force action on the waiver. Check it out and sign the petition.

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