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The economies of the “west” are at the height of a long economic summer. Expansion of the econo-mic ‘bubble’ is now slowing. Stock values of top performers in 2000 are at 1,500 times earning rate compared with 1960 top performer Xerox’s 125 times at the end of that last long boom. Punters are starting to realize this is mad ( ). It’s not been like this since 1929 …Many economic analysts are starting to get nervous – as consumer sentiment shrivels, household debt surpasses income and job growth slows (‘The writing on the wall says “recession”’ SH 19.11.00). Throughout the long boom after the stagflation of the 70s increased wages and shorter work hours were resisted by employers & economic apologists - on grounds that increased wages fed inflation and ‘overstimulated’ the economy. Flexibility became the mantra to keep unit labour costs down. Now, as the economy starts to slow – and job losses & growing unemployment returns – the system’s apologists will start to claim that shorter hours/ wage increases are ‘contractionary’ and precipitate recession: that they trigger a drastic drop in demand, investment & profit, increase bankruptcy etc! Shorter (next page) (‘Downturn ...’ cont’d) hours are not appropriate whatever the phase of the economy! These outrageous claims by employers & their lackeys even take hold in the heads of labour’s leaders: so get transmitted through their organisations down into the ranks and consciousness of workers. These leaders doubt they can really do without a capitalist class to own & control the economy. They secretly fear that if workers go too far they may kill the goose that lays the golden egg! This is a perverted understanding of how value is created. Such leaders, are really liberals living off the working class – they don’t mind representing them, but really wouldn’t want to live like them! They cannot see how humanity is determined by its work or imagine how the world’s working people, acting as a universalizing class can and must achieve a self managing, cooperative world economy if we are to create a pathway to a sustainable future. Humanity’s ‘pre-history’ ends only when we come to ‘rationally regulate our interchanges with nature, with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to and worthy of our human nature’. Whether the economy is in boom, crisis or decline the capitalist class must heed its need to control the economic ‘factors’. An increase in price or a drop in oversupply of labour always challenges this. Shorter work hours, with no loss of wages (or even a pay rise) effectively does both these things at once so will be always opposed, subverted & undermined, but also exploited as best as they can – by forcing increased ‘flexibility’, intensifying work, flat-rating hours, increasing contract and casual labour etc. Yet recession is a most opportune time for labour to go for significant gains & make ‘despotic inroads’ into the prerogatives of capital, as even EG Whitlam realized (‘Reform through Recession’ TJ Ryan lecture 197?). The more desperate the general economic situation, the more generalised the crisis the more labour needs to move. Even notorious renegade L Trotsky noted this - shorter hours & a sliding scale of wages was not only the prime transitional demand to help workers take power, but was absolutely needed to stop the working class’s destruction through dole lines & grinding work & poverty. It was in the 30s depression that the newly formed AFL-CIO nearly got a 30 hour week through the U.S, Congress, and the ACTU dared raise a 30 hour demand, to fight massive unemployment. We must also look to developing positive models of cooperative, collective organization as producers and consumers of goods and services as a way out of recession, while restructuring work-time-life in an empowering way. · If corporations declare bankruptcy employees can run operations collectively. Leave debts to the corporations, their creditors & the courts. · If companies try to physically move out real assets workers can control this through occupation and blockade. A shorter work week demand is an equalizing strategy that balances the supply and demand for labour most evenly and broadly – within industry sectors & labour markets, and across the global economy. SWWAC sees this being done through increasingly generalized and coordinated, progressive reductions in work hours, towards a global standard of say, 25 hours a week by 2010. To the extent breakthroughs are across the board, individual capitals are not unfairly played off against each other, though the generalized effect is to shift total share of social product from profits to wages (adherents of ‘natural capitalism claim this may actually stimulate more ‘productive consumption’ while lessening total resource demand – see http://www.naturalcapitalism.org/ ). But capital’s real fear is that demands to slide hours down/wages up, especially at economic crunch time create the real prospect of labour organizing to wrest decisive control over wealth or social resources from capital. This could give the workers of the global economy and our families, neighbourhoods & commun -ities the power, in effect, to start shifting to a more just & sane society - a more sustainable enviro-socio-economy. Workers control ensures the world’s work, time & resources are reassigned more democratically! The planet’s future is the concern of the world’s workers. We have the right to say what work we do and can develop the power to organise across the global workforce. We can equitably share work and free time and allocate resources according to need. An increasingly conscious and coordinated world wide campaign to progressively reduce work hours and restructure and empower our lives is key to this. Aims to provide greater job security and build better paid manufacturing jobs; to stop the free trade race to the bottom. It seeks to reverse industry policy and create more permanent full-time jobs. Manufacturing Workers Campaign 2001 National Day of Action 6 December 2000 SWWAC call to manufacturing workers: ‘Make sure shorter hours stays an up front demand, to create new jobs & force innovative industry solutions!
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