A right to disconect, collective bargaining and public procurement are the levers to reduce excessive working hours.
‘Happy holidays’—it’s on greetings cards, advertising and illuminations. But for millions of working people across Europe, this time of year is anything but a holiday. Too many are working long hours for low pay, when they should be enjoying time off with friends and family.
This is not a new problem. But a new book, The Politics of Time, sets out how it began with the introduction of the shift system in what were then newly established factories during the industrial revolution. That led to one of the first great battles of the labour movement—the campaign for an eight-hour day, balanced with eight hours rest and eight hours for leisure.
Almost 140 years after the strike for an eight-hour day which gave birth to our modern May Day, the rise of the 24-hour economy has put working time back at the centre of public debate. More people than ever will be working night shifts for manufacturing, distribution and transport companies this Christmas, to meet increased demand and tight supply deadlines. People working regularly from home are also six times as likely to work in their free time and twice as likely to work 48 hours in a week, according to the European Working Conditions Survey.
Workers should enjoy a ‘right to disconnect’ but throughout Europe employers refuse to put in place measures to ensure that right is respected. This is leading not only to a tsunami of unpaid work but also to growing stress and burnout. That is why the European Trade Union Confederation is calling for urgent, EU-level legislation to prevent employers from contacting workers outside their working time.
Clear gap
This issue touches every sector and region of Europe. Its impact is however far from uniform. There is a clear gap in standards across the continent between east and west, north and south, when it comes to working time. And the source of this gap is workers’ rights.
A comparison of statutory maximum working hours and collectively agreed hours illustrates that agreements lead to considerably fewer weekly hours, according to a new report on working time by the European Trade Union Institute for industriAll Europe. That makes respect for the right to collective bargaining crucial to achieving fair working time.
Structures allowing millions of workers to bargain collectively have however been attacked during this century as a result of austerity and flourishing union-busting. Access to negotiated conditions has thereby been removed for over three million workers.
The biggest falls in coverage have come in Greece and Romania—two of the countries with the highest working time. Analysis of Eurofound data by the ETUC shows that in countries where just one in ten workers are covered—Poland, Greece, Romania, Estonia and Hungary—the average collectively agreed working time is 1,848 hours. The Greek government has recently made things even worse with a law further extending working time.
By contrast, in countries where nine in ten workers are covered by a collective agreement—Sweden, Finland, Belgium, France and Austria—the average collectively-agreed working time is 1,674 hours a year. That is a difference of 174 hours—equivalent to four week’s work based on the EU average collectively agreed working time of 38 hours per week. Or, to put it another way, in countries where collective agreements are rare workers work an extra month without pay by comparison with their well-protected counterparts elsewhere.
The claim that collective bargaining was bad for competitiveness has been discredited. On the contrary, it has been proved to be good for the economy and society. The EU and national governments now have to be proactive in rebuilding collective-bargaining coverage.
Billions of cuts
Most immediately, policy-makers need urgently to rethink the rush towards ‘austerity 2.0’. The new EU fiscal rules envisaged, to be reimposed after the pandemic suspension, would require the majority of member states to make billions of cuts from next year, inevitably putting downward pressure on wages and working conditions.
Member states should already be putting in place the measures in the minimum-wage directive, which sets a target of achieving at least 80 per cent collective-bargaining coverage in every member state. But the damage done during the last austerity experiment requires a game-changing intervention.
The ETUC is calling for a revision of the directives on public procurement, to make access to public funding for companies dependent on respect for the right to collective bargaining. No company should be receiving public money if it is not acting in the public interest.
Reduction of working time without loss of pay has been proven to enhance productivity and workers’ wellbeing. Eurofound’s data show high incidence of collective bargaining is the best way to achieve that win-win scenario.
With a clear parallel between the proportion of workers whose contracts are collectively negotiated and the amount of time they have to spend at work every year, the gains from collective bargaining represent the best Christmas gift policy-makers could give to working people.
Esther Lynch was elected general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation in December 2022. She has extensive trade union experience at Irish, European and international levels, starting with her election as a shop steward in the 1980s.